Adult

In POINTS NORTH, completed just weeks before his death, Howard Frank Mosher presents a collection of stories that center around the Kinneson family, ranging over decades of their history in Vermont’s fabled Northeast Kingdom. From a loquacious itinerant preacher who beguiles the reticent farmers and shopkeepers of a small New England town, to a proposed dam that threatens the river that Kinneson men have fished for generations, the scandalous secret of a romance and its violent consequences, and a young man’s seemingly fruitless search for love, POINTS NORTH is a full-hearted and gently comic last gift to those who treasure Howard Frank Mosher.

Staggering around the town streets in the aftermath of an assault, Peach feels a trickle of blood down her legs, a lingering smell of her anonymous attacker on her skin. It hurts to walk, but she manages to make her way to her home, where she stumbles into another oddly nightmarish reality: Her parents can't seem to comprehend that anything has happened to their daughter. The next morning, Peach tries to return to the routines of her ordinary life. And yet, as she struggles through the next few days, she is stalked by the memories of her unacknowledged trauma. Though she tries to close her eyes to what has happened, Peach at last begins to understand the drastic, gruesome action she must take.

Detective Sergeant Matthew Ryan wants to clear the name of his former boss, who stands accused of official corruption. But before he can do so, his boss disappears. Did he escape from police custody, or was he kidnapped? Or did something even worse happen to him?

A shy boy named Oliver Loving attends his school’s annual dance, hoping for a glimpse of the object of his unrequited affections, Rebekkah Sterling. But as the music plays, a troubled young man sneaks in through the school’s back door. The dire choices this man makes that evening will tear the town of Bliss, Texas apart. Nearly 10 years later, Oliver still lies wordless and paralyzed at an assisted care facility. Orbiting the stillpoint of his hospital bed is a family transformed. And then there is Rebekkah, who left Texas long ago and still refuses to speak about her own part in that tragic night. When a new medical test promises a key to unlock Oliver’s trapped mind, the town’s unanswered questions resurface with new urgency.

When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest --- not when she has an entire world to save! If she can't find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she never will have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away.

Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life in New York. Yes, there are rumors that she's having an affair with the architect, but rumors are rumors and people will gossip. But then Bayard is found dead with a knife in his chest on the night of their Twelfth Night Ball, and Annabelle goes missing, presumed drowned. Bay's sister, Janie, forms an unlikely alliance with a reporter to uncover the truth, convinced that Bay would never have killed his wife, but the more she learns about her brother and his wife, the more everything she thought she knew about them starts to unravel. Who were her brother and his wife, really? And why did her brother die with the name George on his lips?

The year is 1982. The setting: an Edenic hamlet some 90 miles north of New York City. There, among the craggy rock cliffs and glacial ponds of timeworn mountains, three friends --- Patrick, Matthew and Hannah --- are bound together by a terrible and seemingly senseless crime. Twenty-six years later, in New York City, living lives their younger selves never could have predicted, the three meet again --- with even more devastating results.

It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over, and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet’s final frontier? This was the moon landing before the 1960s. Everyone wanted to join the adventure. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts begged to be taken along as mess boys, and newspapers across the globe covered the planning’s every stage. The night before the expedition’s flagship launched, first generation New York City high schooler Billy Gawronski jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it?

In 1939, Europe is on the brink of war when young Lily Shepherd boards an ocean liner in Essex, bound for Australia. She is ready to start anew, leaving behind the shadows in her past. With stops at exotic locations along the way, the voyage shows Lily places she’d only ever dreamed of and enables her to make friends with those above her social station. She even allows herself to hope that a man she couldn’t possibly have a future with outside the cocoon of the ship might return her feelings. But Lily soon realizes that she’s not the only one hiding secrets. Her newfound friends are also running away from their pasts. By the time the ship docks, two passengers are dead, war has been declared, and Lily’s life will be changed irrevocably.

Lynn McBride has learned much since society collapsed in the face of nuclear war and the relentless spread of disease. As the memories of her old life continue to surface, she’s forced to forge ahead in the snow-drifted Canadian Yukon, learning how to hunt and trap and slaughter. Forget the old days. Forget summer. Forget warmth. Forget anything that doesn’t help you survive in the endless white wilderness beyond the edges of a fallen world. Shadows of the world before have found her tiny community --- most prominently in the enigmatic figure of Jax, who brings with him dark secrets of the past and sets in motion a chain of events that will call Lynn to a role she never imagined.