For a price Libby Day will reconnect with the players that murdered her mother and two sisters in "The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas." Having testified that her brother Ben was the murderer on that fateful night twenty-five years ago, now she is not so sure as, piece by piece, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started--on the run from a killer.

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, a kind of last testament to his remarkable forebears.

"In the spring of 1877, Bridget--sixteen years old and already disillusioned after caring for her alcoholic father--is orphaned while crossing the Kansas prairie. She arrives penniless in Dodge City, and, thanks to the allure of her bright red hair and country-girl beauty, is soon recruited to work at the Buffalo Queen, the only brothel in town run by women. Bridget takes to brothel life instantly, appreciating the good food, good pay, and good friendships...

Police detective Dave Robicheaux faces off with the most diabolical villain he has ever faced in the twentieth installment of the Dave Robicheaux series. Sadistic serial killer Asa Surette avoids the death penalty for murders he committed while capital punishment was banned. But when Robicheaux's daughter Alafair writes a series of articles implicating Surrette in other murders which could get him death, he decides to escape prison and make her pay....

"During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty...

When Jack and Annie travel back to the Kansas prairie in search of "something to learn," they gain an understanding of how hard life was for pioneers and they experience the terror of a tornado.

The reality of frontier life in Kansas becomes brutally clear to twelve-year-old James Coady McIlvain when his father is scalped and he is taken prisoner by hostile Indians. Escaping with the aid of Tunequi, Coady finds himself with a buffalo sharpshooter that he imagines is the embodiment of his hero, Buffalo Bill Cody, a role in which the circumspect Griffith feels himself totally inadequate.

After his parents are kidnapped, timid twelve-year-old Henry York leaves his sheltered Boston life and moves to small-town Kansas, where he and his cousin Henrietta discover and explore hidden doors in his attic room that seem to open onto other worlds.