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In the fall of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one” --- a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. It had been bone-dry for months, and a recent string of blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s already scant resources. Then, on October 8th, a minor fire broke out in the barn of Irishwoman Kate Leary. A series of unfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings, along with insufficient preparation and a high southwesterly wind, combined to set the stage for an unmitigated catastrophe. The conflagration that spread from the Learys' property quickly overtook the neighborhood, and before long the floating embers had been cast to the far reaches of the city. Families took to the streets with every possession they could carry. Over the next 48 hours, Chicago fell victim to the largest and most destructive natural disaster the United States had yet endured.

London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion --- the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners and discovers that a demobilized soldier, gravely ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, has taken shelter with the group. Maisie’s quest to bring comfort to the youngsters and the ailing soldier brings to light a decades-old mystery concerning Maisie’s first husband, James Compton, who was killed while piloting an experimental fighter aircraft. As Maisie unravels the threads of her dead husband’s life, she is forced to examine her own painful past and question beliefs she has always accepted as true.

In an obscure, 200-year-old museum in a little town in western Massachusetts, there stands what once was the most revered relic from the history of early New England: the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre of 1704. This impregnable barricade, known to early Americans as “The Old Indian Door,” is the sole surviving artifact from one of the most dramatic moments in colonial American history. In the leap year of 1704, on the cold, snowy night of February 29th, hundreds of Indians and their French allies swept down on an isolated frontier outpost to slaughter or capture its inhabitants. The sacking of Deerfield led to one of the greatest sagas of survival, sacrifice, family and faith ever told in North America.

Philosophy professor Neil Weber can't think of one good reason to get up in the morning. His wife has left him, his academic research has sputtered, and the prospect of tenure is more remote than ever. Until Lucia Vanotti disappears. A college student at Neil’s Southern university, Lucia has a secret of her own --- one that haunts her relationships and leads to reckless, destructive behavior. When Neil is drawn into the mystery of her disappearance, he finds new energy, purpose and relevance. But at what cost? Each clue pulls him deeper into Lucia' s dark past, but also into the hidden lives of his closest friends and colleagues. What has driven Lucia to risk everything? And why does Neil, a professor who hardly knew her, care so deeply about finding her?

In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.

A legendary model and style icon, Anke Berben reveled in headline-grabbing romances with three members of the hugely influential rock band the Midnight Ramblers. The band members were as famous for their backstage drama as for their music, and Anke is the only one who fully understands the tangled relationships, betrayals and suspicions that have added to the Ramblers’ enduring appeal and mystique. That is most evident in the mystery around Anke’s role in the death of Mal, the band’s founder and Anke’s husband, in 1969. When Mari Hawthorn accepts the job to work with Anke on her memoir, she is dead set on getting to the truth of Mal’s death. As she ingratiates herself into the world of the band, she grows enchanted, against her better judgment, by these legendary rock stars.

Many years ago, Odysseus sailed to war and never returned. For 20 years, his wife, Penelope, and the women of Ithaca have guarded the isle against suitors and rival kings. But peace cannot be kept forever, and the balance of power is about to break. A beggar has arrived at the Palace. Salt-crusted and ocean-battered, he is scorned by the suitors --- but Penelope recognizes in him something terrible: her husband, Odysseus, returned at last. Yet this Odysseus is no hero. By returning to the island in disguise, he is not merely plotting his revenge against the suitors --- vengeance that will spark a civil war --- he's testing the loyalty of his queen. Has she been faithful to him all these years? And how much blood is Odysseus willing to shed to be sure?

WWII rages Europe. Lisbon stands alone as a glamorous city on the brink of chaos, harboring spies trading double-edged secrets. Among them are Selene Delmont and Beatrice Sullivan, Boston librarians turned Allied operatives. Officially enlisted to collect banned books, both women are undercover agents tasked with infiltrating the Axis spy network. Soon, they’re caught up in games of deception with two of Lisbon’s most notorious men --- the outcast Portuguese baron, Luca Caldeira, and the lethal spy, code name Gable. As Selene charms her way through lavish ballrooms with Luca, the more bookish Bea is plunged into Gable’s shadowy world of informants. But when a betrayal unravels a carefully spun web of lies, everything they’ve fought for is thrown into jeopardy.

