Adult

Lizzy "Overachiever" Chung, Esq. has her life mapped out neatly: Become a lawyer. Check. Join a prestigious law firm. Check. Make partner. In progress. If all goes according to plan, she will check off that last box in a couple of years. What was not in her plans was passing out from a panic attack during a pivotal moment in her career. Lizzy is now in Weldon for three weeks to shed the burnout and figure out what went wrong. And what better place to recharge than the small California town where she spent her childhood summers with her best friend, Jack Park. Jack didn't expect to see Lizzy back in Weldon, but now he has three weeks to spend with the girl of his dreams. Except she doesn't know of his decades-long crush on her --- and he intends to keep it that way.

Three years ago, passionate surfer Kenna Ward lost her two great loves. After her boyfriend drowned, she hung up her surfboard and swore off the water for good. But she is drawn back to the beach when her best friend, Mikki, announces her sudden engagement to a man Kenna has never met --- a member of a tight-knit group of surfers. Kenna travels to a remote Australian beach, entering a dangerous world far from civilization. She is tempted back into the surf, and drawn into the dazzling group and the beach they call their own. But this coastal paradise has a dark side, and members of the group begin to go missing. Kenna realizes that in order to protect Mikki and learn more about the surfers, she must become one of them…without becoming one of their victims.

Isabel Dalhousie is invited to serve on the advisory committee of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. There she meets a woman named Laura, whose husband --- a prominent wine merchant from an illustrious family --- and son are at odds. Laura asks Isabel to arbitrate between them. Isabel is reluctant to intervene in a familial drama but feels obligated to help. Meanwhile, her husband Jamie is helping to select a new cellist for his ensemble but suspects that the conductor’s attention may be focused on something other than his favored candidate’s cello skills. Jamie feels it’s important that the most qualified applicant gets the job. But how to determine if the conductor has the right qualifications in mind?

It is supposed to be a quick visit to Boston for the Buchanan anniversary party, then on to Scotland to collect an inheritance. But after getting lost, Grace Isabel MacKenna ends up with a wounded man stumbling into her arms --- and his shooter coming after them both. When she fires back in self-defense, she doesn’t expect him to drop dead. After Isabel endures an interrogation by police, she is free to go, thanks to the Buchanans dispatching former Navy SEAL and now lawyer Michael Buchanan to assist her. Isabel has harbored an extreme dislike for Michael for years, so gratitude is difficult to muster. Michael has appointed himself her de facto guardian, and she’s stuck with him despite their constant bickering and sizzling attraction.

NYPD master homicide investigator Michael Bennett and top FBI abduction specialist Emily Parker have a history. Working case after case, each can predict the other’s next move. So when she fails to show at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, Bennett risks venturing far outside his jurisdiction. The investigation he undertakes is the most brilliant detective work of his career…and the most intensely personal. A portrait begins to emerge of a woman as adept at keeping secrets as forging powerful connections. A woman whose enemies had both the means and the motives to silence the real Emily Parker --- and her protectors.

Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that is the key that unlocks every door. She begins dating women --- soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads, jobs go off the rails, and evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that her friend, Tig, begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.

Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home. When Yitian attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery. So he seeks out a childhood friend who may be in a position to help: Tian Hanwen. Reuniting for the first time as adults, Yitian and Hanwen embark on the search for Yitian’s father, all the while grappling with the past --- who Yitian’s father really was, and what might have been.

When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back --- until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.

One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’ skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Reports of similar events soon begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends and family will greet them. Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’ father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading.

After returning home from a treacherous adventure, Stone Barrington is all too happy to settle back down in his New York City abode. But when he's introduced to a glamorous socialite with a staggering inheritance, Stone realizes his days are about to be anything but quiet. As it turns out, his intriguing new companion has some surprisingly familiar ties and other far more sinister ones --- including a nefarious enemy who gets too close for comfort. When it becomes clear that this miscreant will stop at nothing to get what he wants and will endanger all whom Stone holds dear, Stone must step in to protect his friends and prevent a dangerous madman from wreaking havoc across the city.