Adult

WINDSWEPT is a beautifully written meditation on connecting with the outdoors through the simple act of walking. In captivating and elegant prose, Annabel Abbs-Streets follows in the footsteps of women who boldly reclaimed wild landscapes for themselves, including Georgia O’Keeffe in the empty plains of Texas and New Mexico, Nan Shepherd in the mountains of Scotland, Gwen John following the French River Garonne, Daphne du Maurier along the River Rhône, and Simone de Beauvoir --- who walked as much as 25 miles a day in a dress and espadrilles --- through the mountains and forests of France.

Every year, as the anniversary of 9/11 inches closer on the calendar, Kit Capriol scans the memorials published in the New York Times. It's a simple thing to look up a name and phone number, and reach out to surviving family members who might still be yearning for connection with their lost loved one. After her husband went down in the North Tower, Kit scraped by as an actress. But now her daughter Zoey is in the hospital, bills are due and the acting work has dried up. Becoming a medium is almost too easy for someone used to pretending for a living. Now, though, something has changed. The seances Kit holds in her apartment are starting to feel unsettlingly real, and the intriguing man she met at a local bar could be more complicated than he seems.

In a village of only 400 inhabitants, life could seem unremarkable. Yet in this remote town, a new road to the city has change on everyone’s minds. There is the beautiful, elusive Elisabet who cuts a surprisingly svelte path at The Knitting Company. Neighbors Kristin and Kjartan who seem…normal, but for their explosive passion that bewilders even themselves (and ignites the spectacular revenge of Kjartan’s wife). And then the most successful businessman in town decides to ditch his Range Rover and glamorous wife in exchange for Latin books and stargazing.

He was suspect number one --- the man who tried to kill Deputy Mattie Cobb and may have killed her father 30 years earlier. But when Mattie and cold case detective Jim Hauck reach the Colorado state prison where they will finally get to interview him, he's found dead in his cell. There's only one clue: a map leading to Timber Creek and rugged Redstone Ridge. Mattie and her K-9 partner, Robo, journey into the burned forest surrounding Redstone Ridge. But before they can finish their search, they're called to help investigate the death of a young woman found in a campground filled with elk hunters. Identification of the deceased points to her having recently given birth, but the infant is nowhere to be found.

On the evening of March 9, 1566, David Rizzio, the private secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered. Dragged from the chamber of the heavily pregnant Mary, Rizzio was stabbed 56 times by a party of assassins. This breathtakingly tense novella dramatizes the events that led up to that night, telling the infamous story as it has never been told before. A dark tale of sex, secrets and lies, RIZZIO looks at a shocking historical murder through a modern lens --- and explores the lengths to which men and women will go in their search for love and power.

One October morning, Laina gets the news that her brother was shot and killed by Boston cops. But what looks like a case of police brutality soon reveals something much stranger. Monsters are real. And they want everyone to know it. As creatures from myth and legend come out of the shadows, their emergence sets off a chain of seemingly unrelated events. Members of a local werewolf pack are threatened into silence. A professor follows a missing friend's trail of bread crumbs to a mysterious secret society. And a young boy with unique abilities seeks refuge in a pro-monster organization with secrets of its own. Meanwhile, more people start disappearing, suicides and hate crimes increase, and protests erupt globally, both for and against the monsters.

A mysterious electrical storm plunges Manhattan into darkness. As a strange, smothering fog rolls in, all communication crashes. In the blink of an eye, the island seems to vanish into a void. FBI Special Agent Jessica Blackwood and brilliant scientist Dr. Theo Cray know this isn’t a freak accident. It’s a sinister sleight of hand. Their greatest adversary, a serial killer and cultist known as the Warlock, has escaped during a prison transfer in New York. A depraved master of manipulation, he promised the end of days. He’s making good on it. One by one, cities across the globe are erupting in chaos as they disappear into the same black holes. But the voids are just a warm-up for something bigger.

When conflict photographer Jackson Swann dies, he leaves behind a conflict of his own making when his three daughters, each born to a different mother, discover that they’re now responsible for the family’s Oregon vineyard --- and for a family they didn’t ask for. As the sisters reluctantly gather at the vineyard, they’re soon enchanted by the Swann family matriarch and namesake of Maison de Madeleine wines, whose stories of bravery in WWII France and love for a wounded American soldier will reveal the family legacy they've each inherited and change the course of all their lives.

By turns reflective and visceral, the stories in HAO examine the ways in which women can be silenced as they grapple with sexism and racism, and how they find their own language to define their experience. In “Gold Mountain,” a young mother hides above a ransacked store during the San Francisco anti-Chinese riot of 1877. In “A Drawer,” an illiterate mother invents a language through drawing. And in “Stars,” a graduate student loses her ability to speak after a stroke.

Nick Anthony has retreated to the North Carolina mountains to mourn the untimely death of his wife. But when his estranged brother and sister-in-law die in a house fire, a stunned Nick learns he has a niece, Annalise, who is missing. At the scene of the crime, the men who set the fire have realized that Annalise, and the information they are looking for, got away. Feverish and exhausted, she stumbles onto her uncle's porch, throwing Nick into the middle of the mystery of her parents’ death and the dangerous criminals hunting her down. Hired to retrieve the stolen information at any price, private military contractor Cole and his team track Annalise to Nick’s cabin. But Nick has a hidden past of his own --- and more than a few deadly tricks up his sleeve.