Adult

When professional hockey player Sig Gauthier’s car breaks down and his phone dies, he treks into a posh private country club to call a tow truck. There, he encounters the alluring Chloe Clifford, the manic pixie dream girl who captivates him immediately with her sense of adventure and penchant for stealing champagne. Sparks fly during a moonlight kiss. But when Sig finally arrives to meet his dad’s new girlfriend over dinner, Chloe is confusingly also there. It turns out that the girlfriend is Chloe’s mother. Oh, and they’re engaged. Sig’s dream girl is his future stepsister. Chloe and Sig know there can never be more than friendship between them. But keeping their relationship platonic grows harder amid the developing family drama, especially knowing they were meant for so much more.

When the stones of her house begin to rattle and shift and call out mysterious messages to her in the middle of the night, 99-year-old Pauline Sinclair knows she will not make it to her 100th birthday. She has lived a modest life in Mason Hall, a rural Jamaican village, educating herself with stolen books, raising her two children, and experiencing both deep passion and true loss with her beloved baby father. But Miss Pauline has buried many secrets. To avenge her enslaved ancestors, she has built her house, stone by stone, from the ruins of a plantation on her land. And she knows more than she has told about the disappearance of Turner Buchanan --- a white American man who came to Mason Hall decades ago to claim her land. The whispering stones are telling Miss Pauline that she must make peace with the past before she dies.

When they married Emperors Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, respectively, Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France became two of the most famous women on the planet. Becoming cultural and fashion icons of their time, they also played a pivotal role in ruling their realms during a tempestuous era characterized by unprecedented political and technological change. Fearless, adventurous and independent, Elisabeth and Eugénie represented a new kind of empress --- one who rebelled against tradition and anticipated and embraced modern values. Yet both women endured hardship in their private and public lives. Between them, Elisabeth and Eugénie were personally involved in every major international confrontation in their turbulent century, which witnessed thrilling technological advances, as well as revolutions, assassinations and wars.

Grabbing an armful of clothes off the clothesline, Ciara Fay straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. All she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe. On the surface, she has a perfect life. Her husband, Ryan, is a good provider, and they have another baby on the way. But he also monitors Ciara's every move, flies into unpredictable rages where he convinces her she can do nothing right, and has isolated her from work, friends and her beloved family. With no job and no support, Ciara struggles to provide a sense of normalcy for her little girls. Facing a broken housing system, they move into a hotel room on a floor reserved for women like her. Ryan, meanwhile, wages a relentless campaign to win her back, and Ciara wavers. He never hit her, after all. And don't the girls need a stable home?

All Hamish Macbeth wants is a quiet life in his peaceful home in the Highland village of Lochdubh. But when his newly assigned constable arrives, he presents Hamish with a surprise and a secret. Getting to the bottom of the secret becomes the least of Hamish’s problems when he meets a family who has a score to settle with a sinister man who has mysteriously gone missing. Discovering a murdered woman’s body puts further pressure on Hamish, especially when it becomes clear that the murdered woman and the missing man are linked. To Hamish’s horror, he then finds himself working on the murder case with the despicable Detective Chief Inspector Blair. With a growing list of suspects, ever more bewildering circumstances, and Blair hindering him at every turn, Hamish must find the murderer before anyone else falls victim.

Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared. Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia --- until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend --- the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head. Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price.

Cotton Malone is on the hunt for a forgotten 16th-century Pledge of Christ --- a sworn promise made by Pope Julius II that evidences a monetary debt owed by the Vatican, still valid after five centuries --- now worth in the trillions of dollars. But collecting that debt centers on what happened to the famed Medici of Florence --- a family that history says died out, without heirs, centuries ago. Who will become the next prime minister of Italy, and who will be the next pope? Finding answers proves difficult until Cotton realizes that everything hinges on when, and if, the Medici return.

At every death scene, NYPD Detective Michael Bennett says a prayer over the victim. But recently, too many of the departed have been fellow cops. “I want you to look at these deaths on special assignment,” NYPD Inspector Celeste Cantor says. “Report only to me.” Bennett excels as a solo investigator. But he's chasing a killer who feeds on isolation...and paranoia.

When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad. He is consumed by memories of his younger sister, Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his 16-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation. Amid that singular action, the Ewerike family spirals into chaos. Amara is hungry for her life to be hers, so the moment she is able to escape her imprisonment, she falls in love --- not with the Aba-born engineer-in-training her mother envisages, but with Maksym Kostyk, the son of the town drunk. Before long, the two have concocted a plan to run away from the trappings of their familial traumas.

At the end of the Second World War, Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent. The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they’d been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies. A FOOL’S KABBALAH reimagines Gershom Scholem’s quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his dear friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin.