Adult

Rosa Ostreech, a pseudonym for the novel’s beautiful but self-conscious narrator, carries around a trilingual edition of Aristotle’s METAPHYSICS, struggles with her thesis on violence and culture, sleeps with a bourgeois former guerrilla, and pursues her elderly professor. Elsewhere on campus, Pabst and Kamtchowsky tour the underground scene of Buenos Aires, dabbling in ketamine, group sex, video games and hacking. And in Africa in 1917, a Dutch anthropologist named Johan van Vliet begins work on a theory that explains human consciousness and civilization by reference to our early primate ancestors --- animals, who, in the process of becoming human, spent thousands of years as prey.

Mormon bishop’s wife Linda Wallheim couldn’t be more surprised to learn that her son, Kenneth, is engaged. Kenneth has left the Mormon church and met his fiancée, med student Naomi Carter, at a “Mormons Anonymous” meeting. Naomi was also raised Mormon, but her family belongs to a group that practices polygamy. Naomi’s father, Stephen, invites the Wallheims to visit the family compound. Though Stephen and his five wives seem to live normal, modern lives, Linda can’t shake the feeling that the family dynamics are off. When tensions on the compound escalate to murder, Linda delves into the many Carter family secrets to find the killer.

The body of a Vestal Virgin is found in the Tiber River, and then a senator is found having bled to death in his bath. As Roman authorities turn a strangely blind eye, Hortensia, the daughter of the capital’s most celebrated orator, begins investigating this trail of murders that leads straight into the dark heart of Rome. Despite her husband’s and father’s attempts to protect her, rebelling against the societal constraints to her sex, Hortensia plunges deeper into the corrupt underworld of the city. And only one man can save her from becoming the next victim: Lucrio, the ex-gladiator to whom she already owes her life. But Lucrio has secrets as well, and his past threatens to subsume both him and Hortensia.

THE RAIN IN PORTUGAL --- a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer --- sheds Billy Collins’ ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical --- “the dogs of Minneapolis… / have no idea they’re in Minneapolis” --- to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, here Collins contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head.

George Washington’s Farewell Address was a prophetic letter from a “parting friend” to his fellow citizens about the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt and foreign wars. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. However, its message remains starkly relevant. In WASHINGTON’S FAREWELL, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction.

Stifled by a soul-crushing job, devastated by the death of her beloved brother, and lonely after the end of a 15-year marriage, Winifred Allen reluctantly agrees to join her three best friends on a high-octane getaway for their annual girls’ trip. What starts out as an invigorating hiking and rafting excursion soon becomes an all-too-real nightmare. A freak accident leaves the women stranded, separating them from their raft and everything they need to survive. A fire on the mountainside lures them to a ramshackle camp that appears to be their lifeline. But as Wini and her friends grasp the true intent of their supposed saviors, long-buried secrets emerge and lifelong allegiances are put to the test.

A trio of mismatched mercenaries is hired by a young woman for a deceptively simple task: check in on her nephew, who may have been taken against his will to a remote New Mexico backwoods settlement called Little Heaven. Shortly after they arrive, things begin to turn ominous. Stirrings in the woods and over the treetops --- the brooding shape of a monolith known as the Black Rock casts its terrible pall. Paranoia and distrust grip the settlement. The escape routes are gradually cut off as events spiral towards madness. The remaining occupants are forced to take a stand and fight back, but whatever has cast its dark eye on Little Heaven is now marshaling its powers...and it wants them all.

Sitting in a jail cell on the eve of his hanging, freedman Persimmon “Persy” Wilson wants nothing more than to leave some record of the truth --- his truth. He may be guilty, but not of what he stands accused: the kidnapping and rape of his former master’s wife. Fifteen years earlier, Persy had been sold to a sugar plantation; his deep and instant connection with a house slave named Chloe fueled a love affair and inspired plans to escape their owner, Master Wilson. But on the eve of the Union Army’s attack on New Orleans, Wilson shot Persy, leaving him for dead, and fled with Chloe and his other slaves to Texas. So began Persy’s journey across the frontier, determined to reunite with his lost love.

A woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome, and her six-year-old son goes missing. The chief of Rome’s major crimes unit secretly lures to the case two of Italy’s top analytical minds: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from having survived a bloody catastrophe, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo while being fed by the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself “the Father.” All evidence suggests that the Father is back and active after being dormant for decades. But when Colomba and Dante begin following the ever-more-bizarre trail of clues, they grasp that what’s really going on is darker than they ever imagined.

Kate and her husband, Ron, attend a dinner party where they meet another couple, Peter and Jill. Kate and Peter only exchange a few pleasant words, but Kate is suddenly overcome with a burning desire for Peter. Her fixation on him results in an intense, passionate encounter between the two. Confident that her life can now go back to normal, Kate never considers that Peter may not be so willing to move on. Not long after their affair, a masked man barges into the café Kate is sitting in with her best friend, firing an assault weapon indiscriminately into the crowd. This tragedy is the first in a series of horrifying events that will show Kate just how grave the consequences of one mistake can be.