Deschutes Public Library

Tor Baz, the young boy who becomes the Wandering Falcon, moves between the tribes of Pakistan and Afghanistan and their uncertain worlds full of brutality, humanity, deep love, honor, poverty, and grace. The region he travels--the Federally Administered Tribal Areas--has become a political quagmire known for terrorism and inaccessibility. In these pages, the author reveals the people who populate those lands, their tribes and traditions, and their older, timeless ways in the face of sometimes ruthless modernity.

Brokenhearted, still mourning the loss of her husband, Heidi travels with her son Abbott and her niece Charlotte to spend the summer repairing their family home in a small village in the south of France. There, thousands of miles from home, Charlotte makes a shocking confession, and Heidi learns the truth about her mother's "lost summer."

River levels are high in Portland when a woman walking her dog comes across the skeleton of a young black man, murdered over fifty years ago. Journalist, Susan Ward investigates. Meanwhile, Detective Archie Sheridan and his team have turned their attention to child-killer Ryan Motley, trained by the notorious Gretchen Lowell. The task force must pursue a series of mysterious clues from Gretchen, one of which leads to a Vanport flood survivor, who happens to be the grandfather of a murdered child. Then, when another child is found murdered, Archie's investigation takes on a new urgency.

In a small town on the Mexican border live two brothers, Don Fidencio and Don Celestino. Stubborn and independent, they now must face the facts: they are old, and they have let a family argument stand between them for too long. Don Celestino's good-natured housekeeper encourages him to make amends--while he still can. They secretly liberate Don Fidencio from his nursing home and travel into Mexico to solve the mystery at the heart of their dispute: the family legend of their grandfather's kidnapping. As the unlikely trio travels, the brothers learn it's never too late for a new beginning.

After the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on a beach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Detective Osama Ibrahim, along with the help of female coroner Katya and her friend Nayir, discovers that the victim was a controversial filmmaker and must discern who wanted her dead.

In modern-day South Africa, Clare Walde tells the story of her sister's death and the disappearance of her daughter during apartheid twenty years earlier.

Miranda and Adam, high school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, where they once spent a summer deeply in love, blissfully living together. At an awkward reunion, the two, who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven't seen each other since, are surprised to discover that they may still have something to talk about; they decide that, for these few weeks, they will take daily walks together. As they experience Rome, the pleasures of eye and palate, and the daily drama of the streets, they review their lives (married to others, and with grown children) and gradually explore not just what matters to them now, but what happened to them long ago. Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent on understanding who they are in relation to who they were. Theirs is a rich and wise story of forgiveness and reckoning.

The quiet Bangkok family life of American travel-writer Poke Rafferty, wife Rose, and daughter Miaow is threatened when a man from Rose's past forces Poke to uncover the whole truth about his wife's former life in a red-light district.

Members of Boston's criminal underground are turning up dead. When Scott Finn learns that one of his clients, Devon Malley, was part of a $300 million artwork heist, he's quickly drawn into the crossfire, and into the renewed hunt for the missing artwork--a hunt that may cost Finn and his colleagues their lives.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother--a singer "stolen" to Pyongyang--and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recgonized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

"Aging sportswriter W.G. Karunasena's liver is shot. As his health fades, he embarks on a frantic search for missing cricketer Pradeep Mathew, whose virtuosic bowling was once legendary. En route he discovers a six-fingered coach, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and unsettling truths about his country and its beloved sport."--P. [4] of cover.

Investigating the murder of an adventurist under her watch, half-Inuit Arctic guide Edie Kiglatuk teams up with police sergeant Derek Palliser when she realizes that the victim's tour group was searching for something specific.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of the revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother's prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominant doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture die. And Dawit, Hailu's youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement -- a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.

In the small southern town of Chin-kiang, in the last days of the nineteenth century, young Willow and young Pearl S. Buck, the headstrong daughter of zealous Christian missionaries, bump heads and embark on a friendship that will sustain both of them through one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history.

The Thief is a seasoned pickpocket. Anonymous in his tailored suit, he weaves in and out of Tokyo crowds, stealing wallets from strangers so smoothly sometimes he doesn't even remember the snatch. Most people are just a blur to him, nameless faces from whom he chooses his victims. He has no family, no friends, no connections. But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when Ishikawa, his first partner, reappears in his life, and offers him a job he can't refuse. It's an easy job: tie up an old rich man, steal the contents of the safe. No one gets hurt. Only the day after the job does he learn that the old man was a prominent politician, and that he was brutally killed after the robbery. And now the Thief is caught in a tangle even he might not be able to escape.

Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.

A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh journeys into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.

A young journalist journeys deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, determined to discover the truth about a Pultizer-winning war correspondent.

Growing up, the only place tomboy Thayer Wentworth felt at home was at her summer camp--Camp Sherwood Forest in the North Carolina Mountains. It was there that she came alive and where she met Nick Abrams, her first love...and first heartbreak. Years later, Thayer marries Aengus, an Irish professor, and they move into her deceased grandmother's house in Atlanta, only miles from Camp Edgewood on Burnt Mountain where her father died years ago in a car accident. There, Aengus and Thayer lead quiet and happy lives until Aengus is invited up to the camp to tell old Irish tales to the campers. As Aengus spends less time at home and becomes more distant, Thayer must confront dark secrets-about her mother, her first love, and, most devastating of all, her husband.

In the aftermath of the murder of an anonymous victim, assistant superintendent David Bengu begins his career in Botswana, where his convivial passions and determined methods earn him a local nickname that likens him to a hippopotamus.