Adult

Liza Cole has one month to write the thriller that could land her back on the bestseller list, while her husband is distracted by the disappearance of his best friend, Nick. Liza’s latest heroine, Beth, suspects that her husband is cheating on her while she’s home caring for their newborn. Before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s tossing the body of her husband’s mistress into the East River. Then, the lines between Liza’s fiction and her reality eerily blur. Nick’s body is dragged from the East River, and Liza’s husband is arrested for his murder. Before her deadline is up, Liza will have to face up to the truths about the people around her, including her own. If she doesn’t, the end of her heroine’s story could be the end of her own.

In the first comprehensive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved.

Vivian is a cosmopolitan Taiwanese-American tourist who often escapes her busy life in London through adventure and travel. Johnny is a 15-year-old Irish teenager, living a neglected life on the margins of society. As Vivian looks to find her calling professionally, she delights in exploring foreign countries, rolling hillsides and new cultures. But all of that changes when Vivian's path collides with Johnny and culminates in a horrifying act of violence. In the aftermath of the incident, Vivian must struggle to recapture the woman she was and the woman she aspired to be. And when Johnny is finally brought to reckon for his crimes, Vivian learns that justice is not always as swift or as fair as she would hope.

THE COUNTESS OF PRAGUE is the exciting introduction to Beatrice von Falklenburg, known to her intimates as Trixie, who will lead us from Prague through Europe and occasionally beyond on a 10-book set of investigations that begins in 1904 and finishes in 1914. The assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo that summer effectively ended the Old Europe into which she was born to a noble Czech father and an English mother. Through the lens of Trixie, whose own journey from pampered aristocrat (albeit in a polite and impoverished marriage) to a degree of emancipation has an exciting yet humorous and sympathetic dynamic, we witness stirring events and societal shifts.

James Hicks has spent his entire life and career fighting on the front lines of terrorism for the clandestine intelligence organization known as The University. He has learned that enemies can appear and disappear in the blink of an eye, and allegiances shift like the wind. But now, Hicks has finally discovered his true enemy: the criminal organization known as The Vanguard. This shadowy group has operated as a deadly organization comprised of weapons dealers, drug runners and money launderers for decades, but has now decided to add regime change to their catastrophic agenda. But knowing the enemy is one thing; being able to defeat it is another matter entirely. When Hicks uncovers a solid lead on his new adversaries, his world explodes.

While investigating the hit-and-run death of a young boy, Seattle homicide detective Tracy Crosswhite makes a startling discovery: the suspect is an active-duty serviceman at a local naval base. After a key piece of case evidence goes missing, he is cleared of charges in a military court. But Tracy knows she can’t turn her back on this kind of injustice. When she uncovers the driver’s ties to a rash of recent heroin overdoses in the city, she realizes that this isn’t just a case of the military protecting its own. It runs much deeper than that, and the accused wasn’t acting alone. As Tracy moves closer to uncovering the truth behind this insidious conspiracy, she’s putting herself in harm’s way.

Max Maguire of the NYPD, daughter of a legendary NY cop and a French mother disowned by her aristocratic family when she married, met examining magistrate Olivier Chaumont over murder at the wedding of an old friend in the Champagne wine region. They remained on-again-off-again partners and lovers over more murder again, this time in Bordeaux. And now, six months later, Max is on her way to Burgundy where it’s time to give up her promising career and commit --- or split.

Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. After all, to observe was to be accepted, and to be accepted was to be loved. She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family. But over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age 40 she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence. Even though it would mean the loss of her friends, her community and possibly even her family, Tova decides to leave her marriage and her religious world and forge a new way of life. In order to do so, she must learn to silence her fears and the voices telling her who she is supposed to be.

Jovan and Suzana have fled war-torn Sarajevo. They have lost their children, their standing as public intellectuals, and their connection to each other. Now working as cleaners in a suburb of Melbourne, they struggle to rebuild their lives under the painful hardships of immigrant life. During a hot Melbourne summer Jovan's janitorial work at a hospital is disrupted by mysterious acts of vandalism. But as the attacks become more violent and racially charged, he feels increasingly targeted, and taunted to interpret their meaning. Under tremendous pressure the couple struggle to keep their marriage together, but fear that they may never find peace from the ravages of war…

May 1940 was a month like no other. The superior German war machine blazed into France, as the Maginot Line, supposedly "as firmly fixed in place as the Pyramids," crumbled in days. With the fall of Holland and Belgium, the imminent fall of Paris, the British Army stranded at Dunkirk, and Neville Chamberlain’s government in political freefall, Winston Churchill became prime minister on this historical nadir of May 10, 1941. Britain, diplomatically isolated, was suddenly the only nation with the courage and the resolve to defy Hitler. Against this vast historical canvas, Michael Korda relates what happened and why.