Adult

When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic apartment in Paris’s upscale 10th arrondissement, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau.

For Phillipa Maakestad --- theater professor and mother to a troubled, volatile daughter --- life is finally, miraculously calm. What better moment, then, to fall headlong into a passionate affair, fly off to France with her new lover, and effectively take a match to her life on the Iowa prairie? As she steps back to survey the damage and determine her way forward, Phillipa must contend with a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her otherwise docile husband. Which is to say: the damage is not easily contained, and the path ahead is not clear.

For sex-crimes detective Livia Lone, a position with a government anti-trafficking task force is a chance to return to Thailand to ferret out Rithisak Sorm, the kingpin behind her own childhood ordeal. But after a planned takedown in a nightclub goes violently awry, Livia discovers that she’s not the only one hunting Sorm. Former marine sniper Dox also has a score to settle, and working together is the only way to take Sorm out. Livia and Dox couldn’t be less alike. But they share a single-minded creed: the law has to serve justice. And if it doesn’t, justice has to be served another way. What they don’t know is that in threatening Sorm, they’re also threatening a far-reaching conspiracy --- one involving the highest levels of America’s own intelligence apparatus.

It’s late Thursday, and Inspector Ross Carver is at a crime scene: a dead man covered in an unknown substance that’s eating through his skin. Suddenly, six FBI agents burst in and haul Carver outside and into a disinfectant trailer, where he’s shocked unconscious. On Sunday he wakes up in his own bed, his neighbor Mia --- to whom he’s barely spoken --- by his side. He can’t remember the past three days. Mia says police officers brought him home and told her he’d been poisoned. Carver can’t disprove her, but his gut says to keep her close.

Simi Desai is 30 years old, and her husband is dying of cancer. He has two last wishes in his final months: that she’ll have his baby so that a piece of him lives on, and that she’ll reconcile with her old flame, who just happens to be their mutual best friend. And so over the course of their last summer together, Simi’s husband plans a series of big and small adventures for this unlikely trio, designed to help them say goodbye to each other and prove to Simi that it’s okay to move on without him --- and even find love again.

On September 12, 1970, an ex-Harvard professor with a genius I.Q. studies a 12-foot high fence topped with barbed wire. A few months earlier, Dr. Timothy Leary, the High Priest of LSD, had been running a gleeful campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Now, Leary is six months into a 10-year prison sentence for the crime of possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Aided by the radical Weather Underground, Leary's escape from prison is the counterculture's union of "dope and dynamite," aimed at sparking a revolution and overthrowing the government. Inside the Oval Office, President Richard Nixon drinks his way through sleepless nights as he expands the war in Vietnam and plots to unleash the United States government against his ever-expanding list of domestic enemies.

Dougie Maddox is the financially astute but socially naïve only son of a Fifth Avenue dynasty. His widowed mother, known as Lady Maud, has kept the 35-year-old on a short leash, but Dougie has crossed paths with Belinda Ross, the new Broadway songbird. He's mesmerized by her, but she seems besotted by him. When Belinda is found strangled late one night in a Times Square Automat, jealous, hot-tempered Dougie is the prime suspect. But British wit Noel Coward, along with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, team up to clear Dougie's name. Their investigation inevitably takes them deep into Belinda's circle and her past.

It's 1920, and Louisa Cannon dreams of escaping her life of poverty in London. Louisa's salvation is a position within the Mitford household at Asthall Manor, in the Oxfordshire countryside. There she will become nursemaid, chaperone and confidante to the Mitford sisters, especially 16-year-old Nancy, an acerbic, bright young woman in love with stories. But then a nurse --- Florence Nightingale Shore, goddaughter of her famous namesake --- is killed on a train in broad daylight, and Louisa and Nancy find themselves entangled in the crimes of a murderer who will do anything to hide their secret.

For years, Liz and Owen have admired their good friends and neighbors, Carole and David. They appear to have it all --- security, happiness and a beautiful young son named Charlie. Then Charlie vanishes without a trace, and all that seemed safe is shattered by a tragedy that is incomprehensible. It took one fleeting moment for Liz to change the lives of everyone she loves --- a heartrending accident that can’t be undone. Neither can the second-worst mistake of her life: concealing it. There’s another good neighbor who has his own secrets, his own pain, and his own reasons for watching Liz’s every move. And only he knows that the mystery of the missing boy is far from over.

It's the summer of 1894, and an infidelity case has brought PI Mary Handley to a far corner of Brooklyn: Coney Island. In the midst of her investigation, Mary is contacted by a convicted man's brother to reopen a murder case. A prostitute was killed by a Jack the Ripper copycat years ago in her New York hotel room, but her true killer was never found. New York City's untouchable head of detectives, Thomas Byrnes, swears he put the right man behind bars, but as Mary digs deeper, she finds corruption at the heart of New York's justice system, involving not only the police, but the most powerful of stock titans.