Bent Northrop Memorial Library

Taken hostage by a failed bank robber while attending an open house, eight anxiety-prone strangers--including a redemption-seeking bank director, two couples who would fix their marriages, and a plucky octogenarian--discover their unexpected common traits. Viewing an apartment normally doesn't turn into a life-or-death situation, but this particular open house becomes just that: a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage....

At 11:34 a.m. one Saturday in August 2019, Boyd Halverson strode into Community National Bank in northern California. "How much is on hand, would you say?" he asked the teller. "I'll want it all." "You're robbing me?" "Not you," Boyd replied, revealing a Temptation .38 Special. Angie Bing, the teller, scraped together $81,000. Boyd stuffed the cash into a paper grocery bag. "I'm sorry about this," he said, "but I'll have to ask you to take a ride...

"The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center, a women's reproductive health services clinic, its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage. After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. As his phone vibrates with...

In a Chicago suburb, a dentist is met in his office parking lot by three men and ordered into the trunk of his Lexus. On a downtown sidewalk, Jack Reacher and an unknown woman are abducted in broad daylight by two men - practiced and confident - who stop them at gunpoint and hustle them into the same sedan. Then Reacher and the woman are switched into a second vehicle and hauled away, leaving the dentist bound and gagged inside his car with the woman's...

In the charming rural town of Trail Stop, Idaho, accessible to the outside world by only a single road, young widow Cate Nightingale lives peacefully with her four-year-old twin boys, running a bed-and-breakfast. Though the overnight guests are few and far between--occasional hunters and lake fishermen--Cate always manages to make ends meet with the help of the local jack-of-all-trades, Calvin Harris, who can handle everything from carpentry to plumbing....

Detective Michael Bennett is called in when the son of one of New York's richest families is kidnapped and held hostage, and when another student disappears, Bennett must rely on FBI agent Emily Parker before the mastermind can fulfill his plot to bring destruction to the city.

"With echoes of Catch-22 and Black Hawk Down, author and former hostage Michael Scott Moore masterfully walks a fine line between personal narrative and journalistic distance in this page-turning and novelistic account of 977 days held captive by Somali pirates. Moore set off for Somalia in January 2012 after reporting on a historic trial of ten Somali pirates in Germany. He went with an open mind and a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting....

When a group of seemingly random people are taken hostage inside St. Patrick's Cathedral, Eve Rossi and her team work to reveal the mastermind behind the situation and how he knows about Eve's past.

When a boxer-turned-revolutionary kidnaps the daughter of a weapons manufacturer and threatens to publicly execute her in exchange for a lucrative ransom, Easy Rawlins is tapped by the LAPD to make a difficult border crossing to navigate an ensuing standoff.

"The woman's body was found in the early morning, on a bench in a New York City playground. She was clean, her hair neatly arranged, her makeup carefully applied. But other things were very wrong--like the tattoo and piercings, clearly new. The clothes, decades out of date. The fatal wound hidden beneath a ribbon around her neck. And the note: "Bad Mommy," written in crayon as if by a child. Eve Dallas turns to the department's top profiler, who confirms...