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It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and...
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"Why would a man serving a long prison sentence escape the day before he's due to be released? Audie was sentenced to ten years for a Texas robbery in which four people died, including two members of his own gang. Seven million dollars have never been recovered from the robbery, and everybody believes Audie knows where the money is. For a decade Audie has been beaten, stabbed, and threatened by inmates and guards, all desperate to know the secret....
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Five years ago, an innocent man began a life sentence for murdering his own son. Today he found out his son is still alive. David Burroughs was once a devoted father to his three-year-old son Matthew, living a dream life just a short drive away from the working-class suburb where he and his wife, Cheryl, first fell in love--until one fateful night when David woke suddenly to discover Matthew had been murdered while David was asleep just down the hall....
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ARC - Book that Aligns with the Summer Reading Club Theme
2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
2024 Tournament of Books
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2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
2024 Tournament of Books
More Lists...
Description
The explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times -bestselling author of Friday Black , about two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own. "A new and necessary American voice." -- Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or...
5) Steelstriker
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The Karensa Federation has conquered a dozen countries, leaving Mara as one of the last free nations in the world. Refugees flee to its borders to escape a fate worse than death, transformation into mutant war beasts known as Ghosts, creatures the Federation then sends to attack Mara. The legendary Strikers, Mara's elite fighting force, are trained to stop these monsters. But as the number of Ghosts grows and Karensa closes in, defeat seems inevitable....
6) The brethren
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"They call themselves the Brethren: a trio of former judges doing time in a Florida federal prison. One was sent up for tax evasion. Another, for skimming bingo profits. The third for a career-ending drunken joyride. Meeting daily in the prison law library, taking exercise walks in their boxer shorts, these judges-turned-felons can reminisce about old court cases, dispense a little jailhouse justice, and contemplate where their lives went wrong. Or...
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"In A Small Town, twelve conspirators meticulously plan to throw open all the gates to the prison that contains them, so that more than a thousand convicts may escape and pour into the nearby small town. The newly freed prisoners rape, murder, and destroy the town-burning down homes and businesses. An immense manhunt ensues, but the twelve who plotted it all get away. After two years, all efforts by the local and federal police agencies have been...
8) The inmate
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"There are three rules Brooke Sullivan must follow as a new nurse practitioner at a men's maximum-security prison: 1) Treat all prisoners with respect. 2) Never reveal any personal information. 3) Never EVER become too friendly with the inmates. But none of the staff at the prison knows Brooke has already broken the rules. Nobody knows about her intimate connection to Shane Nelson, one of the penitentiary's most notorious and dangerous inmates. And...
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"Two years ago Joseph King was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to life in prison. He was a "fallen" Amish man and, according to local law enforcement, a known drug user with a violent temper. Now King has escaped, and he's headed for Painters Mill. News of a murderer on the loose travels like wildfire and putting Chief of Police Kate Burkholder and her team of officers on edge. A nightmare scenario becomes reality when King shows up...
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A Translated Book
Adult Activity Challenge 2026: Books Under 300 Pages
GHPLD Sounds Like a Cult
Quick Reads to Meet Reading Goals
Adult Activity Challenge 2026: Books Under 300 Pages
GHPLD Sounds Like a Cult
Quick Reads to Meet Reading Goals
Description
"Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl--the fortieth prisoner--sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange...
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"Hannah has abandoned everything-her trajectory as a law student, her childhood home and caring for her ill mother-for the chance to work with the Innocence Project, a prestigious coalition of investigators who fight to free wrongly convicted prisoners. Hannah's ambitions are set on the program's highest-stakes case in years: a convicted rapist and murderer on death row. She'll do anything-whatever it takes-to work on this case. Because Hannah has...
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"After ten years as a captive of kidnapper Henry Gemmerle, Joan Crimmins eludes the media and spurns the family who failed to search for her. Instead, she settles in the remote Maine town of Bearkill. But when Gemmerle flees a prison clinic and a 16-year-old Bearkill girl vanishes, Aroostook County Sheriff's deputy Lizzie Snow knows that Joan's painful past has just become another young woman's horrifying future"-- Provided by publisher.
13) The loop
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2022 Summer Top Picks for High Schoolers
2023 Lincoln Award Nominees
2025 Read for a Lifetime
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2023 Lincoln Award Nominees
2025 Read for a Lifetime
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Description
"Luka Kane has spent 736 days wrongfully imprisoned inside the Loop awaiting his execution. Each day is the same. Each day is torturous. But things are starting to change. Whispers of war are circulating. Strange things are happening to the prisoners. And the warden delivers a message: Luka, you have to get out ... Now Luka must decide whether breaking out of the Loop is his only way to survive, especially if there's any chance of saving the ones...
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Haunted/Horror: Books that scare!
Illinois Libraries Present Fall 2023
OBD Halfway to Halloween - Adult
Stay Away From The Lake!
Illinois Libraries Present Fall 2023
OBD Halfway to Halloween - Adult
Stay Away From The Lake!
Description
"December 12th, 2019, Jade returns to the rural lake town of Proofrock the same day as convicted Indigenous serial killer Dark Mill South escapes into town to complete his revenge killings, in this riveting sequel to My Heart Is a Chainsaw from New York Times bestselling author, Stephen Graham Jones. Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life...
15) Ash Princess
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Held captive by the brutal Kaiser since age six when she witnessed her mother's murder, Theodosia, called Ash Princess, is now sixteen and prepared to reclaim the throne by any means necessary.
16) Days of wonder
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"As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love--yearning, breathless love--that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her life was unexpectedly upended when she was accused of trying to murder Jude's father, an imperious superior court judge, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. When she learns she's pregnant shortly after sentencing, she reluctantly decides to give...
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"Astraea is a prisoner of her own mind, the past sliding from her grasp like water. But she knows she must escape the tyrannical king who holds her captive and find her clouded memories once again. This quest leads her to the Libertatem, a succession of trials hosted by the king in which five human lands compete for a cycle of safety from the vampires seeking blood, claiming souls, and savaging after dark. But even winning the Libertatum will not...
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John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick -- a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins -- encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance.
19) Escape
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"New York Times bestselling detective Billy Harney of The Black Book is chasing down a billionaire crime boss and a prison escape artist while a young girl's life hangs in the balance. As Chicago PD's special-ops leader, Detective Billy Harney knows well that money is not the only valuable currency. The filthy rich man he's investigating is down to his last twenty million. He's also being held in jail. For now. Billy's unit is called in when an escape...









