The only child of a single mother, Nina Hill has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, a kick-butt trivia team, a world-class planner and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book. When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! It's time for Nina to come out of her comfortable shell, but she isn't convinced real life could ever live up to fiction. It's going to take a brand-new family, a persistent suitor, and the combined effects of ice cream and trivia to make her turn her own fresh page.

Europe, 1940: Belgium has been overrun by the German army. Posing as a friar, a British operative talks his way into a monastery just before Nazi art thieves plan to sweep through the area and whisk everything of value back to Berlin. The ersatz man of the cloth adds an old leather Bible to the monastery’s library and then escapes. London, 2017: A construction worker makes a grisly discovery --- a skeletal arm-bone with a rusty handcuff attached to the wrist. It’s all that remains of a courier who died in a V-2 rocket attack. The woman who will put these two disparate events together --- and understand the looming tragedy she must hurry to prevent --- is Russian historian and former Soviet chess champion Larissa Mendelovg Klimt.

With no other family or friends her own age, Ana eclipses her little girl Mara’s entire world. They take turns caring for each other --- in ways big and small. However, their arrangement begins to unravel when Ana becomes involved with a civilian rebel group attempting to undermine the city's torturous Police Chief, who rules over 1980s Rio de Janeiro with terrifying brutality. Ana makes decisions that indelibly change their shared life. When Mara is forced to escape, she emigrates to California where she finds employment as a caregiver to a young woman dying of stomach cancer. It’s here that she begins to grapple with her turbulent past and starts to uncover vital truths --- about her mother, herself, and what it means to truly take care of someone.

Detective Porter and the team have been pulled from the hunt for Anson Bishop, the Four Monkey Killer, by the feds. When the body of a young girl is found beneath the frozen waters of Jackson Park Lagoon, she is identified as Ella Reynolds, missing three weeks. But how did she get there? The lagoon froze months earlier. More baffling? She’s found wearing the clothes of another girl, missing less than two days. Obsessed with catching Bishop, Porter follows a single grainy photograph from Chicago to the streets of New Orleans and stumbles into a world darker than he could have possibly imagined, where he quickly realizes that the only place more frightening than the mind of a serial killer is the mind of the mother from which he came.

Eight months after confronting Pendulum, John Wallace is losing himself in a dangerous warzone in a misguided attempt at penance for what he has done. But an assassination attempt makes Wallace realize that he has been targeted for death once again. This time, Wallace is prepared; tracking down his would-be assassin, he discovers a link to his nemesis, Pendulum. The link is the missing piece of a puzzle that has tormented FBI Agent Christine Ash ever since they confronted Pendulum, but with no Bureau support she has been unable to pursue her case. Wallace's proof breaks it, but also exposes them both to terrible danger.

Margaret Jacobsen is just about to step into the bright future she’s worked for so hard and so long: a new dream job, a fiancé she adores, and the promise of a picture-perfect life just around the corner. Then, suddenly, everything she worked for is taken away in a brief, tumultuous moment. In the hospital and forced to face the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again, Maggie must confront the unthinkable. First, there is her fiancé, Chip, who wallows in self-pity while simultaneously expecting to be forgiven. Then, there's her sister Kit, who shows up after pulling a three-year vanishing act. Finally, there's Ian, her physical therapist, who won't let her give in to her pity, and who sees her like no one has seen her before.

In his sharp, surprising debut, Neel Patel gives voice to our most deeply held stereotypes and then slowly undermines them. His characters, almost all of whom are first-generation Indian Americans, subvert our expectations that they will sit quietly by. We meet two brothers caught in an elaborate web of envy and loathing; a young gay man who becomes involved with an older man whose secret he could never guess; three women who almost gleefully throw off the pleasant agreeability society asks of them; and, in the final pair of linked stories, a young couple struggling against the devastating force of community gossip.

