Washoe County Library System

How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann Packer’s intimate and emotionally thrilling new novel, which has won its author comparisons with Jane Hamilton and Sue Miller.
At the age of twenty-three Carrie Bell has spent her entire life in Wisconsin, with the same best friend and the same dependable, easygoing, high school sweetheart....

"Pepin County is in the grip of an icy winter; twenty degrees below zero as the new year rolls in. Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins is happy. She's been living with Rich Haggard, and as they sit together awaiting midnight, she feels ready to step into the marriage he's wanted all along. But not all marriages last. Car mogul Daniel Walker is celebrating New Year's Eve alone, roasting in his sauna with a bottle of Belvedere vodka by his side. His soon-to-be-ex-wife...

Sheriff Lew Ferris knows how to land a sweet brook trout—but can she catch a cold-blooded killer in the thrilling second installment in the Lew Ferris mysteries. It’s Lew Ferris’s first day as the newly-elected Sheriff of McBride County, and already things are heating up in the Wisconsin Northwoods. The tragic drowning of a teenage girl draws an eerie parallel to the unsolved murder of another teen thirty years earlier, but one of Lew’s new...

"Kirsten Hammarstrom hasn't been home to her tiny corner of rural Wisconsin in years-not since the mysterious disappearance of a local teenage girl rocked the town and shattered her family. Kirsten was just nine years old when Stacy Lemke went missing, and the last person to see her alive was her boyfriend, Johnny--the high school wrestling star and Kirsten's older brother. No one knows what to believe--not even those closest to Johnny--but the event...