Adult

In the lush world banking capital of Geneva, Switzerland, three young wealth managers (Catherine, Majid and Rafe) are handling investments for clients with dubious pedigrees. When problems with troubled investments are “fixed” by murders and bombs, they come to suspect that their clients are Mafiosi and terrorists. But by then they are accomplices, and under threat, and have no easy way to back out. Their efforts to save themselves --- and innocent lives --- are complicated by their being in a love triangle, by one of them secretly working with the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence to investigate the other two, and by the unexpected appearance of a detective from Nigeria who may or may not be in league with terrorists himself.

Little known in America but venerated as a martyr in Iran, Howard Baskerville was a 22-year-old Christian missionary from South Dakota who traveled to Persia (modern-day Iran) in 1907 for a two-year stint teaching English and preaching the gospel. He arrived in the midst of a democratic revolution led by a group of brilliant young firebrands committed to transforming their country into a fully self-determining, constitutional monarchy, one with free elections and an independent parliament. The Persian students Baskerville educated in English in turn educated him about their struggle for democracy, ultimately inspiring him to leave his teaching post and join them in their fight against a tyrannical shah and his British and Russian backers.

DINOSAURS is the story of a man named Gil who walks from New York to Arizona to recover from a failed love. After he arrives, new neighbors move into the glass-walled house next door, and his life begins to mesh with theirs. In this warmly textured, dryly funny and philosophical account of Gil’s unexpected devotion to the family, Lydia Millet explores the uncanny territory where the self ends and community begins --- what one person can do in a world beset by emergencies.

This anthology of exclusive new short stories offers tribute to the master of the pulp era --- Cornell Woolrich, who stands with Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and Dashiell Hammett as a legend in the genre. Enter a world of vengeful brides and black widows, where cold-blooded killers watch from every window and every sin shall be paid for, no matter how deep you bury them. See the chilling fate of a young woman, and the darkness in every family, in Joe R. Lansdale’s “Missing Sister”; the cold, calculating mind of an ambitious wife and her cheating husband in Samantha Lee Howe’s “Trophy Wife”; a reunion dinner ripped apart by conspiracies and violence in Susi Holliday’s “The Invitation”; and the tight-knit family of a New York dive bar explode into violence in William Boyle’s “New York Blues Redux.” 

In December 1960, Crystal Singer, her boyfriend Rick and three other MIT grad students take a cross-country road trip from Boston to Arizona to paint a message in the desert. Mars has been silent for 30 years, since the last time Earth solved one of the mathematical proofs the Martian civilization carved onto its surface. The latest proof, which seems to assert contradictory truths about distance, has resisted human understanding for decades. Crystal thinks she’s solved it, and Rick is intent on putting her answer to the test --- if he can keep her from cracking under the pressure on the way. But Crystal’s disappearance after the experiment will set him on a different path than he expected, forever changing the distance between them.

After immigrating from Jamaica to the United States, Prince Shakur’s family is rocked by the murder of Prince’s biological father in 1995. Behind the murder is a sordid family truth, scripted in the lines of a diary by an outlawed uncle hell-bent on avenging the murder of Prince’s father. As Shakur begins to unravel his family’s secrets, he must navigate the strenuous terrain of coming to terms with one’s inner self while confronting the steeped complexities of the Afro-diaspora. WHEN THEY TELL YOU TO BE GOOD charts Shakur’s political coming-of-age from closeted queer kid in a Jamaican family to radicalized adult traveler, writer and anarchist in Obama’s and Trump’s America.

The supernatural, the surreal and the all-too real. Such tales of the dark and the unknown have always fascinated us, and modern authors carry on the disquieting traditions of the past while inventing imaginative new ways to unsettle us. Chosen from a wide variety of venues, these stories are as eclectic and varied as shadows. The latest volume of The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror edited by fantasy aficionado Paula Guran offers more than 400 pages of tales from some of today’s finest writers of the fantastique, including Alix E. Harrow, Zen Cho and Elizabeth Hand. Indulge if you dare, because these 23 tales of terror are sure to delight as well as disturb!

After the trauma of his last case, and after three months spent recovering in Ireland, life is looking up for newly retired homicide detective Brian (Brick) Kavanagh. Back home in Washington, D.C., a new job shows promise when he’s asked to train criminology students in cold case techniques. Then he’s off to a whirlwind weekend in Chicago with Nora, an Aer Lingus flight attendant he’d met in Ireland. There he receives shocking news that his former partner’s wife and twin infants have been kidnapped. Brick rushes to D.C. to support Ron, the man who’s always had his back. But as days pass, Brick questions how well he really knows this man.

The world of Big Tech is full of eccentric characters, but shamanic billionaire Gerald Byrne may be the strangest of the bunch. The founder of Byrner, a global social media platform, Byrne is known for speaking with vague profundity and dabbling in esoteric spiritual practices. And every person who gets in the way of his good work seems to die. When a former student commits suicide, English professor and ex-spy Cameron Winter takes it upon himself to understand why. The young man was expelled from the university in an unfortunate episode that left Winter sympathetic to his plight. After a prolonged silence, he reached out to his teacher with two words just before taking the fatal plunge from the roof of his San Francisco apartment: “Help me.”

London, 1679. A year has passed since the sensational attempt to murder King Charles II, but London is still a viper’s nest of rumored Catholic conspiracies, and of plots against them in turn. When Harry Hunt --- estranged from his mentor, Robert Hooke --- is summoned to the remote and windswept marshes of Norfolk, he is at first relieved to get away from the place. But in Norfolk, he finds that some Royal workers shoring up a riverbank have made a grim discovery --- the skeleton of a dwarf. Harry is able to confirm that the skeleton is that of Captain Jeffrey Hudson, a prominent member of the court once famously given to the Queen in a pie. Except no one knew Hudson was dead, because another man had been impersonating him.