Hmong American twins Astrid and Apollo and their father are excited to start their relaxing ice fishing expedition, but freezing Mom is worried things could go wrong, which they do--sort of.

As the city of Minneapolis prepares for a visit from President William McKinley, someone else prepares for murder. On the day before the visit, a union activist is found hanged, naked, outside a ruined mansion. A placard around his neck reads "THE SECRET ALLIANCE HAS SPOKEN." Who is the alliance? What does it want? How was the victim involved with the city's corrupt mayor? And why did he possess a photograph of a prominent citizen in a compromising

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There was nothing out of the ordinary about Jim Koplin. He was just your typical central Minnesota gay farm boy with a Ph.D. in experimental psychology who developed anarchist-influenced, radical-feminist, and anti-imperialist politics, while never losing touch with his rural roots. But perhaps the most important thing about Jim is that throughout his life, almost literally to his dying breath, he spent some part of every day on the most important...

Thirteen-year-old Jake has big plans to be drafted by the Chicago Cubs, but his dream vanishes when he inadvertently witnesses a hold-up at a Chicago convenience store. Concerned for his family's safety, Jake's father decides to move them back to rural Minnesota. Still angry with the move, Jake befriends a father and son who God uses to transform Jake's life in unimaginable ways.

Betsy Devonshire, owner of the Crewel World needlework shop, doesn't mess around. But when a local hoarder is murdered, she'll need all her wits to dig a new friend out of a heap of trouble. After a tree falls on Tom Riordan's house, landing him in the hospital, the police discover a mountain of junk piled high in his home. Locals in Excelsior, Minnesota including Betsy and her Crewel World Monday Bunch offer to help with the cleanup while Tom recuperates....

The James-Younger gang set out to rob a bank but things don't go as planned.

After she is sent to small-town Minnesota to oversee the restructuring of a manufacturing plant, a high-powered consultant from Miami finds her priorities changing.

When Laura Sobiech learned seventeen-year-old Zach had one year to live, she asked her son to write good-bye letters to family and friends. She also offered one last prayer, "Okay, Lord, you can have him. But if he must die, I want it to be for something big. I want someone's life to be changed forever." God answered her in ways she could never have imagined.

In the wilderness, one false step can make the difference between a delightful respite and a brush with death. On a beautiful summer afternoon in 1998, Dan Stephens, a 22-year-old canoeist, was leading a trip deep into Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park. He stepped into a gap among cedar trees to look for the next portage-and did not return. More than four hours later, Dan awakened with a lump on his head from a fall and stumbled deeper into the woods,...