Adult

One summer in the ’60s, 19-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he is partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who is married with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers. Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory --- and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another.

When a stolen car is recovered on the Gulf Coast of Florida, it sets off a search for a missing woman, local motel owner Sabine Musil-Buehler. Three men are named persons of interest --- her husband, her boyfriend, and the man who stole the car. Then the motel is set on fire; her boyfriend flees the county; and detectives begin digging on the beach of Anna Maria Island. Author Cutter Wood was a guest at Musil-Buehler’s motel as the search for her gained momentum, and he was drawn steadily deeper into the case. Driven by his own need to understand how a relationship could spin to pieces in such a fatal fashion, he began to talk with many of the people living on Anna Maria, and then with the detectives, and finally with the man presumed to be the murderer.

Adrian Mandrick seems to have his life in perfect order with an excellent job in a Colorado hospital, a wife and two young children he loves deeply, and a serious passion for birding. His life list comprises 863 species correctly identified and cataloged. But Adrian holds dark secrets about his childhood --- secrets that threaten to consume him after he’s contacted by his estranged mother, and subsequently relapses into an addiction to painkillers. In the midst of his downward spiral, the legendary birder with the region’s second-longest life list dies suddenly, and Adrian receives an anonymous tip that could propel him to the very top.

Penny Kessler, an intern at the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, wakes up in a hospital on the morning of July 5th to find herself at the center of an international crisis. The day before, the Embassy was the target of a devastating terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Penny’s friends and colleagues. Not only has a photograph of Penny as she emerged from the rubble become the event’s defining image, but for reasons she doesn’t understand, her bosses believe she’s a crucial witness. Suddenly, everyone is intensely interested in what Penny knows. But what does she know? And whom can she trust?

One afternoon, as Maggie Daley prepares to send her only child off to college, their world is shattered by news of a mass shooting at the local mall in rural Maine. As reports and updates about the tragedy begin to roll in, Maggie, an English professor, is further stunned to learn that the gunman had been a student of hers. Nathan Dugan was an awkward, complicated young man whose quiet presence in her classroom had faded from her memory --- but not, it seems, the memories of his classmates. When a viral blog post hints at the existence of a dark, violence-tinged essay Nathan had written during Maggie’s freshman comp seminar, Maggie soon finds herself at the center of a heated national controversy.

Hilketa is a frenetic and violent pastime where players attack each other with swords and hammers. The main goal of the game: obtain your opponent’s head and carry it through the goalposts. With flesh-and-bone bodies, a sport like this would be impossible. But all the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people with Haden’s Syndrome, so anything goes. No one gets hurt, but the brutality is real and the crowds love it. Until a star athlete drops dead on the playing field. Is it an accident or murder? FBI agents and Haden-related crime investigators Chris Shane and Leslie Vann are called in to uncover the truth --- and in doing so travel to the darker side of the fast-growing sport of Hilketa.

Growing up in the White House was never supposed to be easy. So when 16-year-old Cam, also a champion chess player, experiences extreme moodiness and an uncharacteristic violent outburst, doctors are quick to dismiss his troubles as adolescent angst. Still, Secret Service agent Karen Ray is convinced that Cam’s condition is serious --- enough so that she summons her physician ex-husband for a second opinion. At first, the president’s team doesn’t want to listen to Dr. Lee Blackwood. But when Cam gets sicker, Lee must make a diagnosis from a puzzling array of symptoms. As Lee and Karen race for a cure to help Cam, they begin to uncover betrayals that breach the highest levels of national security. And until they can find the truth, no one is safe.

When Eliza Fontaine is rescued from the bottom of a hotel pool just a few weeks before her first novel is going to be published, her family assumes that it’s another failed suicide attempt. But Eliza swears she was pushed. The problem is she remembers little of that night, a result of the large quantity of alcohol she consumed and a worsening struggle with memory loss due to a brain tumor. As she searches for answers, something very peculiar begins to happen: The people closest to her start to confuse the events in her novel with those in her real life. The dividing line between fact and fiction seems to be dissolving, and even Eliza is becoming uncertain about where her protagonist’s story ends and hers begins.

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle. Its denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, but crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population. When a strange new visitor arrives --- a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side --- the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.

Chicago’s Mayor Michael Rodriguez starts a national campaign to ban handguns from America’s cities, towns and villages. In response, Otis Cogsworth, the wealthy chairman and CEO of Cogsworth International Arms, and lobbyist Sunny McCarthy convince an Arkansas congressman to introduce federal legislation mandating that every American must own a firearm. Events soon escalate. Asabogue’s Mayor Lois Leibowitz passes an ordinance to ban guns in the town --- right in Otis Cogsworth’s backyard. Otis retaliates by orchestrating a recall election against Lois, and Jack Steele, a rich town resident, runs against her. Even though the election is for the mayor of a village on Long Island, Steele brings in the big guns of American politics to defeat Lois.