Alamosa Public Library

The gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinian town tells the story of Charley Fortnum, the 'Honorary Consul,' a whiskey-sodden figure of dubious authority who is taken by a group of revolutionaries.

"1945. Marta Nederman has barely survived the brutality of a Nazi concentration camp, where she was imprisoned for her work with the Polish resistance. Lucky to have escaped with her life, she meets Paul, an American soldier, who gives her hope of a happier future. The two make a promise to meet in London, but Paul is in a deadly plane crash and never arrives. Finding herself pregnant and alone in a strange city, Marta finds comfort with a kind British...

In this book - at once a biography, the intimate portrait of an extraordinary family, and a peculiarly American tragedy - Patricia Bosworth has re-created an entire era: Roosevelt's New Deal, the triumphant Left, the victory of World War II, and then the fall of liberalism and the dawn of the Cold War. Political turmoil followed; anti-Communist hysteria ruined many lives full of promise. Among them was that of Patricia Bosworth's father, Bartley Cavanaugh...

Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. Admired and detested, he was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan,...

The banks of the Nile are torn by an unprecedented war during which a charismatic new religious leader traps hundreds of people in the capital city of Khartoum.

Osborne completes his homage to Christie with this third and final adaptation of an original Christie play, following Black Coffee (1998) and The Unexpected Guest (1999). Though the play was written in 1954, the story suffers little from the passage of time, and aside from the static setting, reads well as a novel. Christie's exquisite timing and clever sleight-of-mind tricks are a delight, while Osborne has the good sense not to embroider the tale....

"Charley Castillo works with the Department of Homeland Security, but more and more is the man to whom the President turns when he needs an investigation done discretely. And no situation demands discretion more than the one before them now." "An American diplomat's wife is kidnapped in Argentina, and her husband murdered before her eyes. Her children will be next, she is told, if she doesn't tell them where her brother is - a brother, as it turns...

"In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets? Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic...

A story of a small country caught between Democracy and Communism. An ineffectual ambassador is just one of the handicaps facing the Americans as Southeast Asia is taken over by the communists.

The Constant Gardener Tessa Quayle, young, beautiful, and dearly beloved to husband Justin, is gruesomely murdered in northern Kenya. When Justin sets out on a personal odyssey to uncover the mystery of her death, what he finds could make him not only a suspect, but also a target for Tessa's killers. A master chronicler of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, John le Carre portrays the dark side of unbridled capitalism as...