Los Angeles, 1934. Mary Frances is young, restlessly married, and returning from her first sojourn in France. She is hungry, and not just for food: she wants Tim, her husband Al’s charming friend, who encourages her writing and seems to understand her better than anyone. After a night’s transgression, it’s only a matter of time before Mary Frances claims what she truly desires, plunging all three of them into a tangled triangle of affection that will have far-reaching effects on their families, their careers and their lives.

One day, the preschool office calls and says Janie needs to come in to talk about her four-year-old son, Noah. And life as she knows it stops. For Jerome Anderson, life as he knows it has stopped. A deadly diagnosis has made him realize he is approaching the end of his life. He spent his life searching for that something else. And with Noah, he thinks he's found it. Soon Noah, Janie and Anderson will find themselves knocking on the door of a mother whose son has been missing for eight years --- and when that door opens, all of their questions will be answered.

As a blizzard bears down, Percy James sets off to find her troubled mother, Carletta. Fearing she is strung out on meth and that she won’t survive the storm, Percy heads for Shelton Potter’s cabin. Searching the house, she finds the two-bit criminal and his girlfriend drugged into oblivion --- and a crying baby girl. Percy knows she must save her --- a split-second decision that is the beginning of a dangerous odyssey in which she must battle the elements and evade Shelton and a small band of desperate criminals, hell-bent on getting that baby back.

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across. A young couple on the brink of marriage --- the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist --- find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel.

In the summer of 1977, 11-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina whose mentor is 47-year-old Maurice DuPont. As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives. In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsize the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self. When she receives a letter from a man she has long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.

Natalie Falcone gets a phone call every mother dreads: It’s from a hospital emergency room in the town where her daughter, Arden, attends college. Arden has been in a fire, along with Natalie’s niece, Rory --- her estranged brother-in-law's daughter and Arden’s best friend. Natalie rushes to the hospital and learns that both Arden and Rory lie unconscious, and that another student has died in the blaze. The case unearths a portrait of a complex friendship, a love triangle, a fight, and a girl who was struggling more than anyone realized.

When Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard, host his brother's bachelor party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery. She takes their young daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her Westchester home to the men and their hired entertainment. What she does not expect is that the entertainment --- two scared young women brought there by force --- will kill their captors and drive off into the night. Kristin is unable to forgive her husband for his lapses in judgment, or for the moment he shared with a dark-haired girl in the guest room. But for the dark-haired girl, Alexandra, the danger is just beginning.

When former party girl and society photographer Theophania Bogart flees to San Francisco to escape a high-profile family tragedy, a series of murders drags her unwillingly out of hiding. In no time at all, she discovers she's been providing cover for a sophisticated smuggling operation, she starts to fall for an untrustworthy stranger, and she's knocked out, tied up and imprisoned. The police are sure she's lying. The smugglers are sure she knows too much. Her friends? They aren't sure what to believe. The body count is rising, and Theo struggles to find the killer before she's the next victim or her new life is exposed as an elaborate fraud.

When Signora A first enters the narrator’s home, his wife, Nora, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. First as their maid and nanny, then their confidante, this older woman begins to help her employers negotiate married life, quickly becoming the glue in their small household. She is the steady, maternal influence for both husband and wife, and their son, Emanuele, whom she protects from his parents’ expectations and disappointments. But the family’s delicate fabric comes undone when Signora A is diagnosed with cancer.

At a neglected secondhand shop, Annie McDee purchases a painting that happens to be a lost masterpiece by one of the most important French painters of the 18th century. But who painted this masterpiece is not clear at first. Soon Annie finds herself pursued by interested parties who would do anything to possess her picture. In her search for the painting’s identity, Annie will unwittingly uncover some of the darkest secrets of European history --- as well as the possibility of falling in love again.