Adult

After years of struggling in the Chicago theater scene, ambitious actress Kira Rascher finally lands the role of a lifetime. The catch? Starring in Temper means working with Malcolm Mercer, a mercurial director who’s known for pushing his performers past their limits --- onstage and off. Kira is convinced she can handle Malcolm, but the theater’s cofounder Joanna Cuyler is another story. Joanna sees Kira as a threat --- to her own thwarted artistic aspirations, her twisted relationship with Malcolm, and the shocking secret she’s keeping about the upcoming production. But as opening night draws near, Kira and Joanna both start to realize that Malcolm’s dangerous extremes are nothing compared to what they're capable of themselves.

Rick Montoya, who is eager to experience more of his Italian mother's culture, heads to Rome to start his own translation business. He's armed with curiosity and an appetite for local food and wine. Rick's maternal uncle is a Roman cop with one eye to his nephew's welfare and another to how Rick might be useful, perhaps widen his career choices. So Commissario Piero Fontana pulls Rick into an investigation: the murder of Count Umberto Zimbardi. The wealthy count enjoyed indulging a circle of convivial friends and a hobby collecting oral histories by interviewing residents in the city's centro storico. After heading home from such an afternoon, he was found dead on a bridge over the Tiber.

Adam and Sophie Warner and their three-year-old daughter are vacationing in Washington State’s Hood Canal for Memorial Day weekend. But on Adam’s first day out on the water, he sees Sophie abducted by a stranger. In a nearby cabin is another couple, Kristen and Connor Moss. Unfortunately, beyond what they’ve heard in the news, they’re in the dark when it comes to Sophie’s disappearance. For Adam, at least there’s comfort in knowing that Mason County detective Lee Husemann is an old friend of his. But as Adam’s paranoia about his missing wife escalates, Lee puts together the pieces of a puzzle. The lives of the two couples are converging in unpredictable ways, and the picture is unsettling.

Raised in East Hampton, Caroline never thought she’d be one of the “city people” who spent summers and weekends at the beach. But once her husband’s business takes off, a job stint transplants the couple permanently into Manhattan life --- where entitled husbands, like hers, embark on affair after affair with little consequence. Time for the wives to get even. When Caroline’s friend, Annabelle, suggests they experiment as their wayward mates have, Caroline resists at first. That is, until a scroll through an iPad makes her reconsider…and a pact between two friends is made. The agreement quickly turns serious when Caroline begins to confront the man her husband has become, or perhaps always has been.

Autumn of 1987 takes a young couple on a romantic trip in the Westfjords holiday --- a trip that gets an unexpected ending and has catastrophic consequences. Ten years later, a small group of friends go for a weekend in an old hunting lodge in Elliðaey --- a place completely cut off from the outside world --- to reconnect. But one of them isn't going to make it out alive. And Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir is determined to find the truth in the darkness.

They say you can’t go home again. But when her father is diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer and her mother with atypical Alzheimer’s, New York-based actress Kate Mulgrew returns to her hometown in Iowa to spend time with her parents and care for them in the time they have left. The months Kate spends with her parents in Dubuque --- by turns turbulent, tragic and joyful --- lead her to reflect on each of their lives and how they shaped her own. Those ruminations are transformed when, in the wake of their deaths, Kate uncovers long-kept secrets that challenge her understanding of the unconventional Irish Catholic household in which she was raised.

Raymond Jaffe feels like he doesn’t belong. After his best friend moves away, he has only two real connections: to the feral cat he’s tamed and to a blind 92-year-old woman in his building who’s introduced herself with a curious question: Have you seen Luis Velez? Mildred Gutermann, a German Jew who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, has been alone since her caretaker disappeared. She turns to Raymond for help, and as he tries to track Luis down, a deep and unexpected friendship blossoms between the two. Despondent at the loss of Luis, Mildred isolates herself further from a neighborhood devolving into bigotry and fear.

Renaissance Raines has found her place among the psychopomps --- the guides who lead the souls of the recently departed through the Seven Gates of the Underworld --- and done her best to avoid the notice of gods and mortals alike. But when a young boy named Ramses St. Cyr manages to escape his foretold death, Renai finds herself at the center of a deity-thick plot unfolding in New Orleans. Someone helped Ramses slip free of his destined end --- someone willing to risk everything to steal a little slice of power for themselves. Is it one of the storm gods that’s descended on the city? The death god who’s locked the Gates of the Underworld? Or the manipulative sorcerer who also cheated Death?

Featuring both original in-universe stories and rarely seen reprints, this collection of 19 masterful short stories brings together some of the genre’s greatest living authors. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan take on a delightfully twisted killer in Val McDermid’s “Happy Holidays.” In Fiona Cummin’s “Dead Weight,” an overbearing mother resorts to desperate measures to keep control of her teenage daughter. And in Dean Koontz’s “Kittens,” a young girl learns the truth about how her pets have been dying and devises a horrible revenge. Tense, twisted and disturbing, EXIT WOUNDS is a visceral and thrilling collection showcasing the very best modern crime fiction has to offer.

All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the brutal double murder of her employers: renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Frannie claims she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening, though she does have a tale to tell: a story of her childhood on a Jamaican plantation, her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist who stretched all bounds of ethics, and the events that brought her into the Benhams’ London home --- and into a passionate and forbidden relationship. Though her testimony may seal her conviction, the truth will unmask the perpetrators of crimes far beyond murder and indict the whole of English society itself.