Adult

After years apart from his criminal family, young Luke Crosswhite returns to their flock deep in the California desert. Luke’s father is serving time for a brutal murder that Luke himself witnessed. Now, his uncle vies for power and rival biker gangs encroach on the family’s various criminal enterprises. A sensitive boy grown hard man, Luke navigates the vicious pressures of “home,” and the loyalties to his cousin, Callie, who has hatched a scheme with her boyfriend, Pretty Baby, to escape the control of the gang, the Combine. Hanging over these desperate, lonesome parties is the gang’s motto, tattooed indelibly across the heart: Blood is Love.

After more than 70 years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir. As a dyslexic child who dreamed of becoming famous, Cher was raised in often-chaotic circumstances, surrounded by singers, actors and a mother who inspired her in spite of their difficult relationship. With her trademark honesty and humor, CHER traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century. It follows her extraordinary beginnings through childhood to meeting and marrying Sonny Bono --- and reveals the highly complicated relationship that made them world-famous but eventually drove them apart.

Gemma Guillory has lived in the Australian Outback enclave of Rainier her entire life. Her once charming town is now remembered for one reason and one reason only: three innocent people died there at the hands of a serial killer. The last stop on the Rainier Ripper’s trail of deaths 15 years ago was her picturesque little tea shop. She knows that the consequences of catching the Ripper still haunt her policeman husband and their marriage to this day, and some of her neighbors are desperate enough to welcome a dark tourism company keen to cash in on Rainier’s notoriety as the “Murder Town.” When the tour guide is killed by a Ripper copycat on Gemma’s doorstep, the unease that has lurked quietly in the original killer’s wake explodes into the light, and Gemma is drawn into the investigation.

Dragon fire no longer blisters the skies over Penterra, but inside the lavish palace, life is still perilous, especially for Tamsyn. Raised in the glittering court alongside the princesses, it's her duty to be punished for their misdeeds. Treated as part of the royal family but also as the lowliest servant, Tamsyn fits nowhere. Her only friend is Stig, Captain of the Guard, though sometimes she thinks he wants more than friendship. When Fell, the Beast of the Borderlands, descends on her home, Tamsyn’s world becomes even more dangerous. To save the pampered princesses from a fate worse than death, she is commanded to don a veil and marry the brutal warrior. She agrees to the deception even though it means leaving Stig, and the only life she’s ever known, behind. The wedding night begins with unexpected passion --- and ends in near violence when her trickery is exposed.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident. But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Drawing on her background --- her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women --- and her creative life as an author and teacher, Lidia Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul. By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, READING THE WAVES reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.

A couple for 30 years, Kim and Grant’s "separate but together" partnership is running up against the realities of late middle age: Grant’s mother has died, the college where he taught philosophy was shuttered, and their twin girls are grown and gone. Escaping the bitter cold of a Midwestern winter for the hot desert sun of Palm Springs seems as good a solution as any to the more intractable problems they face. When they arrive at Le Desert, a quirky condo community, Kim immediately embraces the opportunity to make new friends and explore a more adventurous side of her personality. Meanwhile, Grant struggles to find his footing in this unfamiliar landscape. When Grant goes missing on a hike in the Palm Springs mountains, Kim is forced to consider two terrifying outcomes: either Grant is truly lost, or this time, he has really left her.

Detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, are starting a family now that they’ve settled into their life at Haven’s Rock. As Casey nears the end of her pregnancy, she lets nothing stop her from investigating what happens in the forbidden forest outside the town of Haven’s Rock. When one of the town's residents is drugged and wanders too close to the edge of town, she’s dragged into the woods kicking and screaming. She’s saved in the nick of time, but the women of the town are alarmed. Casey and Eric investigate the assault just as a snowstorm hits Haven’s Rock, covering the forest. It’s there that they find a frozen body, naked in the snow. With mixed accounts of the woman's last movements, the two begin to question who they can trust --- and who they can't --- in their seemingly safe haven.

San Francisco, 1986. Martin Hench will invent the forensic accountant, but for now he's an MIT dropout odd-jobbing his way around a city still reeling from the invention of a revolutionary new technology that will change everything about crime forever. When Marty finds himself hired by Silicon Valley PC startup Fidelity Computing to investigate a group of disgruntled ex-employees who've founded a competitor startup, he quickly realizes he's on the wrong side. Marty ditches Fidelity Computing, utterly infatuated with the electric atmosphere of Computing Freedom. This group of brilliant young women found themselves exhausted by the predatory business practices of Fidelity Computing and set out to beat them at their own game. But this optimistic startup has no idea the depth of the evil they're seeking to unroot or the risks they run.

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall, and her love life is…complicated. So when Lila’s real dad --- a man she barely has seen since he ran off to Hollywood 35 years ago --- suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out that even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: about love, and what it actually means to be family.