Adult

Clarissa Cartwright is about to take the stage wearing a fortune in jewels. In the wings, a motley crew of bumbling crooks is scheming to make off with the biggest heist of their careers: five and a half million dollars in precious stones. When the robbers find themselves pursued by both the intimidating ex-cop tasked with protecting the world’s most valuable piece of lingerie and Clarissa's insanely jealous and mobbed-up ex-boyfriend, things get ugly. Especially when Clarissa decides she's had quite enough of being an object and resolves to turn the tables on both the crooks and the fashion world.

When single mom and computer security specialist Kate Ford is suddenly and mysteriously put on administrative leave, she finds herself drawn into the drama of a lurid kidnapping case with ties to her company. Kate has enough on her plate dealing with a condition that leaves her extra-sensitive to stimuli, but the case is too juicy to leave untouched. But what begins as simple curiosity quickly leads her to the country’s darkest corners of power and leaves her and her family the target of a ruthless network of war profiteers, who will stop at nothing to protect their billion-dollar interests.

Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. While driving home exhausted, they are involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted road. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one goes through the windshield. The doctors declare him brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, but his heart is still beating. THE HEART takes place over the 24 hours surrounding the resulting heart transplant, as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death.

Between his own violent tendencies, the shadow cast by his father's death, and a self-destructive revenge quest, Ash McKenna made a mess of his life in NYC. He is now in Portland, where he has taken a job as a bouncer in a vegan strip club. When one of the club's dancers asks Ash for help finding her daughter, he declines. But soon he is held at gunpoint by a man in a chicken mask and told to keep away from the girls. As Ash navigates an unfamiliar city, he finds himself embroiled in a labyrinthine plot involving a ruthless drug cartel and a scandal that could reach one of the most powerful men in Portland.

Driven to spend days alone in the wilderness, Amy Raye Latour, mother of two, is compelled by the quiet and the rush of nature. But this time, her venture into a remote area leaves her on the verge of the precarious edge that she’s flirted with her entire life. When Amy Raye doesn’t return to camp, ranger Pru Hathaway and her dog respond to the missing person call. After an unexpected snowfall and few leads, the operation turns into a search and recovery. BREAKING WILD lays bare Amy Raye’s ultimate reckoning with the secrets of her life and Pru’s dogged pursuit of the woman who, against all odds, she believes she can find.

In a fit of idealism, Ed Boland left a 20-year career as a non-profit executive to teach in a tough New York City public high school. But his hopes quickly collided headlong with the appalling reality of his students' lives and a hobbled education system unable to help them. In the end, Boland isn't hoisted on his students' shoulders and no one passes AP anything. This is no urban fairy tale of at-risk kids saved by a Hollywood hero, but a searing indictment of schools that claim to be progressive but still fail their students.

At 27, Lucy knows everything about coffee, comic books and Gus (the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo), and she possesses a rare gift for drawing. But since she suffered a traumatic brain injury at the age of three, she has had trouble relating to most people. When unexpected circumstances force her out of the comfortable and protective Jewish home where she was raised and into a cramped studio apartment in New York City with her college-age younger brother, she must adapt to an entirely different life --- one with no safety net.

Young Nelly Dean has been Hindley’s closest companion for as long as she can remember, living freely at the great house, Wuthering Heights. But when the benevolence of the master brings a wild child into the house, Nelly learns she must give herself over completely to the demands of the Earnshaw family. As death, illness and passion sweep through the house, Nelly suffers heartache and betrayals at the hands of those she cherishes most, tempting her to leave it all behind. But when a new heir is born, a reign of violence begins that will test even Nelly’s formidable spirit as she finds out what it is to know true sacrifice.

Constance Fenimore Woolson, who contributed to Henry James’ conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the 19th century. Yet today the best-known (and most misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature. Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson’s dramatic life.