Las Animas - Bent County Library District

Follows the lives of two antebellum southerners, Silas Toliver and his best friend Jeremy Warwick, as they head into a new territory known as "Texas" in search of black gold.

In a small town in Ark-La-Tex, Detective Jim Bonham has been assigned to a new case. On the outskirts of the town, a woman has been found brutalized and nailed to a cross. Bonham recognizes her immediately: it is Dr. Deborah Gold, one of the town's psychologists. The questions pile up quickly. How many perpetrators would it have taken to commit this atrocity? Why was a Roman coin found at the foot of the body? And why a murder as gruesome and cruel...

"When twenty-five-year-old Lewis Taylor is released from the Texas State Prison, he receives little attention as he walks into the midday sunlight, free after serving five years for a crime he didn't commit. His only interest is in getting back to his hometown of Gila Bend, Texas ... What he finds ... is a town dramatically changed: once a happy and carefree place to live, it is now populated by people who are angry and afraid. One man, Captain Archer...

It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby...

Thirty-three-year-old Shea Rigsby has spent her entire life in Walker, Texas-a small college town that lives and dies by football. Raised alongside her best friend, Lucy, the daughter of Walkers head coach, Clive Carr, Shea was too devoted to her hometown team to leave. She stayed in Walker for college, even taking a job in the university athletic department. When an unexpected tragedy strikes the Walker community, Sheas world is upended, and she...

"Sheriff Jess Carey and his oddball band of sidekicks have pulled off the impossible, taming Hell's Half Acre, the most lawless town in Texas, infamous for murder, mayhem, prostitution, and every random act of bloodshed imaginable. Now the no-good politicians in Austin have decided it's cheaper to dump hordes of criminals on Jess Carey's town than hanging 'em. In one dreadful week it seems as if the gates of Hell have burst open. Freed outlaws, gunslingers,...

A comedy on a man's belated mid-life crisis at the age of 62. It strikes Texas oil tycoon Duane Moore and not even his wife of 40 years can figure out what caused it. That task is left to a pretty psychiatrist. By the author of The Last Picture Show.

"In his mountain-man days, Elwood "Firestick" McQueen was practically a living legend. His hunting, tracking, and trapping skills were known far and wide. But it was his deadly accuracy with a rifle that earned him the Indian name "Firestick." His two best buddies are Malachi "Beartooth" Skinner -- whose knife was as fatal as a grizzly's chompers -- and Jim "Moosejaw" Hendricks, who once wielded the jawbone of a moose to crush his enemies in the heat...

When Sheriff Rhodes is asked to join the Clearview Barbershop Chorus, he suspects there's an ulterior motive, because he can't sing a note. Fortunately, his detecting skills hit all the right notes.

In this poignant and striking final chapter in the Duane Moore story, which began in 1966, McMurty takes readers on one last unforgettable journey to Thalia, Texas, a town that continues to change at a breakneck pace even as Duane feels himself slowing down. Returning home to recover from a near-fatal heart attack, Duane discovers that he has a new neighbor: the statuesque K. K. Slater, a quirky billionairess who's come to Thalia to open the Rhino...