Adult

There is a heatwave across Europe, and four siblings have gathered at their family’s lake house to seek answers about their father, a famous artist, who recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his long-awaited masterpiece. Now he is dead. As the siblings try to piece together what happened, they spend the summer in a state of lawlessness: living under the same roof for the first time in decades, forced to confront the buried wounds they incurred as his children and waiting for answers. Though they have always been close, the things they learn that summer will drive them apart before they can truly understand his legacy. Meanwhile, their stepmother’s enigmatic presence looms over the house. Is she the force that will finally destroy the family for good?

After achieving her lifelong dream of solving a murder, bringing a killer to justice and proving she is not, in fact, a morbid creep, Beatrice Steele feels like everything is finally falling into place. She’s traded her etiquette-obsessed community of Swampshire for Sweetbriar in the big city of London. Sweetbriar is also home to DS Investigations, the new office she opened with Inspector Drake to solve the city’s brutally thrilling crimes. However, nothing is turning out how Beatrice imagined it would. Beatrice is struggling to balance all the demands on her and begins to wonder if she can become a true detective in a city that feels full of false promises. That is until a string of murders thrusts Beatrice and Drake into the center of a scandal that pits the neighborhood’s wealthiest against the arts community.

After Baz Luhrmann’s movie, Elvis, hit theaters, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley’s music and style, reigniting a debate that has been circling for decades. In BEFORE ELVIS​, author Preston Lauterbach answers these questions definitively, based on new research and extensive, previously unpublished interviews with the artists who blazed the way and the people who knew them. Within these pages, Lauterbach examines the lives, music, legacies and interactions with Elvis of the four innovative Black artists who created a style that would come to be known as Rock ’n’ Roll: Little Junior Parker, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and mostly unknown eccentric Beale Street guitarist Calvin Newborn.

Immigrating alone from Paris to New York after the crucible of World War II, young Gazala becomes friends with two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala’s lost brother, Samir, joins her in Manhattan, this inseparable foursome makes their way into the 21st century, becoming the beating heart of a multigenerational found family. The passing years are marked by the business of everyday existence and the inevitable surprises of erupting passions, of great and small waves of joy and despair, from the beginning of life to its end. Through it all, amid the tumult of these decades, the four friends and their best beloveds stand by one another, protecting, annoying and celebrating themselves, steadfastly unapologetic about their desires and the unorthodox family they have created.

On the occasion of her daughter Valerie’s wedding and her upcoming 50th birthday, Halley Holbrook finds herself reflecting about raising twins Valerie and Olivia. Halley has been able to give them the loving and safe home she never had, having survived a childhood so traumatic she’s never talked about it with her girls. After Valerie moves to Los Angeles with her producer husband and Olivia follows to remain close to her sister, Halley is empty-nesting. Facing her first holiday alone in years, she books a trip to Paris where she meets charming Bart Warner and the two become fast friends. But when a cunning thief makes off with her handbag and then begins to harass her, it reawakens old ghosts from her past. Vowing not to be a victim and with Bart’s help, she chooses a bold course of action.

Francis Fox is a charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be. A tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, FOX illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands.

Annabelle Reynolds has everything she’s ever wanted. A devoted husband, two wonderful daughters and a career she loves. She couldn’t be happier. So why is she suddenly plagued by disturbing dreams of a future where she hates her husband and her daughters’ lives are at risk? At first, she chalks the dreams up to an overactive imagination. But when details from her dreams, details she couldn’t possibly have predicted, begin to materialize, she realizes these aren’t just dreams but rather premonitions of a terrifying future. They all point to a singular choice, an unknown moment that holds Annabelle’s life in the balance. As Annabelle’s present life starts to collide with the future in her dreams, she wrestles with whether she can change what is meant to be.

Talent agent Charlie Francisco has three problems: a divorce that ended his screenwriting career, a business he never planned to inherit and a take-your-breath-away romance novel whose author wants nothing to do with its publication. The book is a surefire hit, if only his agency can find someone to “play” author on its summer book tour. Enter Kate Elliott, a former soap actress who’s miraculously right for the part at the very moment her life seems to be going all wrong. But she can’t know who really wrote the remarkable story. When Kate and Charlie meet they’re all friction and sparks --- the one thing they have in common is they’re determined to play their respective parts. But as the summer heat ups and the lies get bigger and bigger, can they stick to their lines...or will they go off-script?

When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in many years until he presents himself at her Sussex door. He was involved --- somehow --- in the infamous disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels from an impregnable safe in Dublin Castle. It was a theft that shook a government, enraged a king, threatened the English establishment. To slip away with him, not telling Holmes what she’s up to? Knowing that the theft must have involved Mycroft Holmes as well? Siding with her uncle, even briefly, could only place her in opposition to both her husband-partner and his secretive and powerful brother. She has to tell Jake no. On the other hand, this is Jake --- her father’s kid brother, her childhood hero, the beloved and long-lost survivor of a much-diminished family.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to look for answers about her mysterious past and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet and where she will come to question everything she values.