recluses

When Pulitzer Prize?winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?.

With her younger brother in danger, fifteen-year-old Maddie runs out of the house she has not left since she was two years old when the evil town librarian threatened to harm her.

James Bond is called in to investigate a suspected worldwide diamond smuggling ring. He travels to America, where a reclusive millionaire casino owner may be behind it all.

Two interesting characters who are isolated in their old family mansion refuse to accept the fact that times have changed and are joined by others who share a time of music and liberty.

A reclusive white Pulitzer Prize winning author and a sixteen-year-old African-American basketball player with a secret passion for literature meet by chance and form an unlikely friendship.

"1916: The Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on a fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong and the wind in the leaves. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man's-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone?. 2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive -- some say mad, others allege dangerous -- scientist who seems to have vanished. Sifting through the wreckage, Jansson finds a curious gadget: a box containing some rudimentary wiring, a three-way switch, and...a potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way humankind views the world forever."--back cover.

Thomas Glahn is quite content living in a hut at the edge of the forest with only his faithful dog, Aesop, to keep him company until a strange girl enters his life.

Seb has always been a loner, preferring the company of computers, but his life takes a new turn when he makes friends with Kristie, Madeline, and Jen, and becomes involved in a web of computer fraud.

Susan Harris, a woman who lives in self-imposed seclusion, becomes the victim of an artificial intelligence that is obsessed with learning everything there is to know about the flesh.