Adult

Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. INSURRECTO contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator --- one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher.

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender and his girlfriend, Ronnie, are in desperate need of cash to hire a kidnapper to snatch Ronnie’s two-year-old son back from her ex. A nameless woman in an orange wig has offered Junior 50 grand to break into the abandoned house of a recently deceased 97-year-old recluse, Daisy Horton, and steal a doll from her collection. Junior figures there must be something hidden inside the doll that can get him in a heap of trouble. It doesn’t take long for him to realize that he’s not the only one looking for the doll. When an old friend ends up murdered, Junior decides he will stop at nothing to figure out who the woman in the orange wig is, and why she wants the doll badly enough to leave a trail of bodies in her wake.

Ever since her father's untimely death, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in downtown Gothenburg rent-free, thanks to a minor clause in a hastily negotiated contract. That was how Maud learned that good things can come from tragedy. Now in her late 80s, Maud contents herself with traveling the world and surfing the net from the comfort of her father's ancient armchair. Over the course of her adventures --- or misadventures --- she will handle a crisis with a local celebrity who has her eyes on Maud's apartment, foil the engagement of her long-ago lover, and dispose of some pesky neighbors. But when the local authorities are called to investigate a dead body found in Maud's apartment, will Maud finally become a suspect?

One blizzardy New Mexico night, Posadas County Deputy Pasquale picks up a toddler scooting his Scamper along the shoulder of State 56. Yes, it's horrifying --- a child apparently dumped out of a truck by his father. Nearly as horrifying is what unrolls while Christmas approaches after dad Darrell Fisher's arrest: a request arrives from the US Forest Service to locate a missing range tech and his unit last reported headed for nearby Stinkin' Springs, and the brutal murder of Constance Suarez in the border town of Regál, population 37. The Sheriff's Department is stretched to its limits as its dedicated personnel juggle working cases and caring for citizens with their own relationships and family celebrations.

Lady Adelaide Compton has recently (and satisfactorily) interred her husband, Major Rupert Charles Cressleigh Compton, hero of the Somme, in the family vault in the village churchyard. Rupert died by smashing his Hispano-Suiza on a Cotswold country road while carrying a French mademoiselle in the passenger seat. With the house now Addie's, needed improvements in hand, and a weekend house party underway, how inconvenient of Rupert to turn up! Not in the flesh, but in -- actually, as a --- spirit. Before Addie can convince herself she's not completely lost her mind, a murder disrupts her careful seating arrangement. Which of her 12 houseguests is a killer?

In the summer of 1968, the year of Prague Spring with a Cold War winter, Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike set out to hitchhike across Europe. Having reached southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world. Meanwhile, in the company of Czech student Lenka Konecková, Sam Wareham --- First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague --- finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth; now, nothing seems off-limits behind the Iron Curtain. But the great wheels of politics are grinding in the background. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek, and the Red Army is massing on the borders.

After surviving a life-altering accident at 22, Kathleen recuperates by retreating to a remote campground lodge in a state park, where she works flipping burgers for deer hunters and hikers --- happy, she insists, to be left alone. But when a hesitant, heavily accented stranger appears in the dead of winter --- seemingly out of nowhere, kicking snow from his flimsy dress shoes --- the wary Kathleen is intrigued, despite herself. He says he’s a student from Uzbekistan. To her he seems shell-shocked, clearly hiding from something that terrifies him. And as she becomes absorbed in his secrets, she’s forced to confront her own --- even as her awareness of being in danger grows.

One hundred years later, a team of scientists gather at an underground facility in New Mexico to determine what this being is --- the most amazing discovery in the history of mankind --- and how it has managed to survive. A biologist will analyze its structure. A veterinarian will study its behavior. A linguist will translate its language. But even the greatest minds in the world cannot answer one inescapable question: Could this ancient creature, this mockery of God and nature, actually be the ancient demon known as…the Beast?

In 1948, Najin and Calvin Cho, with their young daughter Miran, travel from South Korea to the United States in search of new opportunities. Wary of the challenges they know will face them, Najin and Calvin make the difficult decision to leave their infant daughter, Inja, behind with their extended family; soon, they hope, they will return to her. But then war breaks out in Korea, and there is no end in sight to the separation. Miran grows up in prosperous American suburbia, under the shadow of the daughter left behind, as Inja grapples in her war-torn land with ties to a family she doesn’t remember. Najin and Calvin desperately seek a reunion with Inja, but are the bonds of love strong enough to reconnect their family over distance, time and war?

It begins on Death Row, with a condemned man refusing the services of the lawyer assigned to defend him. It begins with a beautiful woman dead, murdered --- Vassilia Caroline Baird, known to all simply as V. But the story this novel tells begins years earlier, on a struggling farm in the shadow of the Great Depression and among the brawling "cat skinners" of Southern California, driving graders and bulldozers to tame the American West. And the story that unfolds is a lyrical outpouring of hunger and grief, of jealousy and corruption, of raw sexual yearning and the tragedy of the destroyed lives it leaves in its wake.