Adult

On August 27, 2010, three CIA officers ask for a private meeting with CIA Director Leon Panetta. During that secret session, they tell Panetta that agents have tracked a courier with deep Al Qaeda ties to a three-story house at the end of a dead-end street in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But they say it’s more than a house --- it’s a heavily protected fortress. Everyone understands that finally, after nearly a decade, maybe, just maybe, they’ve found the world’s most wanted man. In COUNTDOWN BIN LADEN, Chris Wallace delivers a thrilling new account of the final eight months of intelligence gathering, national security strategizing and meticulous military planning that leads to the climactic mission when SEAL Team Six closes in on its target.

Siblings Dawn and Kim, and their best friend Debra, were three Black girls who bonded as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, and for a brief, wondrous moment, they are all giggles and dreams and promises of “friends forever.” But then fate intervenes, sending them careening in wildly different directions. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why?

Alexander Woodroe has it all, including a starring role as Cupid on TV’s biggest show, “Gods of the Gates.” But the showrunners have wrecked his character, he's dogged by old demons, and his post-show future remains uncertain. When all that reckless emotion explodes into a bar fight, former ER therapist Lauren Clegg is hired to keep him in line. However, the more time they spend together, the harder it gets to keep her professional remove and her heart intact, especially when she discovers the reasons behind his recklessness. When another scandal lands Alex in major hot water and costs Lauren her job, she’ll have to choose between protecting him and offering him what he really wants --- her.

When Sonny Dunes, a SoCal meteorologist, is replaced by a virtual meteorologist that will never age, gain weight or renegotiate its contract, the only station willing to give the 50-year-old another shot is the very place she has been avoiding since the day she left for college --- her northern Michigan hometown. Sonny grudgingly returns and finds her past blindsiding her everywhere. She throws herself headfirst into covering every small-town winter event to woo a new audience, made more bearable by a handsome widower with optimism to spare. But with someone trying to undermine her efforts to rebuild her career, Sonny must make peace with who she used to be and allow her heart to thaw if she’s ever going to find a place she can truly call home.

June 1925: Audacious Appalachian flapper Geneva “Gin” Kelly prepares to trade her high-flying ways for respectable marriage to Oliver Anson Marshall. But just as wedding bells chime, the head of the notorious East Coast rum-running racket turns up murdered at a society funeral, and their short-lived honeymoon bliss goes up in a spectacular blaze. June 1998: When Ella Dommerich’s ninetysomething society queen aunt Julie ropes her into digging up dirt on Senator (and Presidential candidate) Franklin Hardcastle, she couldn’t be less enthusiastic. But then the Hardcastle secrets lead to a web of shady dealings Ella has uncovered in her job as a financial analyst, and the bodies start to tumble out of the venerable woodwork. 

Maybe Tess is overprotective, but passing her daughter off to her ex and his new young wife fills her with a sense of dread. It hurts to see him enjoying married life with someone else. Still, she owes it to her daughter Poppy to make this arrangement work. But Poppy returns from the weekend tired and withdrawn. And when she shows Tess a crayon drawing --- an image so simple and violent that Tess can hardly make sense of it --- Poppy can only explain with the words, “He did kill her.” Jason insists the weekend went off without a hitch. Doctors advise that Poppy may be reacting to her parents’ separation. And as the days go on, even Poppy’s disturbing memory seems to fade. But a mother knows her daughter, and Tess is determined to discover the truth.

Laid off from her department store job, Carmen has perilously little cash and few options. The prospect of spending Christmas with her perfect sister Sofia does not appeal. Frankly, Sofia doesn’t exactly want her prickly sister Carmen there either. But Sofia has yet another baby on the way, a mother desperate to see her daughters get along, and a client who needs help revitalizing his shabby old bookshop. So Carmen moves in and takes the job. Thrown rather suddenly into the inner workings of Mr. McCredie’s ancient bookshop on the picturesque streets of historic Edinburgh, Carmen is intrigued despite herself. The store is dusty and disorganized but undeniably charming. Can she breathe some new life into it in time for Christmas shopping?

When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network. She is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star-power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of Black women --- many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized and all of them quickly forgotten. All until Masey James, a 15-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot. Putting the rest of her work and her (fraying) personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that Black children rarely receive.

Since she adopted him as a puppy 15 years earlier, Jenna Blum and Woodrow have been inseparable. Known to many as “the George Clooney of dogs” for his good looks and charm, Woodrow and his “Mommoo” are fixtures in their Boston neighborhood. But Woodrow is aging. As he begins to fail, the true nature of his extraordinary relationship with Jenna is revealed. Jenna may be the dog parent, but it is Woodrow, with his amazing personality and trusting nature, who has much to teach her. A divorcée who has experienced her share of sadness and loss, Jenna discovers, over the months she spends caring for her ailing dog, what it is to be present in the moment, and what it truly means to love.

Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England. Upon arrival, they meet the festival’s other guests --- an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children’s author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic and a war historian --- along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line. When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?