Orem Library

A Lesson Before Dying, is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and...

The story of John, a fourteen-year-old boy whose stepfather is a Pentecostal minister in Harlem in 1935, as he struggles to discover his own identity.

Getting by as an old-school private investigator in spite of Manhattan's increasingly sophisticated culture, Leonid McGill finds his commitment to living a straight-and-narrow life repeatedly tested when he attempts to obtain information for a high-paying client.

When a man who fled the 1965 Watts riots is suspected of killing a woman in a nearby apartment building, Easy Rawlins begins a murder investigation and learns that the case has sobering racial origins.

Best friends and freelance troublemakers Hap Collins and Leonard Pine assist an old friend in rescuing his daughter from an abusive drug dealer, and wind up enraging the Dixie Mafia.

Twenty-eight-year-old Even Grade is a black man who was orphaned as a child; 15-year-old Valuable Korner is a white girl who might as well have been. Petal, Mississippi, circa 1956, seems an unlikely spot for these two to connect, but it soon becomes apparent in Mother of Pearl that a friendship across race lines is just one of many miracles waiting to happen in this small Southern town. Melinda Haynes's remarkable debut novel begins in a hot August,...

Skilled gun-for-hire Gideon takes an assignment from a former lover, Arizona, that pits him against another group of assassins in Argentina.

Beginning in 1920, Chiefs spans 40 years, chronicling the experiences of three Georgia police chiefs who watch the world, their town and their jobs, change. At the heart of this is a 40-year-old mystery each chief must try to crack.

Curt Mader, a rancher whose homestead has been burned and his wife carried off by a bunch of cowboys, hires Bubba, a black tracker, to help him find her. The white is a coward, the black a reluctant hero. A parody of how the west was won by the author of Zulus.

Facing unprecedented financial troubles when his daughter requires a medical treatment, Easy Rawlins takes a job tracking down a missing attorney and legal assistant, but the assignment proves more complicated than anticipated.