Adult

When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community. Disciplined harshly for her many infractions, Shawna was sexually abused by a predatory adult member of the community. Soon after the leader of the Body died and revelations of the sexual abuse came to light, her family returned to the same Kentucky mountains that their ancestors have called home for 300 years. Shawna ultimately leaves her mountain home but only as she masters a perilous balancing act between who she has been and who she will become.

In London, 1946, the Right Sort Marriage Bureau is getting on its feet and expanding. Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge are making a go of it. That is until Lord Bainbridge --- the widowed Gwen's father-in-law and legal guardian --- returns from a business trip to Africa and threatens to undo everything important to her, even sending her six-year-old son away to a boarding school. But there's more going on than that. A new client shows up at the agency, one whom Sparks and Bainbridge begin to suspect really has a secret agenda, somehow involving the Bainbridge family. A murder and a subsequent kidnapping sends Sparks to seek help from a dangerous quarter --- and now their very survival is at stake.

In 1944, Maren Larsen is determined to do her part to help the war effort. As a cadet nurse at Walter Reed Medical Center, she’s swept off her feet by Dr. Oliver Demarest, whose family spends summers in an insular community on the rocky coast of Maine. In 1970, as the nation grapples with the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, Oliver and Maren are grappling with their fiercely independent 17-year-old daughter, Annie, who has fallen for a young man they don’t approve of. Before the summer is over, a terrible tragedy will strike the Demarests --- and in the aftermath, Annie vows never to return to Haven Point. In 2008, Annie’s daughter, Skye, has arrived in Maine to help scatter her mother’s ashes. Maren knows that Annie never told Skye the whole truth about what happened during that fateful summer.

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother. This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than 30 years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then.

Everyone knows everyone in the tiny town of Bourne, but the Mitchell triplets are especially beloved. For a few weeks 17 years ago, Bourne was national news when its water turned green. The girls have come of age watching their mother’s endless fight for justice. But just when it seems life might go on the same forever, the first moving truck anyone has seen in years pulls up and unloads new residents and old secrets. Soon, the Mitchell sisters are taking on a system stacked against them and uncovering mysteries buried longer than they’ve been alive. Because it's hard to let go of the past when the past won't let go of you.

When Olivia meets a new lover just as she is welcoming her best friend, Lucy, back from New York, her dedicated academic life expands precipitously. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off the grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two --- but Lucy has received shocking news of her own that binds the trio unusually close. Over the months that follow, Lucy’s boss, Hunter, Olivia’s psychoanalyst parents, and a young man named Sebastian are pulled into the friends’ orbit, and not one of them will emerge unchanged.

Josephine Morrow is Girl One, the first of nine Miracle Babies conceived without male DNA on an experimental commune known as the Homestead. The Girls were raised in the shadow of controversy --- plagued by zealots calling them aberrations and their mothers demons --- until a devastating fire at the Homestead claimed the lives of three people, leaving the survivors to scatter across the United States. Years later, upon learning that her mother has gone missing, Josie sets off on a desperate road trip, tracking down the only people who might help: her estranged sisters. Tracing clues her mother left behind, Josie joins forces with two of the Girls, and they journey back through their past, uncovering secrets about their origins and unlocking devastating abilities they never knew they had.

It’s 1966, and Frankie Croy retreats to her friend’s vacant palazzo in Venice. Years have passed since the initial success of Frankie’s debut novel, and she has spent her career trying to live up to the expectations. Now, after a particularly scathing review of her most recent work, she needs to recharge and get re-inspired. Then Gilly appears. A precocious young admirer eager to make friends, Gilly seems determined to insinuate herself into Frankie’s solitary life. But there’s something about the young woman that gives Frankie pause. How much of what Gilly tells her is the truth? As a series of lies and revelations emerge, the lives of these two women will be tragically altered as the catastrophic 1966 flooding of Venice ravages the city.

Through poverty, adolescence and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. But he’s in prison, and she doesn’t know what he did to end up there. She doesn’t know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, Ashley desperately searches for meaning in the chaos. Then her grandmother reveals the truth about her father’s incarceration…and Ashley’s entire world is turned upside down.

In dire need of a fresh start, Aloysius Archer arrives in Bay Town, California. His first stop is a P.I. office where he is hoping to apprentice with a legendary private eye and former FBI agent named Willie Dash. He lands the job and immediately finds himself in the thick of a potential scandal: a blackmail case involving a wealthy well-connected politician running for mayor that soon spins into something even more sinister. As bodies begin falling, Archer and Dash must infiltrate the world of brothels, gambling dens, drug operations and long-hidden secrets, descending into the rotten bones of a corrupt town that is selling itself as the promised land --- but might actually be the road to perdition, and Archer’s final resting place.