Caroline B Cooney

At college in New York City, Janie Johnson, aka Jennie Spring, seems to have successfully left behind her past as "The face on the milk carton," but soon she, her families, and friends are pursued by a true-crime writer who wants their help in telling her kidnapper's tale.

1964: Christaphine is twenty years old, newly married, and determined to make a home and a life for her and her husband, Tommy. But when Christaphine discovers Tommy and his friends on the verge of committing a horrible crime, she does what she has to do to stop them. Afterwards, she knows she can't ever go home again--so she disappears. 50 years later: When Clemmie's neighbor, Muffin, drags her from Sunday morning service at Trinity Hill Church,...

Janie's life finally seems to be settling down. But she really misses Reeve Shields, her boyfriend who is away at college. Reeve is overwhelmed by his new college life, and when he is asked to host a late-night radio show, he cannot turn it down. But he is stressed, and he finds himself spilling Janie's secrets on the air, certain that Janie will never find out, but she does.

The members of two families have their lives disrupted when a teenage girl who had been kidnapped twelve years earlier discovers that the people who raised her are not her biological parents.

While still adjusting to the reality of having two families, her birth family and the family into which she was kidnapped as a small child, seventeen-year-old Janie makes a shocking discovery about her long-gone kidnapper.

"No one ever really paid close attention to the faces of the missing children on the milk cartons. But as Janie Johnson glanced at the face of the ordinary little girl with her hair in tight pigtails, wearing a dress with a narrow white collar--a three-year-old who had been kidnapped twelve years before from a shopping mall in New Jersey--she felt overcome with shock. She recognized that little girl--it was she. How could it possibly be true? Janie...

In small-town Carolina, sixteen-year-old Lutie Painter treasures the "Laundry List" of songs written by her ancestor and does not want to share them, but ultimately they help her learn more about her absent mother and connect with fellow students Kelvin, Doria, and especially Train, a former friend.

In 1704, in the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, eleven-year-old Mercy and her family and neighbors are captured by Mohawk Indians and their French allies, and forced to march through bitter cold to French Canada, where some adapt to new lives and some still hope to be ransomed.

When seventeen-year-old Matt tries to find a family for an eight-year-old foster child, his attempt backfires and both of them need a Christmas miracle.

Falsely accused of her father's murder, Alice is on the run for her life. Alice is at home painting her fingernails and ruminating on her parent's divorce when she receives an oddly desperate-sounding phone call from her father. He instructs her to drop what she's doing, take his car, and bring two computer disks to him at their favorite ice cream shack. Alice can't believe her father wants her to take his precious Corvette, and she's not supposed...