TEENS

Stella Hardesty, our salty, unlikely heroine, runs a sewing shop in rural Missouri. She also has a side business helping battered women with their abusive boyfriends and husbands. When Chrissy Shaw asks Stella for help, it seems like a straightforward case, until Chrissy's no-good husband disappears with her two-year-old son. Now Stella finds herself in a battle against a more formidable enemy as she risks her own life to recover the boy.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Gillian Flynn is a novelist, screenwriter, and television showrunner best known for gritty, sardonic crime fiction centered around morally ambiguous characters. Following a 10 year stint writing for Entertainment Weekly, Flynn found success and renown as a writer of novels such as Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and her most famous novel, Gone Girl. Set in a fictional, economically devastated town (based largely on Cape Girardeau), Gone Girl portrays the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy Manhattanite woman and the suspicion that is cast on her husband, a Missourian creative writing professor. The 2014 film adaptation of Gone Girl received numerous accolades, including nominations for its screenplay, also written by Flynn.

Vampire hunter Anita Blake, known to the vampires she kills as "The Executioner", is hired by the most powerful vampire in St. Louis to find out who has been murdering innocent vampires.

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims--a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story--and survive this homecoming.

No account of Missourian literature would be complete without mention of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. While Twain enjoyed a prolific career (the effort of constructing a complete bibliography of his works continues over a century after his death), he is best remembered for his 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ostensibly a children's novel, this story of the friendship and adventures of abused runaway Huck Finn and escaped slave Jim as they travel down the Mississippi River to freedom touches on issues of morality, identity, and race, and remains influential (if not controversial) to this day.

This novel chronicles the life of Jacques Ducharme, a French fur trapper and river pirate, and the five women whose lives he touches.

A young boy living in the Ozarks achieves his heart's desire when he becomes the owner of two redbone hounds and teaches them to be champion hunters.

Writer of novels and short stories Daniel Woodrell was born in Springfield and now resides in West Plains with his wife, who is also a novelist. Despite some initial misgivings about setting fiction in the Ozarks, Woodrell is now widely known as a "country noir" writer who specializes in socially-conscious crime fiction set in the Missouri Ozarks. His most famous novel, Winter's Bone, set in a fictional Ozarks town north of the Arkansas border, depicts the trials of Ree, a teenage girl who must track down her father, who has skipped bail, in order to protect her poverty-stricken family from eviction and further destitution. The 2010 film adaptation of Winter's Bone was filmed in the Ozarks and helped to propel actress Jennifer Lawrence to stardom.