From a distance, Claudia Castro has it all: a famous family, a trust fund, thousands of Instagram followers, and a spot in NYU’s freshman class. But look closer, and things are messier: her parents are separating, she’s just been humiliated by a sleazy documentary, and her sister is about to have a baby with a man she barely knows. Claudia starts the school year resolved to find a path toward something positive, maybe even meaningful --- and then one drunken night everything changes. She cuts herself off from her family, seeking solace in a new friendship. But when the rest of school comes back from spring break, Claudia is missing. Suddenly, the whole city is trying to piece together the hours of that terrible night.

1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They're the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed. 2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protégé's remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant, but he doesn't know that she has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max's secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won't be easy, Audra knows someone must pay.

Ever since she was adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage, Paloma has had the best of everything. Now at 30 years old and recently cut off from her parents’ funds, she decides to sublet the second bedroom of her overpriced San Francisco apartment to Arun, who recently moved from India. Arun eventually discovers Paloma's darkest secret, one that could jeopardize her own fragile place in this country. Before Paloma can pay Arun off, she finds him face down in a pool of blood. She flees the apartment, but by the time the police arrive, there's no body --- and no evidence that Arun ever even existed in the first place. Paloma is terrified that this is all somehow tangled up in the desperate actions she took to escape Sri Lanka so many years ago.

Every year, as the anniversary of 9/11 inches closer on the calendar, Kit Capriol scans the memorials published in the New York Times. It's a simple thing to look up a name and phone number, and reach out to surviving family members who might still be yearning for connection with their lost loved one. After her husband went down in the North Tower, Kit scraped by as an actress. But now her daughter Zoey is in the hospital, bills are due and the acting work has dried up. Becoming a medium is almost too easy for someone used to pretending for a living. Now, though, something has changed. The seances Kit holds in her apartment are starting to feel unsettlingly real, and the intriguing man she met at a local bar could be more complicated than he seems.

When the roar of a low-flying plane awakens him in the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes knows something strange is happening at the nearby airfield on the coast of North Carolina. But nothing can prepare him for what he finds: a large airplane has crash-landed and is now sitting sideways on the runway, and there are no signs of a pilot or cargo. When the body of a local man is discovered --- shot dead and lying on the grass near the crash site --- Winston begins a murder investigation that will change the course of his life and the fate of the community that he has sworn to protect.

Nanao, nicknamed Lady Bird --- the self-proclaimed “unluckiest assassin in the world” --- boards a bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka with one simple task: grab a suitcase and get off at the next stop. Unbeknownst to him, the deadly duo Tangerine and Lemon are also after the very same suitcase --- and they are not the only dangerous passengers onboard. Satoshi, “the Prince,” is also in the mix and has history with some of the others. Risk fuels him as does a good philosophical debate...like, is killing really wrong? Chasing the Prince is another assassin with a score to settle for the time the Prince casually pushed a young boy off of a roof, leaving him comatose. When the five assassins discover they are all on the same train, they realize their missions are not as unrelated as they first appear.

The Lovelorn Killer murdered seven women, ritually binding them and leaving them for dead before penning them gruesome love letters in the local papers. Then he disappeared, and there hasn’t been a trace of him in 20 years. Grace Harper, who uses her snooping skills as part of an amateur sleuth group, believes that the Lovelorn Killer is still living in the same neighborhoods in which he hunted. If she can figure out how he selected his victims, she will have the key to his identity. Detective Annalisa Vega lost someone she loved to the killer. Now she's at a murder scene with the worst kind of déjà vu: Grace Harper lies bound and dead on the floor, surrounded by clues to the biggest murder case that Chicago homicide never solved.

On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend. One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the Dark Place, the dense forest is the writer’s favorite area for long walks, and it’s on one such walk that she stumbles upon a mysterious note that simply reads “DIG HERE.” Could this be a clue towards what has happened to the missing young couple? And what exactly is buried in this haunted ground?

It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien published THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. What may be less known is that he continued to write about Middle-earth in the decades that followed, right up until the years before his death in 1973. For him, Middle-earth was part of an entire world to be explored, and the writings in THE NATURE OF MIDDLE-EARTH reveal the journeys that he took as he sought to better understand his unique creation. From sweeping themes as profound as Elvish immortality and reincarnation, and the Powers of the Valar, to the more earth-bound subjects of the lands and beasts of Númenor, the geography of the Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor, and even who had beards!

We have your son. It’s the call that’s every parent’s nightmare. And for CIA analyst Jill Bailey, it’s the call that changes everything. It’s Jill’s job to vet new CIA sources. Like Falcon, who’s been on the recruitment fast track. But before she can get to work, Jill learns that her son has been taken. And to get him back, she does something she thought she’d never do. Alex Charles, a hard-hitting journalist, begins to investigate an anonymous tip: an explosive claim about the CIA’s hottest new source. The tip --- and a fierce determination to find the truth --- leads Alex to Jill, who would rather remain hidden. As the two begin to work together, they uncover a vast conspiracy that will force them to confront their loyalties to family and country.