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Raised in the wilderness by her late great-uncle, Vida is a young woman with an almost preternatural affinity for nature, especially for the wolves that also call the forested mountains home. Formed by hard experience, by love and loss, and by the prophecies of a fortune teller, Vida just wants peace. If only nearby Kettleton County didn’t cast such a dark shadow. It’s where Jose Nochelobo, the love of Vida’s life and a cherished local hero, died in a tragic accident. That’s the official story, but Vida has reasons to doubt it. The truth can’t be contained for long. Nor can the hungry men of power in Kettleton who want something too: that Vida, like Jose, disappear forever. One by one they come for her, prepared to do anything to see their plans through to their evil end. Vida is no less prepared for them.

It's the 1960s, and the fashion culture of New York, Paris and Milan is starting to make an impression on the mid-century American woman. Jackie Kennedy's effortless style leads the nation, although Mia's bustling bakery job doesn't often give her the time or money to craft a stylish closet after her idol in the White House. But when a mysterious stranger suddenly offers her a modeling job in Paris at the esteemed House of Rousseau, she takes a chance on it, despite knowing nothing about the world of fashion. Becoming more and more successful in her position as an up-and-coming model, she is soon drawn into the Cold War by the very fashion house she works for. And as she finds herself falling further into national crimes and politics, Mia will soon have to decide which side of history she's really on.

Natalka and Edwin are perfect, if improbable, partners in a detective agency. Eighty-four-year-old Edwin is a master at surveillance, deploying his age as a cloak of invisibility. Natalka, more than 50 years his junior, is a math whiz who takes any cases concerning fraud or deception. She loves a murder, but none have come the agency’s way. That is until local writer Melody Chambers dies. Melody’s daughters are convinced that their mother was murdered. Edwin thinks that Melody’s death is linked to that of an obituary writer who predeceased many of his subjects. Edwin and Benedict go undercover to investigate and are on a creative writing weekend at isolated Battle House when another murder occurs. Are the cases linked, and what is the role of a distinctly sinister book group attended by many of the writers involved?

Hurricane Harvey is about to hit Houston. Meanwhile, single mom Jia Shah is already having a rough week: her 12-year-old son, Ishaan, has just been suspended from school for getting in a fight. And now their apartment complex is under a mandatory evacuation order. Jia’s sister, Seema, has invited them to hunker down in her fancy house in Sugar Land. Despite Jia’s misgivings --- Seema’s husband, Vipul, has been just a little too friendly with her lately --- she concedes it’s probably the best place to keep Ishaan safe during the hurricane. With Jia’s philandering ex scrutinizing her every move, all too eager to snatch back custody of Ishaan, she can’t afford to make a mistake. When Vipul’s brother and his wife show up on Seema’s doorstep, it’s a recipe for disaster. As the storm escalates, tensions rise quickly, and soon someone is dead. Was it a horrible accident, or is there a murderer in their midst?

Crissy Dowling passes her days by the pool in a private cabana, and each evening she transforms into a Princess, performing her musical cabaret inspired by the life of the late Diana Spencer. Some might find her strange or even delusional, an American speaking with a British accent, living and working in a casino that has become a dated trash heap. On top of that, Crissy’s daily diet of Adderall and Valium leaves her more than a little tipsy, her Senator boyfriend has gone back to his wife, and her entire career rests on resembling a dead woman. Yet her fans see her for the gifted chameleon she is. But when Crissy’s sister, Betsy, arrives in town with a new boyfriend and a teenage daughter, and when Richie Morley, the owner of the Buckingham Palace Casino, is savagely murdered, Crissy’s carefully constructed kingdom comes crashing down all around her.

Sisters Jane and Esme used to be thick as thieves. But as adults, pragmatic, dependable Jane regrets the distance that has grown between them. So when beautiful and impetuous Esme calls Jane during a flash summer storm, announcing that she has left her high society husband, Jane is shocked to learn that her little sister wishes to stay with her. Could this be an opportunity for them to become close again? The only catch: Esme needs a ride from the city to their small Connecticut hometown, and Jane is terrified of getting on the highway. The storm is raging, and Jane can’t escape the horrible memory of how she nearly killed Esme while driving in a downpour when they were teens. Jane must either let Esme stand on her own two feet for once or swallow her fear and jump to her younger sister’s rescue --- and her choice cleaves her life in two.

Texas Ranger Rory Yates protects his home state wearing a five-pointed silver badge and carrying a Sig Sauer. When a native woman disappears on the summer solstice, clues point to a cold case. Yates, a quick-draw champion, partners with expert archer Ava Cruz of the Tigua Tribal police. The investigation leads to the edges of Texas’s most unforgiving landscape, where the officers take dead aim with every shot in their arsenals.

