Adult

When France fell to the Germans in June 1940, the legendary Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme --- an icon of Paris frequented by film stars and celebrity writers, American heiresses and risqué flappers, playboys and princes --- was the only luxury hotel of its kind allowed in the occupied city by order of Adolf Hitler. Tilar J. Mazzeo traces the history of this cultural landmark from its opening in Fin-de-Siècle Paris.

Most of the stories in David James Poissant’s debut collection are set in the American South, and all are melancholy tales of domestic discord and loss. A cook at a diner pitches his gay teenage son through a window. A couple’s baby dies from SIDS. A wife is killed in a car accident. A teenager loses a limb. This is grim subject matter, but Poissant’s work is distinguished by his compassion and his gift for the well-turned phrase.

Boyd Varty grew up on Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa. But it wasn’t just a sanctuary for animals; it was also a place for ravaged land to flourish again and for the human spirit to be restored. When Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years of imprisonment, he came to the reserve to recover. CATHEDRAL OF THE WILD is Varty’s memoir of his life in this exquisite and vast refuge.

BUSTED is the shocking true story of the biggest police corruption scandal in Philadelphia history --- a tale of drugs, power and abuse involving a rogue narcotics squad, a confidential informant, and two veteran journalists whose reporting drove a full-scale FBI probe, rocked the City of Brotherly Love, and earned a Pulitzer Prize.

A death row inmate finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him, weaving a fantastical story of the people he observes and the world he inhabits. Two outsiders venture to this ancient stone prison: a fallen priest and the Lady, an investigator who searches for buried information from prisoners’ pasts that can save those soon-to-be-executed. Digging into the background of a killer named York, she uncovers wrenching truths that challenge familiar notions of victim and criminal.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn set out to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a 15-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper and brutal murderer.

Literary agent Isabel Reed is turning the final pages of a mysterious, anonymous manuscript that contains explosive revelations about powerful people. Veteran CIA operative Hayden Gray, determined that this sweeping story be buried, is suddenly staring down the barrel of a gun. And the author himself is hiding in a shadowy expat life while always looking over his shoulder. Over the course of one long day, these lives collide as the book begins its dangerous march toward publication.

When Eileen Tumulty meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with in Woolside, Queens, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers that Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream. She encourages him to want more, but as years pass, it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift.

On her 19th birthday, Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn sets out on a perilous journey back to the castle of her birth to ascend her rightful throne. Around her neck hangs the Tearling sapphire, a jewel of immense magical power; and accompanying her is the Queen’s Guard, a cadre of brave knights led by the enigmatic and dedicated Lazarus. Kelsea will need them all to survive a cabal of enemies who will use every weapon to prevent her from wearing the crown.

In 1989, three teenage friends are among the residents of a Beijing quadrangle in which all the neighbors know one another. It’s four months after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Twenty-two-year-old Shaoai, one of the residents, was among the Tiananmen protesters. One day, the friends discover that someone has poisoned Shaoai. This mystery is the backdrop of a novel about jealousy and the ways in which the traumas of adolescence can devastate one’s adulthood.