Coming Soon

Tough-as-nails criminal defense attorney Jane Smith is hip-deep in the murder trial of the century. Actually, her charmless client might’ve committed several murders. She’s also fallen in love with a wonderful guy. And an equally wonderful dog, a mutt. But Jane doesn’t have much time. She’s just received a terminal diagnosis giving her 12 months. Unless she’s murdered before her expiration date.

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there. Because in that town there is an orchard with seven most unusual trees. From those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black. Take a bite, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger and more vital. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing --- and become darker. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples. However, something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town. Now it’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

When fall rolls around, it’s time for Kerry Tolliver to leave her family’s Christmas tree farm in the mountains of North Carolina for the wilds of New York City to help her gruff older brother and his dog, Queenie, sell the trees at the family stand on a corner in Greenwich Village. In the weeks leading into Christmas, Kerry quickly becomes close with the charming neighbors who live near their stand. When an elderly neighbor goes missing, Kerry will need to combine her country know-how with her newly acquired New York knowledge to protect the new friends she’s come to think of as family. And complicating everything is Patrick, a single dad raising his son, Austin, on this quirky block. Kerry and Patrick’s chemistry is undeniable, but what chance does this holiday romance really have?

London, 1814: Mary Godwin and her stepsister, Jane Clairmont, possess quick minds bolstered by an unconventional upbringing. Though quieter and more reserved than the boisterous Jane, Mary’s imagination is keen, and she longs for real-world adventures. One evening, an opportunity arrives in the form of a dinner guest. At 21, Percy Bysshe Shelley is already a renowned poet and radical. When Mary comes downstairs in search of a book after the party has broken up, she finds instead a man face down on the floor --- with a knife in his back. The dead man, it seems, was a former classmate of Shelley’s, and lately had become a personal and professional rival. Mary, Jane and Shelley are all drawn to learn the truth behind the tragedy, especially as each discovery seems to hint at a tangled web that includes many in Shelley’s closest circle.

Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship and an international embargo threatening to destroy even the country’s most powerful players, some are looking to gain an advantage in the chaos --- and others are just looking to make it through another day. Desperate for money --- and survival --- Matt teams up with his best friend and business partner, Alix Variel. They set their sights on legendary shipwrecks that have been rumored to contain priceless treasures off a remote section of Haiti’s southern coast. However, their ambition and exploration of these disastrous wrecks come with a cascade of ill-fated incidents.

1923 was a “year of lunacy” in Germany, defined by hyperinflation, violence, a political system on the verge of collapse, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and separatist movements threatening to rip apart the German nation. Most observers found it miraculous that the Weimar Republic --- the first German democracy --- was able to survive, though some of the more astute realized that the feral undercurrents unleashed that year could lead to much worse. Now, a century later, Volker Ullrich draws on letters, memoirs, newspaper articles and other sources to present a riveting chronicle of one of the most difficult years any modern democracy has ever faced --- one with haunting parallels to our own political moment.

KILLING THE WITCHES revisits one of the most frightening and inexplicable episodes in American history: the events of 1692 and 1693 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. What began as a mysterious affliction of two young girls who suffered violent fits and exhibited strange behavior soon spread to other young women. Rumors of demonic possession and witchcraft consumed Salem. Soon three women were arrested under suspicion of being witches --- but as the hysteria spread, more than 200 people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, 20 were executed, and others died in jail or their lives were ruined.

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles. There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body. In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Queen Elizabeth II is looking forward to a traditional Christmas gathering with her family in Sandringham when a shocking discovery interrupts holiday plans. A severed hand has been found --- but even more unsettling, she recognizes the signet ring still attached to a finger. It belongs to a scion of the St Cyr family, her old friends from nearby Ladybridge Hall. As reporters speculate about the proximity of the crime to the Crown and the police fail to investigate a suspicious accident on her doorstep, Elizabeth quietly begins to mull over the mystery herself. Someone in the quiet county of Norfolk seems to have a secret worth killing for, and the Queen is determined to find out who and what that is --- even if that means discovering that someone in her close circle is a murderer.

Theo Jennings, an auctioneer in Newmarket, England, has been climbing the ladder at the bloodstock sales company for the past three years. He’s planning on making his first ever multi-million sale with a yearling colt. When he finds the colt dead a few days after the auction, Theo is suspicious that there was foul play involved. As Theo begins to investigate the death, he finds that answers aren’t coming readily from those who he questions. When a person’s body is discovered in the same stable a few days later, all fingers point to him. As his world turns upside down with the accusations, Theo decides to further his investigation. The only way to clear Theo’s name is to find the real murderer, but it isn’t just the police who have their eye on him --- the killer has a target on his back.

On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, 16-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls. Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research and, most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil. But how much of the story is true?

The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: A mother’s husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects his wealth no matter the cost, all the while war cries are heard from France, as Napoleon sets forth a violent master plan to become emperor of the world. As institutions are challenged and toppled in unprecedented fashion, ripples of change ricochet through our characters’ lives as they are left to reckon with the future and a world they must rebuild from the ashes of war.

In October 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one” --- a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. There hadn’t been a meaningful rain since July, and several big blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s scant resources. On October 8th, when Kate Leary’s barn caught fire, so began a catastrophe that would forever change the soul of the city. The conflagration that spread from her property quickly overtook the neighborhood, and before too long the floating embers had spread to the far reaches of the city. Families took to the streets with everything they could carry. Over the course of the next 48 hours, Chicago saw the biggest and most destructive disaster the United States had ever endured, and Leary would be its scapegoat.

