Super thief Riley Wolfe can do it all. He is a master of disguise, can scale a wall, and can vanish into thin air (thick air, too). He uses these unique talents to rob the richest. But this time, it’s the most powerful who have him in their grips. It’s not just that the high-up, rogue government agent has abducted the only two people Riley loves: it’s the fact that Riley has to do the man’s dirty work to set them free. It’s something Riley ordinarily would find a modest day’s work, infiltrating a madman’s Soviet missile silo in one of the world’s most remote places, all to find a secret on a tiny flash drive. But he’s never had to race the clock like this.

In the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo, an unusual statue of a Japanese mythic beast --- a kirin --- stands guard over the district from the classic Nihonbashi Bridge. In the evening, a man who appears to be very drunk staggers onto the bridge and collapses right under the statue of the winged beast. The patrolman who sees this scene unfold goes to rouse the man, only to discover that the man is dead and was stabbed in the chest. The key to solving the crime is to find out where he was attacked and why he made such a superhuman effort to carry himself to the Nihonbashi Bridge. That same night, a young man named Yashima is injured in a car accident while attempting to flee from the police. Found on him is the wallet of the murdered man.

1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia, a spy in the guise of a language teacher. Embedded in the town of Voronezh, Kite’s mission is to extract a chemical weapons scientist before the man’s groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands and shuttle him across the border to freedom in Ukraine. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong, and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. 2020: Thirty years after that dangerous mission, Kite discovers that its outcome put his name on the notorious “JUDAS” list --- a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination. Kite’s fight for survival takes him to Dubai, where he enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian secret state.

Aspiring playwright Kate Gamble is struggling to launch a script she’s been secretly researching her entire life. Her father is Christian Gamble, CEO of Buck Technologies, a private data integration company whose clients include the CIA and virtually every counter-terrorism organization in the Western World. Kate’s father adores her, and a play about the dark side of Big Data would be the ultimate betrayal in his eyes. But Kate is compelled to tell this story --- not only as an artist exploring the personal information catastrophe that affects us all, but as a daughter trying to understand her mother’s apparent loss of purpose. Then Patrick Battle comes back into her life, changing everything she has ever thought about her play, her father and her mother’s tragic death.

When Cassie Fitzgerald was at school in the late ’90s, she and her friends killed a fellow student. Almost 20 years later, Cassie is a happily married mother who loves her job --- as a police officer. She closely guards the secret she has all but erased from her memory. One day, her husband finally persuades her to go to a school reunion. But then, shockingly, one of her old friends, Garfield Rice, is found dead in the school bathroom, supposedly from a drug overdose. Garfield was an eminent --- and controversial --- MP, and the investigation is high profile. The trouble is, Cassie can’t shake the feeling that one of them has killed again. Is Cassie right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies?

It’s getting late. I want to share my knowledge of London with you, if I can remember any of it. So says Arthur Bryant. He and John May are the nation’s oldest serving detectives. Who better to reveal its secrets? Why does this rainy, cold, gray city capture so many imaginations? Could its very unreliability hold the key to its longevity? The detectives are joined by their boss, Raymond Land, and some of their most disreputable friends. Each character gives us a short tour of odd buildings, odder characters, lost venues, forgotten disasters, confusing routes, dubious gossip, illicit pleasures and hidden pubs. They make all sorts of connections --- and show us why it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction in London.

Minnesota, 1977. For the teens of one close-knit community, summer means late-night swimming parties at the quarry, the county fair, and venturing into the tunnels beneath the city. But for two best friends, it’s not all fun and games. Heather and Brenda have a secret. Something they saw in the dark. Something they can’t forget. They’ve decided to never tell a soul. But their vow is tested when their friend disappears --- the second girl to vanish in a week. And yet the authorities are reluctant to investigate. Heather is terrified that the missing girls are connected to what she and Brenda stumbled upon that night. Desperately searching for answers on her own, she learns that no one in her community is who they seem to be.

Time slips. Doomsday scenarios. Killer butterflies. C. J. Tudor’s novels are widely acclaimed for their dark, twisty suspense plots, but with A SLIVER OF DARKNESS, she pulls us even further into her dizzying imagination. In “The Lion at the Gate,” a strange piece of graffiti leads to a terrifying encounter for four school friends. In “Final Course,” the world has descended into darkness, but a group of old friends make time for one last dinner party. In “Runaway Blues,” thwarted love, revenge and something very nasty stowed in a hat box converge. In “Gloria,” a strange girl at a service station endears herself to a coldhearted killer, but can a leopard really change its spots? And in “I’m Not Ted,” a case of mistaken identity has unforeseen fatal consequences.

While checking on a former patient at her isolated Victorian house, Dr. Amy Winslow discovers in the cellar a secret, cobweb-covered 1899 electrochemical laboratory containing a Jules Verne-esque steam-punk sarcophagus out of which springs a wild-eyed, half-mummified, crypt-keeper-like man. He claims to be a real-life Victorian master chemist and detective named Holmes, who allowed Conan Doyle to write stories based on his cases. Holmes and his reluctant new Watson, Amy, find themselves unexpectedly attracted to each other while perilously involved in reclaiming his proof of identity. It’s all connected to a horrific death-by-tiger, only the first of several bizarre, mystifying murders being committed by an exquisitely fiendish descendant of Holmes’ Victorian archenemy, Professor Moriarty.

Dr. Brandt Savage is on sabbatical from the University of Chicago. Instead of doing solo fieldwork in anthropology, the gawky, bespectacled PhD finds himself enrolled in a school where he is the sole pupil. His professor, “Meed,” is demanding. She’s also his captor. Savage emerges from their intensive training sessions physically and mentally transformed, but with no idea why he’s been chosen and how he’ll use his fearsome abilities. Then his first mission with Meed takes them back to her own training ground, where Savage learns how deeply entwined their two lives have been. To prevent a new class of killers from escaping this harsh place where their ancestors first fought to make a better world, they must pledge anew: Do right to all, and wrong to no one.