Adult

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.

Magic is seeping out of the world, leaving the witches who have relied on it for countless centuries increasingly hopeless. Young Alice Marin is using magic’s waning days to delve into the mystery of numerous disappearances in the occult circles of New Orleans. Alice disappeared once, too --- caged in an asylum by blood relatives. Recently freed, she fears her family may be more involved with the growing crisis than she ever dared imagine. Yet the more she seeks the truth about her family’s troubled history, the more she realizes her already-fragile psyche may be at risk.

Agatha Christie burst onto the literary scene in 1920, with THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES; her last novel was published in 1976, a career longer than even Arthur Conan Doyle’s 40-year span. The truth is that it was due to the success of writers like Anna Katherine Green in America; L. T. Meade, C. L. Pirkis, the Baroness Orczy and Elizabeth Corbett in England; and Mary Fortune in Australia that the doors were finally opened for female crime writers. So, while Agatha Christie may still reign supreme, it is important to remember that she did not ascend that throne except on the shoulders of the women who came before her --- and inspired her --- and who are now removed from her shadow once and for all.

Officially, Thomas Laker is an employee of the NSA. His real employer, known as the Gray Outfit, is not listed --- anywhere. When a Washington, D.C., insider is killed in a bomb explosion, Laker teams up with cryptographer Ava North on a desperate search for clues. The only thing certain is that another act of terrorism is imminent. Delving into the dangerous past when America was drawn into global conflict, they discover one of history’s greatest --- and deadliest --- secrets. In the wrong hands it can unleash unimaginable destruction. Now, to keep his homeland from plunging into its darkest hour, Laker will have to defend everything he believes in.