A teenager returns home from work and finds her parents shot to death in their bed. Responding to the call, Sheriff Bree Taggert realizes the crime wasn’t a burglary gone wrong. The couple was executed. The sole survivor: their traumatized teenage daughter, Claire Mason. Bree teams up with investigator Matt Flynn to work the case, but together they uncover more questions than answers. When Claire is stalked at the park, it’s clear the killer isn’t finished --- and she’s the next target. As Bree and Matt sift through the past --- suspect by suspect --- a tangled web of deception emerges, and the truth becomes harder to see. Because the victims’ entire lives were a lie. And the only way to protect the vulnerable girl is to unravel her parents’ secrets.

John Russell, an English journalist, had always been a reluctant spy. It’s a dangerous life --- especially when you are tasked with being a double agent for Soviet and American intelligence. But it’s been years since Russell was finally able to extricate himself from his life of espionage --- through a shady deal with a high-ranking Soviet official. Now it’s 1953, and Russell and his family live a life of relative comfort in Los Angeles. Feeling somewhat adrift, Russell has just begun work on a book investigating American firms that continued doing business with Germany during Nazi occupation. Then he notices someone is tailing him around Los Angeles. Has someone not taken kindly to his research? Or could it be that the deal he struck all those years ago has left him with unfinished business?

On a frigid February day, Anchorage Detective Cara Kennedy stands by the graves of her husband and son, watching as their caskets are raised from the earth. It feels sacrilegious, but she has no choice. Aaron and Dylan disappeared on a hike a year ago, their bones eventually found and buried. But shocking clues have emerged that foul play was involved, potentially connecting them to a string of other deaths and disappearances. Somehow tied to the mystery is Mia Upash, who grew up in an isolated village called Unity, a community of women and children in hiding from abusive men. Mia never imagined the trouble she would find herself in when she left home to live in Man’s World. Although she remains haunted by the tragedy of what happened to the man and the boy in the woods, she has her own reasons for keeping quiet.

Cora Valentine has her whole life --- and a shot at the Olympics --- ahead of her. But when she’s kidnapped on Halloween, her name is splashed across headlines not as an athlete but as a victim. Not even her safe return changes that, especially since no one is caught for the crime. Hounded by the public, Cora’s time as a missing girl and member of the Magnificent Eight has its consequences. Years later, when Cora has her own daughter, she’s determined to leave the past behind for a better life. Her daughter will never face those fears. And Cora will never face them again. But four years later, on Halloween, the past comes knocking. Now, Cora’s daughter is gone, and to get her back, Cora must take someone else’s child.

When Kat Bird wakes up from a coma, she sees her mirror image: Jude, her twin sister. Jude’s face and name are the only memories Kat has from before her accident. As Kat tries to make sense of things, she believes Jude will provide all the answers to her most pressing questions: What happened? Where am I? Who am I? Amid this tragedy, Jude sees an irresistible opportunity: she can give her sister a brand-new past, one worlds away from the lives they really led. She spins tales of an idyllic childhood, exotic travels and a bright future. But if everything was so perfect, who are the mysterious people following Kat? And what explains her uncontrollable flashes of violent anger, which begin to jeopardize a sweet new romance? Duped by the one person she trusted, Kat must try to untangle fact from fiction.

Ralph Silverman was a foreign film buff, a victim of bullies and a boy genius. He held long conversations with his pet parakeet and spent countless hours on a computer, creating mesmerizing music and solving problems in philosophy. He was a friend of great scholars and the son of a wealthy outer-borough businessman with shady associates and a secret second family. And, as he begins to take over the story from the narrator, Ralph finds himself in South Florida, physically abused and expelled into a frightening world of the unhoused --- with a broken pair of glasses, no money and no shoes.

Coral is the first person to discover her brother Jay’s dead body in the wake of his suicide. There’s no note, only a drably furnished bachelor pad in Long Beach, California, and a cell phone with a handful of numbers in it. Coral pockets the phone. And then she starts responding to texts as her dead brother. Over the course of one week, Coral, the successful yet lonely author of a hit dystopian novel, Wildfire, becomes increasingly untethered from reality. Blindsided by grief and operating with reckless determination, she doubles --- and triples --- down on posing as her brother. As Coral’s swirl of lies slowly closes in on her, the quirky and mysterious alien world of Wildfire becomes enmeshed in her own reality, in the process pushing long-buried memories, traumas and secrets dangerously into the present.

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out. The program is a who’s who of crime-writing royalty: the debut writer (me!), the forensic science writer, the blockbuster writer, the legal thriller writer, the literary writer, and the psychological suspense writer. But when one of us is murdered, the remaining authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime. Of course, we also should know how to commit one. How can you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder?

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward 16-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero. Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life, though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do --- she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie. Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi. Her twin 10-year-olds know they need help --- and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India is not just an adoptive mother.

