NCW Libraries

"After a highly publicized fall from grace, James, a famous humanitarian and philanthropist, attempts to flee from the chaos in his life. He ends up in a community he had never heard of before, one that has been neglected and ignored by everyone in rural Ham, Mississippi. A place of abject poverty, the neighborhood is commonly referred to as "Around the Way." Within a place forgotten by the rest of the world, politics can be a dangerous game. When...

A touring production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" brings murder and mayhem into the life of P.I. Sarah Booth when the costar, a much-despised diva and current lover of Sarah's old flame, is poisoned, and all evidence points to Sarah.

"In the 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals in a small town in rural Mississippi. Their worlds were as different as night and day ... But then Larry took a girl to a drive-in movie and she was never seen or heard from again. He never confessed ... and was never charged. More than twenty years have passed. Larry lives a solitary, shunned existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has become the town constable....

A young woman returns home with her child to her ghost-haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the stormridden territory of southern Mississippi to find the girl who may be a savior in the apocalypse.

Ward (Salvage the Bones) tells the story of three generations of a struggling Mississippi family in this astonishing novel. "We don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once." This is the explanation 13-year-old Jojo is provided by his grandmother, the family matriarch, on her deathbed. "I'll be on the other side of the door," she reassures him, "With everybody else that's gone before." Jojo and his little...

"Jack Widow is an elite NCIS Agent. He's the guy sent to hotspots all over the world, undercover as a Navy SEAL to investigate high-level crimes, until he is pulled off assignment after someone has shot his sheriff mother, way back home in Mississippi. In order to solve the murder of a mother, that he hasn't seen in years, Jack Widow is forced to return home from an undercover assignment. Taken-to-be a worthless drifter, Widow discovers a distraught...

Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...

Everything starts somewhere. . . .For elite military cop Jack Reacher, that somewhere was Carter Crossing, Mississippi, way back in 1997. A lonely railroad track. A crime scene. A coverup. A young woman is dead, and solid evidence points to a soldier at a nearby military base. But that soldier has powerful friends in Washington. Reacher is ordered undercover--to find out everything he can, to control the local police, and then to vanish. Reacher is...

Kiese Laymon's debut novel is a Twain-esque exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in Post-Katrina Mississippi, written in a voice that's alternately funny, lacerating, and wise. The book contains two interwoven stories. In the first, it's 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, 14-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an overnight YouTube celebrity. The next day, he's sent...

"Davis Way Cole smells T-R-O-U-B-L-E when she's fired from half of her part-time job at the Bellissimo Resort and Casino in Biloxi. The quarter-time job she's left with is lulling her to sleep, exactly what she's doing when Birdy James, centenarian director of the casino's Lost and Found department, disappears. With five million dollars. If Davis doesn't find the little old lady and the money fast, she'll lose what's left of her job, at which point,...