In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to Jell-O from its inventor for $450. The sale would turn out to be one of the most profitable business deals in American history, and the generations that followed enjoyed immense privilege --- but they were also haunted by suicides, cancer, alcoholism and mysterious ailments. More than 100 years later, Allie's mother Mary was diagnosed with the same cancer that had claimed her own mother's life. Determined to combat what she had come to consider the "Jell-O curse," Mary started researching her family's past. Before she died, Mary began to send Allie boxes of her research and notes, hoping that her daughter might write what she could not. JELL-O GIRLS is the liberation of that story.

Judith Kratt inherited all the Kratt family had to offer --- the pie safe, the copper clock, the murder no one talks about. She knows it's high time to make an inventory of her household and its valuables, but she finds that cataloging the family belongings --- as well as their misfortunes --- won't contain her family's secrets, not when her wayward sister suddenly returns, determined to expose skeletons the Kratts had hoped to take to their graves. Interweaving the present with chilling flashbacks from one fateful evening in 1929, Judith pieces together the influence of her family on their small South Carolina cotton town, learning that the devastating effects of dark family secrets can last a lifetime and beyond.

There is a place in Minnesota with hundreds of miles of glacial lakes and untouched forests called the Boundary Waters. Ten years ago, a man and his son trekked into this wilderness and never returned. They were presumed dead until a decade later when the son appeared. He was violent and uncommunicative and sent to a psychiatric facility. Maya Stark, the assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection with him, but he refuses to answer questions about his father or the last 10 years of his life. As she’s drawn closer to her high-profile patient, she’ll risk everything to reunite him with his father who has disappeared from the known world.

When Darl Moody went hunting after a monster buck he's chased for years, he never expected he'd accidentally shoot a man digging ginseng. Worse yet, he's killed a Brewer, a family notorious for vengeance and violence. With nowhere to turn, Darl calls on the help of the only man he knows will answer: his best friend, Calvin Hooper. But when Dwayne Brewer comes looking for his missing brother and stumbles onto a blood trail leading straight back to Darl and Calvin, a nightmare of revenge rips apart their world.

For Clara Darden, Grand Central Terminal is the stepping stone to her future. It is 1928, and she is teaching at the lauded Grand Central School of Art. But Clara and her bohemian friends have no idea that they'll soon be blindsided by the looming Great Depression. Nearly 50 years later, the terminal has declined almost as sharply as Virginia Clay's life. Recently divorced, Virginia has just accepted a job in the information booth to support herself and her college-age daughter. But when Virginia discovers a striking watercolor hidden under the dust, she embarks on a quest to find the artist, drawing her deep into the mystery of Clara Darden, the famed 1920s illustrator who disappeared from history in 1931.

Jill Lassiter’s three-year-old daughter disappears from a playground only to return after 40 frantic minutes of searching, but the mother’s relief is short-lived --- there’s a tiny puncture mark on Sophia’s arm. When doctors can find no trace of drugs in Sophia’s system, Jill accepts she’ll never know what happened, but at least her child is safe. Except Sophia isn’t. Someone is watching the Lassiter home in an affluent Pennsylvania suburb, infiltrating the family’s personal and professional lives. As Jill faces every parent’s worst nightmare a second time, she must find out who has taken her daughter and why. Someone doesn’t just want Sophia for her own --- she’s out to destroy Jill’s entire family.

Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls --- a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place --- Jake Baker spends most of his time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but eccentric enthusiast of occult artifacts and conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turns 12, he befriends a pair of siblings new to town, and so Calvin decides to initiate them all into the "Saturday Night Ghost Club." But as the summer goes on, what begins as a seemingly light-hearted project may ultimately uncover more than any of its members had imagined.

Andrei Kaplan leaves New York to care for his ailing grandmother in Moscow. He learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow, still the city of his birth, but with more expensive coffee. Over the course of the year, his grandmother’s health declines, and his feelings of dislocation from both Russia and America deepen. Andrei knows he must reckon with his future and make choices that will determine his life and fate. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei’s politics and his allegiances are tested, and he is forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed since he was a kid.