In these 10 stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters --- from children to grandmothers to ghosts --- live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief and the meaning of home, WITNESS enacts its own testimony.

Jack might be a polished, Harvard-educated lawyer on paper, but everyone in the down-at-the-heels, if picturesque, village of Onset, Massachusetts, knows his real job: moving people on the run from powerful enemies. The family business --- co-managed with his father, a retired spy --- is smooth sailing, as they fill up Onset’s holiday homes during the town’s long, drowsy off-season and help clients shed their identities in preparation for fresh starts. But when Elena, Jack’s former flame --- a dedicated hustler who's no stranger to the fugitive life --- makes an unexpected return to town, her arrival upends Jack’s routine existence. It isn’t long before Jack finds himself enmeshed in her latest project: intercepting millions of dollars’ worth of raw diamonds before they’re shipped overseas.

Once a promising Midwestern football star, Mike Brink was transformed by a traumatic brain injury that caused a rare medical condition: acquired savant syndrome. The injury left him with a mental superpower --- he can solve puzzles in ways ordinary people can’t. But it also left him deeply isolated. Everything changes after Brink meets Jess Price, a woman serving 30 years in prison for murder who hasn’t spoken a word since her arrest five years before. When Price draws a perplexing puzzle, her psychiatrist believes it will explain her crime and calls Brink to solve it. What begins as a desire to crack an alluring cipher quickly morphs into an obsession with Price herself. She soon reveals that there is something more urgent and dangerous, behind her silence, thrusting Brink into a hunt for the truth.

In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle. After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Through her friendship with Dorothy and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope is for all three of them to survive the war intact.

When a years-long case against a powerful mobster finally cracks and an unimpeachable witness takes the stand, federal prosecutor Nora Carleton is looking forward to putting the defendant away for good. The mobster, though, has other plans. As the witness’s testimony concludes, a note is passed to the prosecution offering up information into the assassination of a disgraced former New York governor, murdered in his penthouse apartment just days before. It’s enough to blow the case wide open, and to send Nora into a high-stakes investigation of conspiracy, corruption and danger.

John Feinstein, who has spent four decades finding intriguing sports characters and narratives and turning them into classic books, chronicles the life and career of David Feherty. The two have known each other for years, beginning with Feinstein’s work on A GOOD WALK SPOILED, which was researched and written at a time when Feherty was an excellent player who won five times in Europe and was on the '91 Ryder Cup team, but also was a functioning alcoholic. In retirement from the game, Feherty has sobered up, while his golf world persona has only grown in stature. Feherty is now a grand ambassador for golf, a man who is feted by US Presidents and respected by every big name in the game.

Over Michael Bamberger’s celebrated writing career, he has written a handful of books and hundreds of Sports Illustrated stories about professional golf and those who play it --- that is, the .001 percent. Now, in a delightful turn of events, Bamberger has decided to train his eye on the rest of us. In his most personal book yet, Bamberger takes the lid off a game that is both quasi-religious and a nonstop party, posing an age-old question early that is answered over its pages: Why does the game cast such a spell on us? Here is the story of modern golf that is not on TV. This is our story, we who pay to play, who can’t wait to get another crack at the game, even when golf doesn’t love us back.

Paul Runyan --- the Arkansas farm boy who stood 5'6" and weighed 130 pounds --- shocked the golf world by defeating long and lean, sweet-swinging Sam Snead in the finals of the 1938 PGA Championship, thus earning the nickname “Little Poison.” Runyan did more than beat Snead: he shellacked him as decisively as David toppled mighty Goliath. His resounding victory was so convincing, so dominant, that even Snead had to shake his head when it was finished and wonder how the porkpie-wearing, pint-sized golf pro had gotten the better of him in the 36-hole final. LITTLE POISON is the story of a man who made a career out of punching above his weight on the golf course.

Beginning in 1947 with I, THE JURY and continuing with his next six novels, Mickey Spillane quickly amassed a readership in the tens of millions, becoming the bestselling novelist in the history of American publishing. There is, however, more to Spillane’s life than the books. He also starred as Mike Hammer in a movie, was a circus performer, worked with the FBI in capturing a notorious criminal, and starred in Miller Light beer commercials that were so popular they ran for a quarter of a century. Max Allan Collins became Spillane’s friend and collaborator, continuing the Mike Hammer series for years after the author's death. Now, with co-author James Traylor, Collins has produced the first comprehensive and authoritative profile of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.

Forty years ago, Steven “Smithy” Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy became convinced that she had been right. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Smithy decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn’t just a writer of forgotten children’s stories. The Twyford Code holds a great secret, and Smithy may just have the key.