No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Lara is convicted of 32 felonies. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and LORD OF THE FLIES. But Lara brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the “shot caller.” When she’s released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she’s legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her.

Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective. She doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it. Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis begins to court her. Why have the adults around her not revealed that the touch of a hand can change everything? After following Louis to Glasgow, though, she learns the limits of his devotion. Faced with a seemingly impossible choice, she makes a terrible mistake. But her second sight may allow her a second chance.

For GBI investigator Will Trent and medical examiner Sara Linton, McAlpine Lodge seems like the ideal getaway to celebrate their honeymoon. Set on a gorgeous, off-the-grid mountaintop property, it’s the perfect place to unplug and reconnect. Until a bone-chilling scream cuts through the night. Mercy McAlpine, the manager of the Lodge, is dead. With a vicious storm raging and the one access road to the property washed out, the murderer must be someone on the mountain. But as Will and Sara investigate the McAlpine family and the other guests, they realize that everyone here is lying. Trapped on the resort, they must untangle a decades-old web of secrets to discover what happened to Mercy. And with the killer poised to strike again, the trip of a lifetime becomes a race against the clock.

Shackled to her bed against the pleas of the medical staff, Charli Zhao gives birth to a beautiful daughter she names Willow. Charli had been transported to the hospital from prison, where she is serving time for a crime she didn’t commit. Within hours of the birth, the unthinkable happens: the newborn is abducted, leaving Charli devastated and wondering if she’ll ever find her child, even after she gets free. When a local legal aid group recruits attorney Camille Delaney to help with a case on the inside, she feels drawn to these women’s stories. By the time Camille meets Charli, it’s been years since Willow was abducted, and the case has gone cold. With the help of her trusted friend and private investigator, Trish Seaholm, Camille begins a dogged pursuit to find Charli’s daughter and bring the man who framed Charli to justice.

You’ll be safe here. That’s what the tour guide promises Dr. Linda Farmer and her family when they relocate to Plymouth Valley. With the outside world in shambles, this move is her family’s last chance. Linda, her husband and their teen twins do their best to fit in. It works at first, but then Linda encounters Gal Parker, a hot mess of a woman, whose wife has abandoned her and whose kids are sick. One terrible night, Gal commits an unthinkable act. All of Plymouth Valley turns on Gal, refusing to speak her name. But Linda can’t stop wondering: What would drive a woman to do something so awful? The more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. A clock is ticking, too. Before the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, Linda has to figure out: Should she and her family be fighting to stay, or fighting their way out?

Jack Lee is a white lawyer from Freeman County, Virginia, who has never done anything to push back against racism, until he decides to represent Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with brutally killing an elderly and wealthy white couple. Doubting his decision, Lee fears that his legal skills may not be enough to prevail in a case where the odds are already stacked against both him and his client. Desiree DuBose is a Black lawyer from Chicago who has devoted her life to furthering the causes of justice and equality for everyone. She comes to Freeman County and enters a fractious and unwieldy partnership with Lee in a legal battle against the best prosecutor in the Commonwealth. Yet DuBose is also aware that powerful outside forces are at work to blunt the victories achieved by the Civil Rights era. 

Bound in an unwanted marriage, Freya dreams of becoming a warrior. When her husband betrays her to the region’s jarl, she is involved in a fight to the death against his son, Bjorn. To survive, Freya is forced to reveal her deepest secret: She possesses a drop of a goddess’s blood, which makes her a shield maiden with magic capable of repelling any attack. And it’s been foretold that such magic will unite the fractured nation of Skaland beneath the one who controls the shield maiden’s fate. Believing he’s destined to rule Skaland as king, the fanatical jarl binds Freya with a blood oath and orders Bjorn to protect her from their enemies. Desperate to prove her strength, Freya must train to fight and learn to control her magic, all while facing perilous tests set by the gods. The greatest test of all, however, may be resisting her forbidden attraction to Bjorn.

Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud’s. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes a gruesome discovery: this is no wax figure. The mannequin is the beautifully preserved body of a young woman who was once very much alive. But who would do such a dreadful thing, and why? Sleuthing out the answer to this question sets Veronica and Stoker on their wildest adventure yet. Through it all, the intrepid pair is always one step behind the latest villain --- a man who has killed once and will stop at nothing to recover the body of the woman he loved.

Aiden Valentine has a secret: he’s fallen out of love with love. And as the host of Baltimore’s romance hotline, that’s a bit of a problem. But when a young girl calls in to the station asking for dating advice for her mom, the interview goes viral, thrusting Aiden and "Heartstrings" into the limelight. Lucie Stone thought she was doing just fine. But when all of Baltimore is suddenly scrutinizing her love life --- or lack thereof --- she begins to question if she’s as happy as she believed. Maybe a little more romance wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Everyone wants Lucie to find her happy ending…even the handsome, temperamental man calling the shots. But when sparks start to fly behind the scenes, Lucie must make the final decision between the radio-sponsored happily ever after or the man in the headphones next to her.

After facilitating a handful of successful romances, Katie Donald is eager to continue helping the lovelorn citizens of Edinburgh find connection. Word of her expertise spreads quickly, and more people than ever are flocking to the Perfect Passion Company seeking Katie's advice. With each client's distinctive quirks and unique personalities, Katie finds herself seeking new and creative solutions to locate their perfect match.

April and Eddie have taken a wrong turn. They’re looking for the small resort town where they plan to spend their honeymoon. When they spot what appears to be a lone hitchhiker along the deserted road, they stop to help. But not long after the hitchiker gets into their car, they see the blood seeping from her jacket and a truck barreling down Atticus Line after them. When the hitchhiker dies at the local hospital, April and Eddie find themselves in the crosshairs of the Coldlake Falls police. Unexplained murders have been happening along Atticus Line for years, and the cops finally have two witnesses who easily become their only suspects. As April and Eddie start to dig into the history of the town and that horrible stretch of road to clear their names, they soon learn that there is something supernatural at work.

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives. They get swept up in the life of the facility --- the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; and the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.

It’s a brutal winter in Des Moines, Iowa, and the city is gripped by fear. A serial attacker known as the Sin Eater is stalking women and has just struck again. It’s a tough time and a tough place for Riley Fisher, a former small-town sergeant, to be reporting for duty as an FBI agent on her first assignment. Teamed with a man she’s not sure she can trust and struggling to prove herself --- while fighting the pull of her old life and family dramas --- Riley is tasked with investigating a vicious death threat against the newly elected female state governor. Gradually, she traces a disturbing connection between this case and the hunt for the Sin Eater. Through snow, ice, violence and lies, Riley Fisher is drawn towards a terrifying revelation.

In SLOW NOODLES, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone --- her home, her family, her country --- all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse and weaving silk.

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels, the Ibis Trilogy, 10 years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the 19th-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. SMOKE AND ASHES is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as the world at large.

Leslie Jamison is among our most beloved contemporary voices, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling and electric prose. In SPLINTERS, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of her most intimate relationships: new motherhood, a ruptured marriage, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once, Jamison juxtaposes the magical and the mundane in surprising ways. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, a deep reckoning that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.

THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE is the final installment in Stephen Graham Jones’ trilogy that kicked off with MY HEART IS A CHAINSAW and continued in DON’T FEAR THE REAPER. It’s been four years in prison since Jade Daniels last saw her hometown of Proofrock, Idaho, the day she took the fall, protecting her friend, Letha, and her family from incrimination. Since then, her reputation and the town have changed dramatically. There’s a lot of unfinished business in Proofrock, from serial killer cultists to the rich trying to buy Western authenticity. But there’s one aspect of Proofrock no one wants to confront…until Jade comes back to town. The curse of the Lake Witch is waiting, and now is the time for the final stand.