When Commander Monk of the Thames River Police is called to investigate the drowning of an escaped prisoner, he’s forced to contend with customs officer McNab, who clearly bears a bitter grudge against him. But the reason is a mystery in itself. Monk’s memory loss --- a secret he guards closely --- leaves him vulnerable to repercussions from his missing past, especially his exploits overseas in the tumultuous Gold Rush days of San Francisco. And now McNab appears intent on using whatever damning facts he can find to his advantage to ruin Monk’s future as an officer of the law.

We never know what will happen next in Florida. We know only that, any minute now, something will. Every few months, Dave Barry gets a call from some media person wanting to know, “What the hell is wrong with Florida?” Somehow, the state has acquired an image as a subtropical festival of stupid, and as a loyal Floridian, Dave begs to differ. It is a great state, and Dave is going to tell you why. Join him as he celebrates Florida from Key West at the bottom to whatever it is that’s at the top, from the Sunshine State’s earliest history to the fun-fair of weirdness that it is today.

New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history --- and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul’s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country? As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem.

As guests arrive for a party at her Irish mansion, Lady Athelinda Playford has decided to cut off her two children without a penny and leave her vast fortune to an invalid who has only weeks to live. Among her visitors are the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard. Neither knows why he has been invited --- until Poirot begins to wonder if Lady Playford expects a murder. But why does she seem so determined to provoke a killer? And why --- when the crime is committed despite Poirot's best efforts to stop it --- does the identity of the victim make no sense at all?

A wounded officer is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford’s aid station, where she stabilizes him. The odd thing is, the officer isn't British --- he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German. When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, won by the Germans. But on which side of the war do his sympathies really lie? When the French officer disappears in Paris, it’s up to Bess to find out why, even at the risk of her own life.

Rise the dark. These were the last words written in Lauren Novak's notebook before she was murdered in a strange Florida village. They've never meant anything to the police or to her husband, investigator Markus Novak. Now the man he believes killed her is out of prison, and draws Markus to the place he's avoided for so long: the lonely road where his wife was shot to death. In Red Lodge, Montana, Sabrina Baldwin is abducted by Garland Webb, the man Markus believes killed his wife. Drawing them all together is a messianic villain who understands that you can never outpace your past. You can only rise against the future.

Red Rover, the blackest of black ops teams, is betrayed on its top-priority mission to capture and interrogate a mysterious Saudi terrorist. Greg Whitman and Felix Orteño are left adrift in a world full of deathly shadows, blind alleys and unanswerable questions. Into their midst comes Charlize Daou, a brilliant arms expert who possesses the true power necessary for survival. Ignoring their new orders, Red Rover secretly sets out to find the protected Saudi terrorist, the first step in a perilous journey into the heart of a vast conspiracy that involves the NSA, a cabal of immensely wealthy mystics known as the Alchemists, and an ageless visionary out to create an entirely new way of waging war.

A woman sits at her father's bedside, watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters have all turned up over the past week to pay their last respects. Each is traumatized in his or her own way, and the bonds that unite them to each other are fragile. With her siblings all gone, back to their self-obsessed lives, she is now alone with the faltering wreck of her father's cancer-ridden body. It is always at times like this when it --- the dark and nameless, the impossible, presence that lingers along the fringes of the dark fields beyond the house --- comes calling.

How far will you go to achieve a dream? That's the question a celebrated coach poses to Katie and Eric Knox after he sees their daughter Devon, a gymnastics prodigy and Olympic hopeful, compete. But then a violent death rocks their close-knit gymnastics community, and everything they have worked so hard for is suddenly at risk. As rumors swirl among the other parents, Katie tries frantically to hold her family together while also finding herself irresistibly drawn to the crime itself. What she uncovers forces Katie to consider whether there's any price she isn't willing to pay to achieve Devon's dream.

When ex–military contractor John Knox receives a text from partner Grace Chu warning that she fears her cover may have been blown while on assignment, he jumps into action. Knox must locate her overseas handlers, convince them of the threat, and then try to retrace the well-hidden steps of a woman who had been attempting to determine how one million euros’ worth of AIDS vaccine disappeared, all while eluding angry poachers on a parallel trail. As the threat from Al-Shaabab militants interferes with his pursuit of Grace, Knox finds himself pitted against the most savage and suicidal fighters in the world.