Full AspenCat Catalog

"A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many characters we meet that day, each of whom will come...

"Growing up in the 1950s, nine-year-old Maryellen longs to stand out, but in a family with five brothers and sisters, it's easy to get lost in the shuffle!" --

Constable Twitten investigates the death of a famed theater critic who was murdered before he could deliver information about an unsolved crime. "It's 1957, and the famed theater critic A. S. Crystal has come to the British seaside resort of Brighton with something other than the production of A shilling in the Meter on his mind. Sitting in the Brighton Theatre Royal with Constable Twitten, Crystal intends to tell the detective the secret he knows...

At a car dealership's big opening day, the festivities are marred by the discovery of a corpse It is September 1957, and America is waiting to meet the Edsel, Ford's top-secret new automobile, whose promotional campaign has redefined the word hype. Sam McCain, lawyer, detective, and car fiend, has been dreaming of the Edsel for months. But when the sheet comes off Ford's new creation, the car is a nightmare. Pastel colored, bulky, and with a distinctively...

Relates the surprising gifts bestowed on twelve-year-old Bob Barnhart and his family, who have recently moved to a small Illinois town in 1958, by their larger-than-life neighbor, Mrs. Dowdel.

Sparking enthusiasm for a play about the founding of their North Carolina mountains Catholic girls' school, a charismatic ninth grader and her recently orphaned best friend set in motion a series of events that have decades-long ramifications.

In 1950s San Francisco, as Jim Ferguson, an elderly garage owner with a heart condition prepares to retire and sell his business, he is offered the deal of a lifetime by record-company owner Chris Harman, but Al Miller, a somewhat irresponsible mechanic who works in Jims Garage, believes that Harman is a crook and sets out to protect his mentor.

Hooper's Crossing, New York, 1952. The post-war boom seems a million miles away . . . especially for a sheltered librarian who longs for the adventure and excitement of the big city. New York City. The hustle and bustle. The people and the excitement. It's all Lily Denton dreams about. But ever since her mother died, her overprotective father won't ease up on her. So she spends her days working at the library and her nights hoping life doesn't pass...