Piet Barol has an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. He applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of Europe’s leading hotelier: a child who refuses to leave his family’s mansion on Amsterdam’s grandest canal. As the young man enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets --- and soon, quietly, steadily, finds his life transformed as he in turn transforms the lives of those around him.

Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James, Scotland Yard partners as well as devoted life-mates, become embroiled in the case of the puzzling drowning of a rower, a Met detective, on the Thames. 

Like many couples, Michael and Jolene Zarkades have to face the pressures of everyday life --- children, careers, bills, chores --- even as their 12-year marriage is falling apart. Then an unexpected deployment sends Jolene deep into harm’s way and leaves defense attorney Michael at home, unaccustomed to being a single parent to their two girls.

When Gemma Hardy is orphaned and left to fend for herself, she moves to the Orkney Islands, where she is hired as an au pair for the niece of charming London businessman Hugh Sinclair. Everyone in the island community, including Gemma, is intrigued by the enigmatic Hugh, and soon, Gemma and Hugh begin a complex relationship that will change Gemma’s life forever.

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel is still terminal. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

Min Green and Ed Slaterton are breaking up, so Min is writing Ed a letter and giving him a box. Inside the box is why they broke up. Item after item is illustrated and accounted for, and then the box, like a girlfriend, will be dumped.

The night before her lavish wedding, Cressida Forrest went to bed serene and happy. By morning she had vanished without a trace. Shocked and confused, the two families face a long day of revelations, as a complex, fragile web of sexual, marital and financial secrets is ripped apart by Cressida's disappearance.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother --- a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang --- and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate.

Inspired by a lifelong passion for Jane Austen, mystery writer P. D. James draws the characters of Austen’s beloved novel PRIDE AND PREJUDICE into a tale of murder and emotional mayhem.