It’s 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. But when his best and only friend, Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob’s wife, Naomi. Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clarke works as a seasonal maid in the town’s most elegant hotel. When Naomi eloped with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalized the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherited him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.

There were once four worlds, each pulsing with fantastical power and connected by a single city: London. Until the magic grew too fast and forced the worlds to seal the doors between them in a desperate gamble to protect their own. Now, only three Antari are known in recent memory --- Kell Maresh of Red London, Delilah Bard of Grey London, and Holland Vosijk of White London. But barely a glimpse of them have been seen in the last seven years --- and a new Antari named Kosika has appeared in White London, taking the throne in Holland's absence. The young queen is willing to feed her city with blood, including her own --- but her growing religious fervor has the potential to drown it instead. And back in Red London, King Rhy Maresh is threatened by a rising rebellion.

When Remy Wadia left India for the United States, he carried his resentment of his cold and inscrutable mother with him and has kept his distance from her. Years later, he returns to Bombay, planning to adopt a baby from a young pregnant girl --- and to see his elderly mother again before it is too late. She is in the hospital, has stopped talking, and seems to have given up on life. Struck with guilt for not realizing just how ill she had become, Remy devotes himself to helping her recover and return home. But one day in her apartment, he comes upon an old photograph that demands explanation. As shocking family secrets surface, Remy finds himself reevaluating his entire childhood and his relationship to his parents, just as he is on the cusp of becoming a parent himself.

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her.

From the moment Ava Carson and her 10-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. Meanwhile, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte --- once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination --- in the hands of its last five Black residents and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him.

While on a drive in Los Angeles, Kerry Washington received a text message that would send her on a life-changing journey of self-discovery. In an instant, her very identity was torn apart, with everything she thought she knew about herself thrown into question. In THICKER THAN WATER, Washington gives readers an intimate view into both her public and private worlds --- as a mother, daughter, wife, artist, advocate and trailblazer. Chronicling her upbringing and life’s journey thus far, she reveals how she faced a series of challenges and setbacks, effectively hid childhood traumas, met extraordinary mentors, managed to grow her career, and crossed the threshold into stardom and political advocacy, ultimately discovering her truest self and, with it, a deeper sense of belonging.

Pushing intimacy to its limits in prose of unearthly beauty, Vauhini Vara explores the nature of being a child, parent, friend, sibling, neighbor or lover, and the relationships between self and others. A young girl reads the encyclopedia to her elderly neighbor, who is descending into dementia. A pair of teenagers seek intimacy as phone-sex operators. A competitive sibling tries to rise above the drunken mess of her own life to become a loving aunt. One sister consumes the ashes of another. And in the title story, an experimental artist takes on his most ambitious project yet: constructing a life-size ark according to the Bible’s specifications. In a world defined by estrangement, where is communion to be found?

The Tower of London is impenetrable, well-protected, secure, and home to the most valuable jewels on earth. But once a year, when the Queen attends the State Opening of Parliament, the Metropolitan Police must execute the most secret operation in their armory as they transport the Crown Jewels across London. For decades, the elite squad at Scotland Yard has been in charge of the operation. And for decades, it’s run like clockwork. But this year, everything is about to change. Because a master criminal has set his sights on pulling off the most outrageous theft in history --- and with a man on the inside, the odds are in his favor. Unless the team can stop him before it’s too late.

Hell comes to Southern California every October. It rides in on searing Santa Ana winds that blast at near hurricane force, igniting voracious wildfires. Master thief Danny Cole longs for the flames. A tsunami of fire is exactly what he needs to pull off a daring crime and avenge a fallen friend. As the most devastating firestorms in Los Angeles’s history scorch the hills of Malibu, relentless arson investigator Walter Sharpe and his new partner, former US marshal Andrew Walker, suspect that someone set the massive blazes intentionally. While the flames rage out of control, Danny pursues his brilliant scheme, unaware that Sharpe and Walker are closing in. But when they all collide in a canyon of fire, everything changes, pitting them against an unexpected enemy within an inescapable inferno.

Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein each founded empires built on grit and determination. Yet they became locked in a feud spanning three continents, two world wars and the Great Depression. Brought up in poverty, Canadian-born Elizabeth Arden changed popular opinion, persuading women from all walks of life to buy skincare products that promised them youth and beauty. Helena Rubinstein left her native Poland, and launched her company with scientific claims about her miracle creams made with anti-aging herbs. And when it came to business, nothing was off-limits: poaching each other’s employees, copying each other’s products, planting spies, hiring ex-husbands, and one-upping each other every chance they had.

When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back --- until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.

Nathan Silverman’s idyllic childhood in Berlin is soon marred by increasing levels of bigotry against his family and the rest of the Jewish community. After his uncle is arrested on Kristallnacht, he leaves Germany for New York City with only his mother’s wedding ring to sell for survival. While attending an evening course at Columbia in 1942, Nathan notices a recruitment poster on a university wall and decides to enlist in the military and help fight the Nazi regime. The Allies are racing to develop a nuclear weapon before the Nazis, and a German theoretical physicist is hoping to defect. The physicist was a friend of his father's, and Nathan's mission is to return to Berlin via France and smuggle him out of Europe.