Coming Soon

Stella O'Neill is just your average millennial, working at a public library and worrying about making rent. No one would suspect she's been living under an assumed name or that she was raised in a Vermont commune of "diviners" where she witnessed her mother’s brutal murder. But her quiet, anonymous existence is upended when a true-crime obsessive posts her current name and location on the internet. Now, Stella has to get out of Boston before her mother’s killer can find her. She heads to the off-the-grid retreat of her childhood to confront her mother’s unhinged guru who controlled their lives for so long. Stella has two powerful assets: determination and a supernatural gift. Relying on her mother’s beloved rose quartz pendulum, Stella will have to outwit the charismatic leader who’s ruined so many lives and discover once and for all the true identity of her mother's killer --- before becoming his next victim.

These new, recent and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink. She finally decides that she will join him when he suggests they meet at his home. A man is so forgetful that his wife panics and yells into his phone, asking where their daughter has gone. A woman resents that a colleague has achieved greater success and thinks she ought to do something about it.

The disappearance of a local politician’s teenage daughter is major news in Minnesota. As a huge manhunt is launched to find her, Cork O’Connor’s grandson stumbles across the shallow grave of a young Ojibwe woman --- but nobody seems that interested. Nobody, that is, except Cork and the newly formed Iron Lake Ojibwe Tribal Police. As Cork and the tribal officers dig into the circumstances of this mysterious and grim discovery, they uncover a connection to the missing teenager. And soon, it’s clear that Cork’s grandson is in danger of being the killer’s next victim.

Following a semi-successful career as a teen model in New York City, Danielle Greer has moved back to the mountains of North Georgia and is living in her childhood home with her husband and four daughters. One stifling, lazy afternoon, the girls are exploring the ravine behind the house when they come across a body. Danielle knows the body doesn't belong to Benji Law, a younger local misfit who she had an illicit relationship with as a teenager. No, his body was found after he was killed in a motorcycle accident on the road in front of her family's house. Danielle has a good idea who the body might be, but she doesn't know how it got there. When local police officer Cady Benson is called in to investigate, Danielle's world is turned upside down, and she's thrust back into those dark, confusing days leading up to Benji's death.

In the summer of 1941, on the New England shores where they were raised, Evelyn and Joseph fell in love. Now, more than 60 years later, with a lifetime between them, they have gathered their three grown children to share the staggering news: she has received a tragic diagnosis, and he cannot live without her. So in one year’s time, they will end their lives on their own terms. As the couple comes to grips with their fate, they retrace their past --- the joys and regrets, the laughter and the sorrow --- that brought them to this moment. They embark on a journey to live out their greatest dreams and to comfort and connect with each of their children before they're gone. But as their final days draw closer, they must confront the stark reality of what they are about to do, and make peace with the legacy they will leave behind for their family.

Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world that centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-the-heel section of Hollywood: 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ’n’ rollers and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion. It also was the breaking and then the remaking --- and thus the true making --- of another great American writer: Eve Babitz. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.