Adult

Hap Collins looks like a good ol’ boy. But even in his misspent youth, his best pal is Leonard Pine, who is black, gay and the ultimate outsider. Inseparable friends, Hap and Leonard climb into the boxing ring, visit their families, get in bar fights and just go fishing --- all the while confronting racists, righting wrongs and eating a whole lot of delicious food. In OF MICE AND MINESTRONE, Joe R. Lansdale --- along with his daughter Kasey Lansdale’s down-home recipes and New York Times bestselling crime author Kathleen Kent’s introduction --- has cooked up a new passel of tales for you about the unlikeliest duo East Texas has to offer, created by his own self.

It’s 1983, and Justine and Eve are stuck at Griswold Academy, a Connecticut boarding school. Griswold is a far cry from Justine's bohemian life in New Haven, where her parents run a theater and struggle to pay the bills. Eve, the sophisticated daughter of status-obsessed Park Avenue parents, also feels like an outsider amidst Griswold's preppy jocks and debutantes. Despite their differences, they form a deep friendship. After a tumultuous school year, Eve and Justine spend the summer in New York City where they join Eve's childhood friend, India. All three are affected by their sexual relationships with older men and the power adults hold over them, even as the young women begin to assert their independence.

The Carls disappeared the same way they appeared, in an instant. While the robots were on Earth, they caused confusion and destruction with only their presence. Part of their maelstrom was the sudden viral fame and untimely death of April May: a young woman who stumbled into Carl’s path, giving them their name, becoming their advocate, and putting herself in the middle of an avalanche of conspiracy theories. Months later, April’s friends are trying to find their footing in a post-Carl world. Just as it is starting to seem like the gang may never learn the real story behind the events that changed their lives forever, a series of clues arrive --- mysterious books that seem to predict the future and control the actions of their readers --- all of which seems to suggest that April could be very much alive.

When Michel, a Swiss banker, discovers his wife Alice's betrayal, he turns for help to a Russian client who leads him into unknown territory, endangering not only his own life but that of Alice, and above all, his 14-year-old daughter, Pamela. Their charmed life --- a beautiful house on the French Riviera, elegant vacations and boarding school in Switzerland for Pamela --- is not all that it seems. As the repercussions of Michel's illicit deals move closer in around them, Alice finds herself in Amagansett with her artist sister who is having a crisis of her own, while the danger circles around Pamela.

Ruby has a strange relationship to privilege. She grew up the super's daughter in the basement of an Upper West Side co-op that gets more gentrified with each passing year. Her close childhood friendship with Caroline, the daughter of affluent tenants, and the mere fact of living in such a wealthy neighborhood brought her certain advantages, even expectations. Ruby took out loans to attend a prestigious small liberal arts college and explore her interest in art. But now she has been forced by circumstances to move back in with her parents. And Caroline is throwing one of her parties tonight, in her father's glorious penthouse apartment, a party that Ruby looks forward to and dreads in equal measure.

Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, she came to understand that each of us is broken. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process. THE BEAUTY IN BREAKING is the poignant true story of Harper's journey toward self-healing.

Alice Knott lives alone, a reclusive heiress haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious near-identical brother. Much of her family’s fortune has been spent on a world-class collection of artwork, which she stores in a vault in her lonely, cavernous house. One day, she awakens to find the artwork destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow and the world’s most priceless works of art are destroyed one by one, Alice finds that she has become the chief suspect in an international conspiracy --- even as her psyche becomes a shadowed landscape of childhood demons and cognitive disorder.

Austin Channing Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at age seven, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations and churches, Austin writes, "I had to learn what it means to love blackness," a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America's racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion. In a time when nearly all institutions (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claim to value "diversity" in their mission statements, I'M STILL HERE is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words.

The drug crisis hits home for Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong when the son of her outlaw lover Cort Wesley Masters nearly dies from an opioid overdose. On top of that, she’s dealing with the inexplicable tragedy of a small Texas town where all the residents died in a single night. When Caitlin realizes that these two pursuits are intrinsically connected, she finds herself following a trail that will take her to the truth behind the crisis that claimed 75,000 lives last year. The same force that has taken over the opiate trade has even more deadly intentions in mind, specifically the murder of tens of millions in pursuit of their even more nefarious goals. At the root of the conspiracy lies a cabal nestled within the highest corridors of power that’s determined to destroy all threats posed to them.

In 1946 London, Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge are the proprietors of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau. One day, Lady Matheson, a cousin of Gwen’s who works for the Queen in "some capacity," arrives in need of some discreet investigation. It seems that Princess Elizabeth has developed feelings for a dashing Greek prince, and a blackmail note has arrived, alluding to some potentially damaging information about said prince. Wanting to keep this out of the palace gossip circles, but also needing to find out what skeletons might lurk in the prince's closet, the palace has quietly turned to Gwen and Iris. Without causing a stir, the two of them must uncover any secrets in the prince's past before his engagement to the future Queen of England is announced.