Adult

Two years out of college, Ellie Adler has a job in journalism, an older lover and a circle of smart friends. Her beloved father, James, who has children from three marriages, unites the family with his gentle humor and charisma, but Ellie has always believed she is her father's favorite. When he suddenly dies, she finds herself devastated by the unexpected loss. Then, at the reading of his will, she learns that instead of leaving her his prized possession --- a baseball that holds emotional resonance for them both --- he has left her a seemingly ridiculous, even insulting gift. Worse, he’s given the baseball to someone no one in the family has ever heard of. Setting out to track this person down, Ellie learns startling information about who her father really was and who she herself is becoming.

Lorraine --- “Rainy” --- lives at the top of Tiger Mountain. Remote, moody, cloistered in pine trees and fog, it’s a sanctuary, a new life. She can hide from the disturbing past she wants to forget. If she’s allowed to. When Rainy reluctantly agrees to a girls’ weekend in Vegas, she’s prepared for an exhausting parade of shots and slot machines. But after a wild night, her friend Braithe doesn’t come back to the hotel room. And then Rainy gets the text message, sent from Braithe’s phone: someone has her. But Rainy is who they really want, and Rainy knows why. What follows is a twisted, shocking journey on the knife-edge of life and death. If she wants to save Braithe --- and herself --- the only way is to step back into the past.

Frankie Barrera has always been fiercely protective of her younger sister, Izzy. But over the years, Izzy’s risky choices have tested Frankie’s loyalty. Never so much as on a night five years ago, when a frantic phone call led Frankie to the scene of a car accident --- and a drunk and disoriented Izzy who couldn’t remember a thing. Though six friends partied on the outskirts of town that night, one girl was never seen again. Now, an AMBER alert puts Frankie in the sights of the local police. Her truck has been described as the one used in the abduction of a girl from a neighboring town. And the only other person with access to Frankie’s truck is Izzy. This time around, Frankie will have to decide to what lengths she’s willing to go in order to protect Izzy.

A bomb explodes on a sunset charter cruise out of Friday Harbor at the height of tourist season and kills everyone on board. Now this fishing and boating community is in shock and asking who would commit such a heinous crime. Was the explosion an act of domestic terrorism, or was one of the dead the primary target? That is the first question Special Agent Matt Costa, Detective Kara Quinn and the rest of the FBI team need to answer, but they have few clues and no witnesses. Accused of putting profits before people after leaking fuel endangered an environmentally sensitive preserve, the West End Charter company may itself have been the target. As Matt and his team get closer to answers, they find one of their own caught in the crosshairs of a determined killer.

“In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola, who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever. This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn’t always see me. As I wrote FINDING ME, my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. We are forced to reinvent them to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get to some form of self-love.”

A United Nations relief team in a small village in the Congo makes an alarming discovery. An unknown force is leveling the evolutionary playing field. Men, women and children have been reduced to a dull, catatonic state. The environment surrounding them has grown more cunning and predatory, evolving at an exponential pace. The insidious phenomenon is spreading from a cursed site in the jungle --- known to locals as the Kingdom of Bones --- and sweeping across Africa, threatening the rest of the world. What has made the biosphere run amok? Is it a natural event? Or, more terrifyingly, did someone engineer it? As Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force race to find answers, they quickly realize that they have become the prey.

Meredith May had a difficult childhood, with a mother who was physically present but emotionally absent. She learned early on to fend for herself and never had to care for anyone else. When she and her wife, Jenn, adopt Edie, a sweet golden retriever puppy, Edie wins their hearts immediately. But it isn’t long after Edie joins the family that the problems begin. Edie is an unusually anxious dog whose fears become so intense that Meredith and Jenn can’t leave the house. Meredith grows determined to fix Edie, but what will she do if Edie can’t be fixed? In LOVING EDIE, Meredith shares her unforgettable journey with Edie, and the lessons about selflessness and unconditional love that she learns along the way.

Emma Averell loves her life, but it wasn’t always so perfect. When she was just five years old, Emma and her older sister went into foster care because of a deeply disturbing incident with their mother. Her sister can remember a time when their mother was loving and “normal,” but Emma can only remember her as one thing --- a monster. And that monster emerged right around their mother’s 40th birthday, the same milestone Emma is approaching now. Emma desperately wants to keep her childhood trauma in the past, but as she stops being able to sleep, she also can’t stop thinking about what happened all those years ago. Is the madness in her blood? Could she end up hurting her family just like her mother? Or is there another explanation for the strange things that keep happening around her?

What makes puzzles --- jigsaws, mazes, riddles, sudokus --- so satisfying? A.J. Jacobs --- New York Times bestselling author, master of immersion journalism and nightly crossworder ---- set out to determine their myriad benefits. And maybe, in the process, solve the puzzle of our very existence. Well, almost. In THE PUZZLER, Jacobs meets the most zealous devotees, enters (sometimes with his family in tow) any puzzle competition that will have him, unpacks the history of the most popular puzzles, and aims to solve the most impossible head-scratchers, from a mutant Rubik’s Cube, to the hardest corn maze in America, to the most sadistic jigsaw.

As the older sibling to identical twins Violet and Lily, Cami Porter was always the odd sister out. The divide grew even wider when their parents split up. While the twins stayed in Cape Sanctuary with their free-spirited mother, 14-year-old Cami moved to LA with her attorney father. Nearly 20 years later, when Cami gets the terrible news that Lily has drowned saving a child’s life, her mother begs her to return home to help untangle the complicated estate issues her sister left behind. Cami readjusts to the family and community she hasn’t known for decades, including the neighbor who stands in the way of her late sister’s dream. Violet grieves the loss of her twin and struggles to figure out who she is now, without her other half, as the little girl Lily saved pulls her back into the orbit of the man she once loved.