Adult

When Hap and Leonard witness a man abusing his dog, Leonard takes matters into his own fists --- and now the bruised dog abuser wants to press charges. One week later, a woman drops by their new PI office with a proposition: find her missing granddaughter, or she'll turn in a video of Leonard beating the dog abuser. The two agree to take on the cold case and soon discover that the used car dealership where her granddaughter worked is actually a front for a prostitution ring. What began as a missing-person case becomes one of blackmail and murder.

When an explosion in London kills two policemen and seriously injures three more, many believe that anarchists are the culprits. But Thomas Pitt knows the city’s radical groups well enough to suspect that someone with decidedly more personal motives lit the deadly fuse. As he investigates the source of the fatal blast, Pitt is stunned to discover that the bombing was a calculated strike against the ranks of law enforcement. But still more shocking revelations await. As he pursues each increasingly threatening lead, Pitt finds himself impeded at every turn by the barriers put in place to protect the rich and powerful.

Two people, drawn together by chance, begin to unravel the mystery of the contents of a safe-deposit box long abandoned in a New York City bank. Jane Willoughby is a law clerk at the surrogate’s court and Phillip Lawton a fine arts expert for Christie’s auction house. They are simply doing their jobs when they come to the bank to inspect the contents of the box. But for both Jane and Phillip, the search turns personal --- and their efforts to reconstruct an enigmatic life will lead from New York to London and Paris, to Rome and Naples, and a series of stunning revelations.

The emergence of paper in the imperial court of Han China brought about a revolution in the transmission of knowledge and ideas. The first writing surface sufficiently cheap, portable and printable for books, pamphlets and journals to be mass-produced and distributed widely, paper opened the way for an unprecedented, ongoing dialogue between individuals and between communities across continents, oceans and time. THE PAPER TRAIL explores how the new substance was used to solidify social and political systems that influenced China even into our own time.

A sweeping and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, THE BRAZEN AGE opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity, a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the 20th century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation and burgeoning bohemia.

It begins with two girls: Neva, from the Caucasus, sold into the sex trade; and Poppy, the adopted daughter of a wealthy New York real estate family, the Zanes. As their paths cross and their fates intertwine in an exquisite high drama that blurs the lines between realism and myth, we travel with them from lavish weddings to the transglobal underworld; from London and New York to Laos and Istanbul; and we watch as the mighty Zane dynasty slips from greatness. Jane Mendelsohn captures the emotional worlds of these characters with visceral immediacy, and transforms their private narratives into a larger story about the forces of globalization, human trafficking and sexual violence.

In the fall of 1984, the Grand Hotel in the seaside town of Brighton, England, became ground zero for the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Nimbly weaving together fact and fiction, comedy and tragedy, Jonathan Lee vividly reimagines those fateful days from the perspectives of three unforgettable characters --- a young IRA bomb maker, the deputy hotel manager, and his teenage daughter --- whose lives will be changed forever by the Prime Minister’s visit.

Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and with siblings whose astonishing creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing intensity. Brontë’s blazingly intelligent female characters brimming with hidden passions transformed English literature, even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed the author’s literary success.

A FEW OF THE GIRLS brings together, for the first time, 36 of Maeve Binchy’s very best stories --- some published in magazines, others written for friends as gifts, many for charity benefits, all of them filled with her trademark warmth, wisdom and humor. Written over a period of decades, these stories show that while times change, people often remain the same: they fall in love, sometimes unsuitably; they experience heartbreak, compassion and redemption; they hold to hopes and dreams; and they have friendships --- some that fall apart, and a few special ones that endure.

Relief pitcher/private investigator Johnny Adcock doesn't have an office; he has the bullpen. That's where he meets Tiff Tate, the femme-fatale stylist responsible for half the looks in Major League Baseball, from Brian Wilson's beard to Big Papi's gold ropes. Tiff has a problem. Her new client, the rookie phenom Yonel Ruiz, has been threatened by a cartel of smugglers. Adcock is her last best hope. As he embarks on this potentially deadly mission, Adcock tangoes with a mysterious, sexy assassin known only as La Loba. And he still has the playoffs to worry about.