NCW Libraries

"The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever venture beyond Baltimore, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping...

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother, yet the prospect is dimming. So when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has been...

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family--their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog--is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions...

"When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately...

The past comes back to haunt a high-profile defense attorney in the newest book in the Baltimore series from the New York Times bestselling author of Monster in the Closet. In his work as a defense attorney in Baltimore, Thorne has always been noble to a fault-specializing in helping young people in trouble in an attempt to atone for those he couldn't save when he himself was younger. He plays the part of the bachelor well, but secretly holds a flame...

A memoir by the late Congressman details how his experiences as a sharecroppers' son in volatile South Baltimore shaped his life in activism, explaining how government oversight can become a positive part of a just American collective.

When families go missing in Baltimore County, Jane McKeene, who is studying to become an Attendant, finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that has her fighting for her life against powerful enemies. Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania-- derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever. Now laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children...

Pregnant Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan probes the disappearance of a chic blonde green-raincoated dog walker she'd been watching from her comfy prison. Tess also takes in the missing woman's abandoned green-slickered Italian greyhound from hell and unravels a complex scam.

Tracy Turnblad, a teenager with huge hair, a big grin, and all the right moves, becomes the queen of Baltimore's number one dance revue.

The senior year of a girls' high school step dance team against the background of inner city Baltimore. Empowered by their teachers, coaches, families, and each other, they strive to win a championship and go to college.