Every law firm has its backroom bench of brilliant workaholic nerds ferocious in their commitment to the law and to their clients. Such a player is Milton Bernstein of Abbott & Windsor. He's highly valued by the partners for his skills, but untested in the courtroom. Milton's younger brother, Hal, is his polar opposite --- strikingly handsome, a high school baseball legend in St. Louis who was on his way to the major leagues until he destroyed his prospects in a motorcycle accident. Neither brilliant nor driven, Hal has to face up to earning a living. For now he's killing time as a lifeguard at an exclusive country club. But the lives of both brothers are about to change.

LeAnne Hogan went to Afghanistan as a rising star in the military and came back a much lesser person, with a missing eye and half her face badly scarred. Shattered by one last blow --- the sudden death of her hospital roommate, Marci --- LeAnne finds herself on a fateful drive across the country, reflecting on her past and seeing no future. Arriving in the rain-soaked small town in Washington state that Marci had called home, she makes a troubling discovery: Marci’s eight-year-old daughter has vanished. As she becomes obsessed with finding the little girl, LeAnne and a new canine companion of hers are drawn into danger as dark and menacing as her last Afghan mission.

When former prosecutor Cal Claxton’s neighbor, Jim Kavanaugh, the owner and gifted vintner of an up-and-coming winery, is accused of murdering his wife, his freedom --- and the grape harvest --- is suddenly in jeopardy along with his reputation, and his business begins to slide. No gentleman farmer, this puts the rugged winemaker's property, his only financial asset, in play. When a blackmail plot is hatched against the owner of adjacent land, it begins to look like a brutal game of real-life Monopoly is underway. Cal agrees to defend Jim, a good friend, which pulls him reluctantly into the blackmail plot and might well make him the next target of a vicious, cunning killer.

It is early in 1933, and wealthy bohemian Rowland Sinclair and his companions --- a poet, a painter and a sculptress who also models nude --- are ensconced in the superlative luxury of The Hydro Majestic-Medlow Bath. But Rowland, try as he might to lead the boho life in Sydney in the family mansion or in a luxury spa, can't dismiss the responsibilities of being a Sinclair. Most of them rest upon his conservative elder brother, Wilfred. And Wil now makes two claims on Rowly. One is to appear at an important upcoming board meeting of a firm where Rowly, pressured by Wil, serves as a director. The other is to hustle up into the high country where a longtime family stockman appears to have gone missing --- and find him.

From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the ongoing struggle for human rights in the Middle East, Condoleezza Rice has served on the front lines of history. As a child, she was an eyewitness to a third awakening of freedom, when her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, became the epicenter of the civil rights movement for black Americans. In this book, Rice explains what these epochal events teach us about democracy. At a time when people around the world are wondering whether democracy is in decline, Rice shares insights from her experiences as a policymaker, scholar and citizen, in order to put democracy's challenges into perspective.

In 1876, two monomaniacal paleontologists pillage the Wild West, hunting for dinosaur fossils, while surveilling, deceiving and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars. Into this treacherous territory plunges the arrogant and entitled William Johnson, a Yale student who has joined world-renowned paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh on his latest expedition. But when the paranoid and secretive Marsh becomes convinced that William is spying for his nemesis, Edward Drinker Cope, he abandons him in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a locus of crime and vice. William is forced to join forces with Cope and soon stumbles upon a discovery of historic proportions.

Veteran reporter Geneva Chase is at the end of her professional rope. Battling alcoholism and bad choices, she's lost every major news job she's had. Working at her hometown newspaper is her last chance to redeem herself --- and now the paper's future is in doubt. Then she lands the story of a lifetime: Six nude bodies are found hacked to pieces in a Queen Anne mansion on the coast of Long Island Sound. The sensational headline is picked up by the metro papers, and Geneva is back in the game, using her reporter's nose to sniff out the secrets of Sheffield's rich and entitled citizens. As her investigation leads her deeper into dangerous waters, her toxic affair with a married man and her inability to get sober threaten to undo everything she has worked so hard to achieve.

Taking a midnight stroll along the Hudson River, Mike Hammer gets more than he bargained for: a partial corpse on an ice floe. The body is that of a butler who spent the last years of his life working for a millionaire --- also now deceased --- and his notoriously privileged children. Were both master and servant murdered? Captain Pat Chambers thinks so. But to prove it, Hammer must travel to upstate New York to investigate the dead man’s family, all of whom have a motive for murder --- and one of whom has a taste for it.

Paul Stuart, a renowned food writer, finds himself at loose ends after his longtime girlfriend leaves him for her personal trainer. To cheer him up, Paul’s editor, Gloria, encourages him to finish his latest cookbook on-site in Tuscany, hoping that a change of scenery will offer a cure for both heartache and writer’s block. But upon Paul’s arrival, things don’t go quite as planned. A mishap with his rental-car reservation leaves him stranded, until a newfound friend leads him to an intriguing alternative: a bulldozer. With little choice in the matter, Paul accepts the offer, and as he journeys into the idyllic hillside town of Montalcino, he discovers that the bulldozer may be the least of the surprises that await him.

In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, life goes on as it has for generations --- until a stranger appears at the village gate. Slowly, Li-yan begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock, she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her near an orphanage. Despite being raised by loving adoptive parents, Li-yan’s daughter, Haley, wonders about her origins. Across the ocean Li-yan longs for her lost daughter. Over the course of years, each searches for meaning in the study of Pu’er, the tea that has shaped their family’s destiny for centuries.