"Preparations are underway for Lake Eden, Minnesota's annual Winter Carnival--and Hannah Swensen is set to bake up a storm at her popular shop, The Cookie Jar. Too bad the honor of creating the official Winter Carnival cake went to famous lifestyle maven Connie Mac--a half-baked idea, in Hannah's opinion. She suspects Connie Mac is a lot like the confections she whips up on her cable TV cooking show--sweet, light, and scrumptious-looking, but likely...

Describes the lonely predicament of Carol Kennicott, who is caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness. Her dilemma is intensified by the fact that she lives in a small, self-satisfied, Midwestern town.

"Whenever you hear the sky rumble, that usually means a storm. In Virgil Flowers' case, make that two. The exceptional new thriller from the writer whose books are "pure reading pleasure" (Booklist) The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota zoo. Two large, and very rare, Amur tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are worried sick that they've been stolen for their body parts. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes those...

"No one cooks up a delectable, suspense-filled mystery quite like Hannah Swensen, Joanne Fluke's dessert-baking, red-haired heroine whose gingersnaps are as tart as her comebacks, and whose penchant for solving crimes--one delicious clue at a time--has made her a bestselling favorite. And it all began on these pages, with a bakery, a murder, and some suddenly scandalous chocolate-chip crunchies. Featuring a bonus short story and brand new, mouthwatering...

At a local university, two feuding departments have faced off on the battleground of science and medicine. But highly educated people of sound mind and good intentions can reasonably disagree, right? Then a renowned and confrontational scholar winds up dead, and Virgil Flowers is brought in to investigate. As Virgil probes the recent ideological unrest, he quickly realizes he's dealing with people who, on this one particular issue, are functionally...

The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it: local merchants, fearing for their businesses, and environmentalists, predicting ecological disaster. The protests don't seem to be slowing the project, though, until someone decides to take matters into his own hands. The first bomb goes off on the top floor of PyeMart's headquarters. The second one explodes at the construction site...

Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota's Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O'Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown,...

When the keyboard player for the Cinnamon Roll Six jazz band is murdered after a tour bus accident on the way to Lake Eden, Minnesota, Hannah Swensen investigates and comes up with several local suspects.

"College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Iverson is a dying Vietnam veteran--and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been...

"The acclaimed author of Ordinary Grace crafts a powerful novel about an orphan's life-changing adventure traveling down America's great rivers during the Great Depression, seeking both a place to call home and a sense of purpose in a world sinking into despair"-- 1932, Minnesota. The Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an...