Burlington Public Library

The adventures of Laura Ingalls and her family continue as they move from their little house on the banks of Plum Creek to the wilderness of the unsettled Dakota Territory. Ma and the girls follow Pa west by train where they make their home at a rough railroad camp and plan for their own homestead.

You've been waiting all year long, and now it's finally Christmas Eve! Is this the year you'll finally catch an elf?

"Twas the night before Christmas, and dozens of rich, influential hostages are trapped inside a sprawling lakefront mansion in New Orleans. The perp? Detective Reed Ware, model cop turned outlaw. After receiving a panicked call from Hollis "Holly" Bayard, a teenage street tough with a penchant for amateur sleuthing who stumbles upon the scene of a drug-deal-turned- murder, Ware finds his and his friend's lives in dire danger. The crime Holly witnessed...

Carrie Slayton, a big-city society-page columnist, longs to write more serious news stories. So her editor hands her a challenge: She can cover any topic she wants, but only if she first scores the paper an interview with Finn Dalton, the notoriously reclusive author. Living in the remote Alaskan wilderness, Finn has written a megabestselling memoir about surviving in the wild. But he stubbornly declines to speak to anyone in the press, and no...

Archangel Gabriel and his three mischievous Prayer Ambassadors--Shirley, Goodness and Mercy--lend their celestial aid to three needy Christmas cases. Harry Alderwood, 86, prays that his increasingly forgetful wife, Rosalie, will agree to move into assisted living before he dies. Meanwhile, nine-year-old Carter Jackson begs God for a dog, even though his mother and father tell him that they can't afford to keep a pet, while Beth Fischer's mother prays...

"Laura and her family find a new home in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, where the nearby creek and swimming hole lure Laura with dangerous, yet thrilling adventures. Too soon, their life is threatened when prairie fires and other strange events jeopardize their crops."

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, on assignment with the FBI, gets involved in a Christmas Eve murder in New York City. She must identify the dead female before the serial killer whose work this is finds Scarpetta's niece. "In Richmond, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia and consultant for the FBI, is in the midst of a late-night autopsy at the morgue when the call comes: Gault, the sadistic psychopath who has eluded capture for years, has struck...

Summoned to Scotland for a Christmas-themed masquerade party, former members of an exclusive mystery-solving group at university soon discover that in this game, murder is all too real, and to survive until Christmas morning, they must face the truth of what really happened one fateful night 12 years earlier.

From the Publisher: Right before Thanksgiving, a freak tornado descends on Larkspur, the small town in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains where matriarch and candy magnate Loretta Cisco-affectionately called "Cisco" by her grandchildren-lives, and levels the home she's inhabited for fifty years. Then there's more bad news: Cisco's beloved triplet grandchildren-Hannah, Sara, and Sam-all newlyweds, are experiencing marital problems but they refuse...

The Bear family goes to the beach, but before they can swim in the ocean there's a lot of work to be done.