Adult

From an author offering "some of the best writing I've seen from a younger Irish writer in a while" (Colum McCann) comes the tale of Enoch O'Reilly --- Elvis-impersonator, preacher -- a small Irish town, a river flood, and the mysterious drowning of nine citizens.

Set in rural Grace County, North Carolina, in a time of state-mandated sterilizations and racial tension, NECESSARY LIES tells the story of two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy. A social worker and a 15-year-old are thrown together and must ask themselves: how can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it’s wrong?

Elliot Rosenzweig, a respected civic leader and wealthy philanthropist, is accused of being a former Nazi SS officer named Otto Piatek, the Butcher of Zamosc. Although the charges are denounced as preposterous, his accuser, Solomon, encourages attorney Catherine Lockhart to bring Rosenzweig to justice, revealing that the true Piatek was abandoned as a child and raised by Solomon's own family, only to betray them during the Nazi occupation. But has Solomon accused the right man?

An encoded diary by one of Ludwig II’s confidants falls into the hands of modern-day rare book dealer Steven Lukas, who soon realizes that the diary may bring him more misery than money. Others want the diary as well --- and they will kill to get it. Lukas teams up with a beautiful art detective to investigate each of Ludwig’s three famous castles for clues to crack the diary’s code as mysterious thugs and Ludwig’s fanatical followers chase them at every step. Just what in the diary could be so explosive?

In 1942 Paris, gifted architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him a great deal of money --- and maybe get him killed. All he has to do is design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined German officer won't find it. But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what's at stake.

A brilliant but careless professor, Steven Brookman has determined that for the sake of his marriage --- and his soul --- he must extract himself from his relationship with Maud Stack, his electrifying student, whose papers are always late and too long yet always incandescent. But Maud is a young woman whose passions are not easily contained or curtailed, and their union will quickly yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.

How many ways can two people wound each other? In James Whitfield Thomson's debut novel, LIES YOU WANTED TO HEAR, Lucy's husband, Matt, has taken their children and fled. This seems 100% unforgivable, until we read the backstory of terrible wrongs committed by wife against husband, and mother against child. Then we're left wondering.

As the novel opens on Thanksgiving Day, readers are telescoped into three different worlds in various states of disrepair --- a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marriage and his father’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s; and a self-made debt-collecting magnate, whose brute talent for squeezing money out of unlikely places has yielded him a royal existence, trophy wife included.

In the tradition of the great immigrant sagas, THE LION SEEKER brings us Isaac Helger, son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, surviving the streets of Johannesburg in the shadow of World War II.

Danish Red Cross nurse Nina Borg has been following Natasha Doroshenko's case for years now. Nina, who had tried to help Natasha leave her abusive Danish fiancé more than once, can't see the young Ukrainian mother as a vicious killer. But in her effort to protect Natasha's daughter and discover the truth, Nina realizes there is much she didn't know about this woman and her past.