Lamar Public Library

For a favorite son returned from war and an outsider looking for a home, Virgin River offers both a chance to make peace with the men they once were and to find the dreams they thought they had lost.

"Last Christmas Marcie Sullivan said a final goodbye to her husband, Bobby. This Christmas she wants to find the man who saved his life and gave her three more years to love him. Fellow marine Ian Buchanan dragged Bobby's shattered body onto a medical transport four years ago, then disappeared once their unit arrived stateside. Since then, Marcie's letters to Ian have gone unanswered. Marcie tracks Ian to the tiny mountain town of Virgin River and...

A war hero on his third deployment in Iraq, Peter is injured and finds himself both alive and dead on a wondrous spiritual journey where he is given a second chance at life from God Himself. With Christmas approaching, time is running out for Peter to complete the most important mission of his life: convincing himself that he and Mariana, the woman he left behind in Chicago, were meant to share a special message of love with the world.

SSgt. Kyle Vogel leaves a handwritten letter on the seat of his car, grabs a pistol, and steps into a Minnesota forest. Flash back a few months as Vogel lies wounded in a hospital near Anbar Province, Iraq. The night before he's due to return to combat, his doctor, Lt. Kelly Tripp, presses him on why he's so obsessed with collecting battle souvenirs. Kyle proceeds to tell her what happened on Memorial Day, 1993, when, as a 13-year old boy, he discovered...

"Two women, separated by a generation but equally scarred by war find hope, meaning and friendship through a garden of flowers. Iris Maynard lost her husband in World War II, her daughter to loneliness and, finally, her reason to live. Walled off from the world for decades behind a towering fence surrounding her home and gardens, Iris has built a new family...of flowers. Iris propagates her own daylilies and roses while tending to an heirloom garden...

Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father's frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects-a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.

In The Good Soldiers, David Finkel's account from the front lines of Baghdad, he shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous surge, a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now Finkel has followed many of those same men as they've returned home and struggled to reintegrate -- both into their family lives and into American society at large. Where do soldiers belong after their homecoming?...