Adult

Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships --- his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife. Alexander attempts to deal with the unravelling of his marriage and the grief of his mother's recent passing while sharing the solace he found in learning how to perfect her famous fried chicken dish. With an open heart, Alexander weaves together memories of his past to try to understand his greatest love: his daughters.

One early morning on a Norfolk beach in Virginia, a dead body is discovered by a man taking his daily swim. After narrowly surviving an assassination attempt that killed his wife and child, Arman Bajalan has been given lonely sanctuary in the US. Convinced that the body is connected to his past, he knows he is still not safe. Seasoned detective Catherine Wheel and her newly minted partner have little to go on beyond a bus ticket in the dead man’s pocket. It leads them to Sally Ewell, a local journalist who is investigating a corporation on the cusp of landing a multi-billion-dollar government defense contract. As victims mount around Arman, they find themselves in a race, committed to unraveling the truth and keeping Arman alive --- even if it costs them absolutely everything.

Someone murdered Kate Stone’s father. Then they came for her. And now that Kate has left her job as an assistant district attorney, she’s finally free to hunt down the perpetrator. Kate suspects that Wall Street financier Ian Templeton is behind the vicious and violent attacks against her and the people she cares about. The D.A. warns Kate that Templeton is untouchable, but she remains convinced that the best way to bring him down is to expose his latest fraudulent scheme --- a new cryptocurrency scam. But while she is tracking Templeton, someone is also tracking her. Kate believes that her pursuers were hired by Templeton to stop her. However, they may be working for someone with a larger agenda instead.

In 1855, Britain and France are fighting to keep the Russians from snatching the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Florence Nightingale has made it her mission to improve the wretched conditions in the British military hospitals in Turkey. When young women start turning up dead, their mouths sewn shut with embroidered fabric roses, Inspector Charles Field is sent from England to find the killer among the doctors, military men, journalists and others swarming Turkey’s famous Barrack Hospital. When the prime suspect takes his own life, the case is closed. Or is it? Twelve years later, women again start turning up dead, their mouths covered by that telltale embroidered rose. Did Field suspect the wrong man before, or is he dealing with a deviant copycat?

Danger has always followed Isaiah Quintabe, a reality he’s keenly aware of as he’s laid up in a hospital bed, recovering from injuries sustained in his last case. So he’s unaware that Grace, the love of his life, has been abducted by his sworn enemy, the professional hitman Skip Hanson. Now, Isaiah and his sometimes partner, ex-hustler Juanell Dodson, must track scant clues through L.A.’s perilous landscape as Grace’s predicament grows more uncertain. A complication arises in the form of Winnie Hando, a homicide detective with something to prove. Stubborn and effective, Winnie sees his efforts as an obstruction to the investigation. As the desperate hunt winds on, Isaiah fears that even if he can bring Grace home alive, things between them will never be the same.

The visiting clubhouse in San Diego was soggy, sweaty and sticky after the 1998 Yankees swept the Padres in four games and celebrated winning their 24th World Series title. The players raised bottles of champagne, sprayed the bubbly on each other, and reveled in a baseball season that might have been more memorable than any in history. Jack Curry was part of that unforgettable scene as a reporter, navigating around the clubhouse to ask the same, pertinent question. After winning an unprecedented 125 games and pummeling teams along the way, were these Yankees the best team ever? Twenty five years later, Curry revisits that season to discuss how that team was built and why the Yankees were such a talented, refreshing and successful club.

In 1898, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor for the British on the East African Railway. Far from home, he commits a brutal act in the name of survival that will haunt him and his family for years to come. Pirbhai’s children are born in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule, and as the country moves toward independence, his granddaughters come of age in a divided nation. In 1972, the entire family is forced to flee under Idi Amin’s military dictatorship. Pirbhai’s grandchildren are now scattered across the world, struggling to find their way back to each other. One day a letter arrives with news that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure their own place in the world.

Detective Lindsay Boxer put serial killer Evan Burke in jail. Reporter Cindy Thomas wrote a book that put him on the bestseller list. An obsessed maniac has turned Burke’s true-crime story into a playbook. And he's embellishing it with gruesome touches all his own. Now Lindsay is tracking an elusive suspect, and the entire Murder Club is facing destruction.

Anna Horn is always looking over her shoulder. For the bullies who torment her, for the entitled visitors at the reservation’s casino…and for the nameless, disembodied entity that stalks her every step --- an ancient tribal myth come to life, one that’s intent on devouring her whole. With strange and sinister happenings occurring around the casino, Anna starts to suspect that not all the horrors on the reservation are old. As girls begin to go missing, Anna struggles with her place on the rez, desperately searching for the key she’s sure lies in the legends of her tribe’s past. When Anna’s own little sister also disappears, she’ll do anything to bring Grace home. But the demons plaguing the reservation are strong, and sometimes it’s the stories that never get told that are the most important.

As a columnist for the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri has watched in real time as those who didn’t learn from history have been forced to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. If we repeat history one more time, we’re going to fail! Maybe it’s time for a new textbook. ALEXANDRA PETRI’S US HISTORY contains a lost (invented!) history of America (a history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren G. Harding). Petri’s “historical fan fiction” draws on real events and completely absurd fabrications to create a laugh-out-loud, irreverent takedown of our nation’s complicated past.