Marlow Heddings is starting over. She has carried the outrage of her husband Dylan’s affair with a younger woman --- and the expectations of his family’s powerful Chicago holdings company --- long enough. Now, after another devastating twist of fate, she is unapologetically moving on. Arriving in tiny Bramble, Kentucky, Marlow revels in her freedom, swapping her executive suits for sundresses...and scouting places to open her dream boutique. Best of all is her new residence, an adorable cottage with gorgeous lake views --- and a breathtaking landlord, former Marine Cort Easton. Soon they’re sharing dockside morning coffee and nighttime firefly gazing. Marlow’s new life feels like a dream. Then Pixie Nolan arrives on her doorstep. With a shocking secret.
Living in a shack out in the swamps, the Labasques made do by hunting down alligators and other animals. To the good people of Jacknife, Louisiana, they are troublemakers and outcasts, the kind of people you wouldn’t want in your community. So when Cutter Labasque is found face down in the muddy swamp, no one seems to care, not even her two brothers. The only person who questions the official verdict of suicide is Cutter’s childhood friend, Loyal May, who has just returned home to care for her mother. When she left town at 18 years old, she betrayed Cutter. Now with a ragtag group from the local paper where she works, Loyal goes in search of answers, uncovering a web of deceit and corruption that implicates those in town.
Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in 17th-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China. Memory, political revolution, generational change and the ethical imagination are at the heart of Lina’s illuminating conversations with her fellows in the Sea. Through their guidance, Lina equips herself to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility and the possibility of redemption when her ailing father begins to reveal his role in their family’s tragic past.
The Beauclaire family immigrated to New York City from Haiti years ago, looking for their own piece of America’s promised riches. They go to church; they're good neighbors; and their two daughters, Judith and Beatrice, have typical sibling rivalries that keep things interesting. But beneath this polished exterior, something is just slightly off. There’s malice waiting...wanting to reveal itself. When their mother unexpectedly dies, Judith and Bea are overwhelmed by a mob of relatives, friends and church ladies. Amidst taking care of the funeral, they meet Libète, who claims to be a close friend of their mother’s. Bea welcomes her, but Judith is immediately suspicious --- their mother never mentioned Libète, and yet she seems to know everything about them.
Alice Haserot thought she’d escaped the curse. For 16 years, she’s lived far from her family and the ghosts she used to conjure. But her past isn’t so easily left behind. When Alice discovers she’s pregnant and her estranged sister, Bronwyn, turns up on her doorstep, her carefully built new life begins to unravel. Bronwyn offers an ultimatum: one of her daughters is trying to possess the other, and only Alice has the power to save them. If Alice refuses, Bronwyn will go to their abusive mother and expose her location. Forced to confront the terrors of her childhood, Alice returns home to face the inheritance of her family curse.
It’s a steamy, restless end of the school year in New Orleans. Sister Holiday is staying busy with her music classes and preparing for her permanent vow ceremony, a pivotal moment in her journey of faith. But when one of her favorite students is found dead of a fentanyl overdose, Sister Holiday and her partner-in-PI, Magnolia Riveaux, are launched on a mission to track down the drug dealers. As students continue to fall prey to this sinister drug under her watch, Sister Holiday becomes more and more desperate to stop this epidemic. All the while, she must contend with her own past with addiction, a demon that is never too far.
Maya Killgore is 23 and still in the process of figuring out her life. Conor Harkness is 38, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him. Any relationship between them would be problematic in too many ways to count, and Maya should just get over him. After all, he has made it clear that he wants her gone from his life. But not everything is as it seems --- and clichés sometimes become plot twists. When Maya’s brother decides to get married in Taormina, she and Conor end up stuck together in a romantic Sicilian villa for over a week. There, on the beautiful Ionian coast, Maya realizes that Conor might be hiding something from her. And as the destination wedding begins to erupt out of control, she decides that a summer fling might be just what she needs --- even if it’s a problematic one.
In the summer of 1996, teenage Tess Murphy’s mom gave her two rules to abide by: keep quiet and stay out of trouble. Her mother landed a new job as a cook at an affluent Virginia estate and didn’t want anything to risk the opportunity, least of all her outspoken daughter. What no one saw coming was Tess falling deeply in love with the boy next door, high-society Grant Alexander. Over a few wondrous and heat-filled months, Tess and Grant’s love blooms so ferociously it feels utterly impossible that anything can keep them apart, until tragedy strikes and the teenagers find themselves pained by betrayal with little hope to repair the damage that’s been done. Now, two decades after their epic teenage romance abruptly ended in heartbreak, Tess and Grant are both running for Governor of Virginia, where secrets from that summer threaten to shatter their families, futures and the love they once shared.
Warwick Easton’s traveling show has landed him in California. Out of money and about to return to England, Easton gets lucky when silent movie star and Mack Sennett offers him a job performing slapstick comedy stunts as a Keystone Cop. But the laughs turn sour as things quickly start to go awry. Known in his new role only as “Keystone,” Easton finds the line between cop and comedian starts to blur, especially when a series of tragedies strikes the studio. The gory death of a stunt actor on a roller coaster seems like an accident, but then a bludgeoned body is discovered in a bungalow and Amber Honeybee, the beautiful but troubled actress Easton has befriended, vanishes. Easton has no choice but to step into the role of a real detective. Does he have what it takes to unravel the mystery in time and save the girl?
Sergeant Akal Singh is just starting to settle into his life in the capital city of Suva when he is sent to the neighboring island of Ovalau on a series of fool’s errands. First: investigate strange reports of Germans, thousands of miles from the front of World War I. Second: chaperone two strong-willed European ladies, Mary and Katherine, on a sight-seeing tour. And third: supervise the only police officer currently on Ovalau, an 18-year-old constable. Accompanied by his friend Taviti, Akal sets off on these seemingly straightforward tasks. Instead, they become embroiled in a series of local issues: the gruesome death of an unpopular local and the imprisonment of a group of Norwegian sailors in Taviti’s uncle’s village. To add to Akal’s woes, Katherine harbors an agenda of her own. Will Akal be able to keep her out of trouble before anybody else gets killed?
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Coming Soon
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May's Books on Screen roundup includes the series premieres of "The Better Sister" on Prime Video, "Dept. Q" and "Forever" on Netflix, and "Miss Austen" on PBS "Masterpiece"; the season premieres of Hulu's "Nine Perfect Strangers," Max's "And Just Like That..." and AMC's "The Walking Dead: Dead City"; the series finales of "The Handmaid's Tale" on Hulu and "The Last Anniversary" on Sundance Now and AMC+; the season finales of CBS's "Tracker" and "Watson," as well as ABC's "Will Trent"; the films Juliet & Romeo and Fear Street: Prom Queen; and the DVD/Blu-ray releases of Captain America: Brave New World, Mickey 17 and Being Maria.