Adult

Those who have the collecting bug care passionately --- sometimes violently --- about the objects of their obsession. No one covets like a collector, and as you will find in the pages of this new anthology from MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block, a truly dedicated collector will ignore the other nine commandments, too, in his quest for his personal Holy Grail. From Joyce Carol Oates' tale of the ultimate Marilyn Monroe collectible to Dennis Lehane's bookseller with a penchant for other people's tragic correspondence, and culminating in Block's own classic story of a killer with a unique approach to choosing his victims, COLLECTIBLES illustrates the range of the collecting impulse and the lengths people will go to in their hunger to possess the perfect piece.

Elle, a 50-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at “The Paper Palace” --- the family summer place that she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: Last night, Elle and her oldest friend, Jonas, crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next 24 hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn’t forever changed the course of their lives. As Miranda Cowley Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity.

Nevada’s attorney general is missing. At dusk on a deserted Nevada highway in a thunderstorm, ex-IRS agent and PI-in-training Mortimer Angel comes across a pretty, scantily clad girl --- Harper Leeman. When Mort offers her a ride, she orders him out of his truck at gunpoint. She tries to take off, but he cuts the valve stem on the rear tire. Realizing she’s in trouble, he wants to help --- but with no spare tire, he devises a creative way to get them out of the hills. On their way down, a rough-looking man stops and asks Mort if he has “seen anyone up in the hills.” Mort realizes the guy is after Harper, who is hiding in the truck. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse chase in northeast Nevada that continues even after Mort finds the attorney general --- Harper’s mother --- dead in the trunk of a car.

El Paso, Texas, is a battleground. It’s an open market for Mexican drug cartels to sell their wares. It’s also a destination for teens looking for fun. Venice Alexander’s 13-year-old son, Roman, was there on a school trip. Now, he and a fellow student have vanished without a trace. Assuming the kidnapping is retaliation for his past incursions against Mexico’s underworld, Jonathan Grave leads his covert operatives to rescue their teammate’s son. But the trail Jonathan follows leads him down unexpected paths where he ends up in the crossfire of a deadly vendetta.

When Gracie Cooper’s father dies, she sets aside her dreams of pursuing her passion for art to take over his Midtown Manhattan champagne shop. She soon finds out that the store’s profit margins are being squeezed perilously tight, and a giant corporation headed by the impossibly handsome but irritatingly arrogant Sebastian Andrews is proposing a buyout. But Gracie can’t bear the thought of throwing away her father’s dream like she did her own. So she seeks advice and solace from someone she’s never met --- the faceless “Sir,” with whom she connected on a blind dating app. Although Gracie finds herself slowly falling for Sir online, she has no idea she’s already met him in real life…and they can’t stand each other.

Eighteen-year-old Jenny Moore is looking forward to a fresh start at college, but the people in her life won’t let her go. When Jenny is viciously stabbed and left for dead, it’s her mother who finds Jenny’s body underneath the pines outside their home in the upscale town of Lewisboro, New York. State police investigator Susan Adler and her consultant partner Liam Dwyer are called to investigate the crime scene, but they sense something is off right away. The clues contradict the story Jenny’s parents keep telling, which makes the entire family suspects in Jenny’s murder. But who did it? Was it the wealthy father? The disappointed mother? The strange, quiet little brother? The jealous best friend? An ex-lover?

In 1961 suburban Cleveland, 10-year-old Edna hides in her bedroom closet, avoiding her disdainful father and distracted mother. Grandma Becky is a shrewd woman who manages her husband Morris' successful floor-scraping business. Although Becky appears to be in charge, she's consumed by hypochondriacal fantasies, and her secrecy leads her sisters Ceal and Libby to suspect something sinister. After discovering a stash of cash and a bedroom full of state-of-the-art medical equipment, they ultimately uncover her addiction to a cocktail of Percocet, Darvon and paregoric. But when people start dropping dead for no apparent reason, things take a darker turn --- and then a shocking event changes everything.

They're not the most popular freshmen at their Florida prep school, but at least everyone knows their name(s). The Brittanys. Brittany Rosenberg drives her golf cart around her subdivision to meet boys. Brittany Gottlieb insists you can't lose your virginity if you haven't gotten your period. (She heard it somewhere!). Brittany Tomassi is from New York. Brittany Jensen once threw her tampon into a stranger's swimming pool. She is the greatest person in the whole wide world --- at least as far as the fifth Brittany, our narrator, is concerned. Even within their friend group, she and Jensen are a duo. But Jensen's interests may be diverging from her friends'. And within our narrator's own family, life-changing events may be taking shape --- events that only years later, she has the perspective to see.

Flavia Albia, daughter and successor of private informer Marcus Didius Falco, is twiddling her thumbs with no clients during the December festival of Saturnalia. But that doesn't mean all is quiet. Her husband Tiberius and the Fourth Cohort are battling organized crime interests that are going to war over the festival nuts. A series of accidental poisonings, then bloody murders of rival nut-sellers, and finally a gruesome warning to Tiberius from the hidden criminal powers to back off. Albia has had just about enough and combines forces with Tiberius to uncover the hidden criminal gangs trying to worm their way into the establishment at a banquet of the emperor Domitian.

Full-time sheriff Sunshine Vicram has to deal with a bar fight gone bad, a teenage daughter hunting a serial killer, and the still unresolved mystery of her own abduction years prior. All evidence points to a local distiller, a dangerous bad boy named Levi Ravinder, but Sunny knows he’s not the villain of her story. Still, perhaps beneath it all, he possesses the keys to her disappearance. At the very least, beneath it all, he possesses a serious set of abs. Between policing a town her hunky chief deputy calls four cents short of a nickel, that pesky crush she has on Levi that seems to grow exponentially every day, and an irascible raccoon that just doesn’t know when to quit, Sunny’s life is about to rocket to a whole new level of crazy.