Being the daughter of the village Capuwa, or demon-priest, Amara is used to keeping mostly to herself. Influenced by the new religious practices brought in by the British Colonizers, the villagers who once respected her father’s craft have turned on the family. Yet, they all still seem to call on him whenever supernatural disturbances arise. Now someone --- or something --- is viciously seizing upon men in the jungle. But instead of enlisting Amara’s father’s help, the villages have accused him of carrying out the attacks himself. As she tries to clear her father’s name, Amara finds herself haunted by dreams that eerily predict the dark forces on her island. And she can’t shake the feeling that it’s all connected to the night she woke up to hear her mother’s frantic cries: No one can find out what happened.

The Great War is over. Everfair has found peace within its borders. But our heroes’ stories are far from done. Tink and his sister, Bee-Lung, are traveling the world via aircanoe, spreading the spores of a mysterious empathy-generating fungus. Through these spores, they seek to build bonds between people and help spread revolutionary sentiments of socialism and equality. Meanwhile, Everfair’s Princess Mwadi and Prince Ilunga return home from a sojourn in Egypt to vie for their country’s rule following the abdication of their father, King Mwenda. But their mother, Queen Josina, manipulates them both from behind the scenes, while also pitting Europe’s influenza-weakened political powers against one another as these countries fight to regain control of their rebellious colonies.

When Ruth Handler walks into the boardroom of the toy company she co-founded and pitches her idea for a doll unlike any other, she knows what she’s setting in motion. It just might take the world a moment to catch up. In 1956, the only dolls on the market for little girls let them pretend to be mothers. Ruth’s vision for a doll shaped like a grown woman and outfitted in an enviable wardrobe will let them dream they can be anything. As Ruth assembles her team of creative rebels, she knows they’re working against a ticking clock to get this wild idea off the ground. In the decades to come --- through soaring heights and devastating personal lows, public scandals and private tensions --- each of them will have to decide how tightly to hold on to their creation. Because Barbie has never been just a doll. She’s a legacy.

Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. Suddenly she hears footsteps coming up the stairs and sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm and to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is --- and what he wants.

Fourteen years ago, the Palmer sisters --- Emma, Juliette and Daphne --- left their home in Arden Hills and never returned. But when Emma discovers she’s pregnant and her husband loses his job, she has no option but to return to the house that she and her estranged sisters still own...and where their parents were murdered. Emma has never told anyone what she saw the night her parents died, even when she became the prime suspect. But her presence in the house threatens to uncover secrets that have stayed hidden for years, and the sisters are drawn together once again. As they face their memories of the past, rivalries restart, connections are forged, and, for the first time, Emma starts to ask questions about what really happened that night.

Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Especially for shy, unassuming Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. But when Lucy asks her to room together, something in Margot can't say no. And so she finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls: Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one. It's a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she's been in since the end of high school, when her best friend, Eliza, died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered...and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.

Luke Daniels receives a surprise visit from the head of a former CIA operation --- a failed attempt to assemble an espionage network within the Ukraine on the eve of the Russian invasion. It was during this mission that his friend, CIA case officer John Vince, was captured by Russian operatives and supposedly executed. But Luke is provided some shocking news. Vince is alive, in failing health, locked behind the walls of Russia’s brutal Solovetsky Island prison, and has a critical message he’ll give to no one but Luke. However, just as he manages to extract his friend from prison, Vince tragically dies, and his final words are rambling and incoherent. But they’re enough to plunge Luke into a hunt for something lost since the 15th century --- the legendary library of the first Tsar of All Russia, Ivan the Terrible.

Shanghai, 2007: Feeling betrayed by her American mother's engagement to their rich landlord, Lu Fang, teenager Alva begins plotting her escape. But the exclusive American School --- a potential ticket out --- is not what she imagined, and she's surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats, and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please. Qingdao, 1985: Newlywed Lu Fang works as a lowly shipping clerk. Though he aspires to a bright future, he is one of many casualties of harsh political reforms. Then China opens up to foreigners and capital, and Lu Fang meets a woman who makes him question what he should settle for.

Haven’s Rock is a well-hidden town surrounded by forest that serves as a refuge for those who need to disappear. Detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, already feel at home in their new town, which reminds them of where they first met in Rockton. And while they know how to navigate the woods and its various dangers, other residents don’t. Which is why people aren't allowed to wander off alone. When Max, the town’s youngest resident --- taught to track animals by Eric --- fears a bear is stalking a hiking party, alarms are raised. Even stranger, the 10-year-old swears the bear had human eyes. Casey and Eric know the dangers a bear can present, so they’re taking it seriously. But odd occurrences are happening all around them, and when a dead body turns up, they’re not sure what they’re up against.