Adult

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across. A young couple on the brink of marriage --- the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist --- find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel.

Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is investigating the death of a senior government prosecutor, David Minton, while Malcolm Fox is helping a surveillance team track a notorious Glasgow crime family. John Rebus gets a call from his old nemesis, "Big Ger" Cafferty; someone just fired a bullet through his front window, and the only man he trusts with his life is Rebus. As the cases collide, it's up to Clarke, Fox and Rebus to connect the dots and save their unlikely ally, whose past harbors a shocking secret that implicates Minton's friends in an unspeakable crime.

On a summer night in 2009, three lives intersected in one American neighborhood. Two people newly in love --- Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who spent many years trying to find themselves and eventually found each other --- and a young man on a dangerous psychological descent: Isaiah Kalebu, the son of a distant, authoritarian father and a mother with a family history of mental illness. All three paths forever altered by a violent crime, all three stories a wake-up call to the system that failed to see the signs.

In the summer of 1991, violence simmers in The Park, a Scarborough housing complex outside of Toronto where Michael and Francis, sons of Trinidadian immigrants, are learning to stomach the careless prejudices that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry. Francis, the older of the two brothers, has always been the leader. When their single mother works double to triple shifts, it Francis who helps the days pass, smuggling Michael into his older crew’s barbershop hangout. But Francis dreams of a future in music. Michael’s dreams, on the other hand, are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school. But the bright hopes of all three are violently thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow.

For 30 years, humanity struggled to cope with the brilliants, the one percent of people born with remarkable gifts. Now the White House is a smoking ruin. Madison Square Garden is an internment camp. In Wyoming, an armed militia of thousands marches toward a final, apocalyptic battle. Nick Cooper has spent his life fighting for his children and his country. Now, as the world staggers on the edge of ruin, he must risk everything he loves to face his oldest enemy --- a brilliant terrorist so driven by his ideals that he will sacrifice humanity’s future to achieve them.

ROSALIE LIGHTNING is Eisner-nominated cartoonist Tom Hart's beautiful and touching graphic memoir about the untimely death of his young daughter, Rosalie. His heartbreaking and emotional illustrations strike readers to the core, and take them along his family's journey through loss. Hart uses the graphic form to articulate his and his wife's ongoing search for meaning in the aftermath of Rosalie's death, exploring themes of grief, hopelessness, rebirth and eventually finding hope again.

Orchard Grove is a town like any other, with quiet neighborhoods and apple groves…though Ethan, the depressed screenplay writer, and his secretive wife, Susan, would tell you differently. So would the seductive serial killer living next door. The apple trees are fertilized with evil, and the backyard fences aren’t enough to stop the manipulative mind games and dangerous lies. The lines between good and evil are blurred, and then erased, as Ethan does what it takes to survive.

By the age of 17, Sam Lansky was an all-star student with Ivy League aspirations in his final year at an elite New York City prep school. But a nasty addiction to prescription pills spiraled rapidly out of control, compounded by a string of reckless affairs with older men, leaving his bright future in jeopardy. After a terrifying overdose, he tried to straighten out. Yet as he journeyed from the glittering streets of Manhattan, to a wilderness boot camp in Utah, to a psych ward in New Orleans, he only found more opportunities to create chaos --- until finally, he began to face himself.

Six-year-old Helen and Ellie are identical twins. But Helen is smarter, more popular and their mother's favorite, while Ellie requires special instruction at school, is friendless and is punished at every turn. Until they decide to swap places --- just for fun, and just for one day --- and Ellie refuses to switch back. The girl who used to be Helen loses her sense of self and withdraws into a spiral of behavioral problems, delinquency and mental illness. Twenty-five years later, she receives a call that threatens to pull her back into her sister's dangerous orbit. Will she take this chance to face her past?

A year ago, Danny Ryan lost his wife and son in a car accident. He's still reeling from the tragedy when Michael Cohen, his friend and fellow journalist, drives into the pond in front of his house with a bullet through his gut. With Michael's death ruled a murder, Danny must work to get his name crossed off the list of suspects, and that means digging into Michael's last article, an exposé of the twisted side of Philadelphia politics. But powerful people are ready to kill to protect what Michael was about to uncover. If Danny isn’t careful, he'll be next.