When young wife and mother Tara Burke goes missing with her baby girl, all eyes are on her husband, Lucas. He paints her not as a missing person but as a wayward wife --- until a gruesome piece of evidence turns the investigation criminal. While Chronicle reporter Cindy Thomas pursues the story and M.E. Claire Washburn harbors theories that run counter to the SFPD’s, ADA Yuki Castellano sizes Lucas up as a textbook domestic offender…who suddenly puts forward an unexpected suspect. If what Lucas tells law enforcement has even a grain of truth, there isn't a woman in the state of California who's safe from the reach of an unspeakable threat.

Liberated from home and hearth by World War I, politically enfranchised and ready to work, women arrived to take their place in the dazzling new skyscrapers of Manhattan. But they did not want to stay in uncomfortable boarding houses. They wanted what men already had --- exclusive residential hotels with daily maid service, cultural programs, workout rooms and private dining. Built in 1927 at the height of the Roaring Twenties, the Barbizon Hotel was intended as a safe haven for the “Modern Woman” seeking a career in the arts. It became the place to stay for any ambitious young woman hoping for fame and fortune. THE BARBIZON weaves together a tale that, until now, has never been told.

At Montverre, an ancient and elite academy hidden high in the mountains, society’s best and brightest are trained for excellence in the grand jeu --- an arcane and mysterious competition that combines music, art, math, poetry and philosophy. Léo Martin once excelled at Montverre but lost his passion for scholarly pursuits after a violent tragedy. Now he has been exiled back to Montverre. Once the exclusive bastion of men, Montverre’s most prestigious post is now held by a woman: Claire Dryden, the head of the great game. As the legendary Midsummer Game approaches --- the climax of the academy’s year --- long-buried secrets rise to the surface and centuries-old traditions are shockingly overturned.

It is the mid-18th century, and in the 13 colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America’s “First Frontier” beyond the Appalachian Mountains commence a series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, the French, and finally against the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world. This is the setting of BLOOD AND TREASURE, and the guide to this epic narrative is America’s first and arguably greatest pathfinder, Daniel Boone --- the Revolutionary War hero whose explorations into the forested frontier beyond the great mountains would become the stuff of legend.

Long ago, Nathan lived in a house in the country with his abusive father --- and has never told his family what happened there. Long ago, Maddie was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn’t have --- and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures. Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania. Now, Nate and Maddie Graves are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver. And now what happened long ago is happening again…and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own and a taste for dark magic.

They are the families considered worthy of a listing in the exclusive Green Book --- a discriminative diary created by the niece of Edith Roosevelt’s social secretary. Their old money and manner lurk through the cobblestone streets of Georgetown, Kalorama and Capitol Hill. They only socialize within their inner circle, turning a blind eye to those who come and go on the political merry-go-round. These parents and their children live in gilded existences of power and privilege. But what they have failed to understand is that the world is changing. And when the family of one of their own is held hostage and brutally murdered, everything about their legacy is called into question. They’re called The Cave Dwellers.

The summer of 1937 will be a turning point for 14-year-old Houston “Huck” Finn. When he and a friend find a dead body in a local creek, with a rare Lindbergh flight watch on its wrist, it seems like a sign. Huck is building his own airplane. That summer also marks the arrival of his cousin Annelise, sent to live with the family under mysterious circumstances. It turns out she has had flying lessons --- another sign. As Huck’s airplane takes shape, so does his burgeoning understanding of the world, including the battle over worldliness vs. godliness that has split Annelise from her family and, in a quieter way, divides Huck’s family. Meanwhile, there’s the matter of the watch, which the dead man’s cohort of bank robbers would very much like back.

Lady’s maid Jane Prescott is back in New York with the Tylers after a glittering society wedding in Europe. On their return, Jane learns that her old dancing partner, Leo Hirschfeld, has married a chorus girl in his new Broadway musical. Jane and Louise Tyler are pulled into the sparkling and scandalous world of Broadway, as a starstruck Louise invests in Leo's show, and Jane chaperones her at rehearsals. But when the show's abusive producer, Sidney Warburton, is murdered, the list of suspects is long. Was it the comedic star or her gambler boyfriend? The disgruntled costume designer? The beautiful, blond dancer, her jealous husband? Or was it Leo himself, who had more reason than anyone to hate Sidney Warburton?

Claudia Simcoe is sure that the gourmet harvest dinner being held at her artisan marketplace will wipe away any memories of the unpleasantness last summer. Not to mention give her a chance to figure out the bewildering relationship budding with her craft-beer-brewing neighbor, Nathan. But Claudia finds herself thrown into the center of a murder investigation when a secret compartment in her market is tied to the death of a local lawyer. The prime suspect is one of her marketplace tenants: locally famed cheesemaker Julie Muller. Determined to help clear her friend’s name and discover the history connecting her market to the murder victim, Claudia is forced to test her mettle as a detective once more.

At the center of FOREGONE is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of 60,000 draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late 70s, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex–star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife’s wife and alongside Malcolm’s producer, cinematographer and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession.

In 1932, Roy Chapman Andrews, president of the men-only Explorers Club, boldly stated to hundreds of female students at Barnard College that "women are not adapted to exploration," and that women and exploration do not mix. He obviously didn't know a thing about either. THE GIRL EXPLORERS is the inspirational and untold story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers --- an organization of adventurous female world explorers --- and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today's women scientists by scaling mountains, exploring the high seas, flying across the Atlantic, and recording the world through film, sculpture and literature.

When Kevin Gogarty’s 83-year-old mother is caught shoplifting yet again, he has no choice but to hire a caretaker to keep an eye on her. Kevin, recently unemployed, is already at his wits’ end tending to a full house while his wife travels to exotic locales for work, leaving him solo with his sulky, misbehaved teenaged daughter. Into the Gogarty fray steps Sylvia, the upbeat home aide, who appears at first to be their saving grace --- until she catapults the Gogarty clan into their greatest crisis yet.

Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last 20 years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic and cultural issues of our times --- and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. In 19 razor-sharp essays, THE HARD CROWD spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco.

It's New Year's Eve, 1972, when a boat pulls up to the Maiden Rock lighthouse with relief for the keepers. But no one greets them. When the entrance door, locked from the inside, is battered down, rescuers find an empty tower. A table is laid for a meal not eaten. The Principal Keeper's weather log describes a storm raging round the tower, but the skies have been clear all week. And the clocks have all stopped at 8:45. Two decades later, the wives who were left behind are visited by a writer who is determined to find the truth about the men's disappearance. Moving between the women's stories and the men's last weeks together in the lighthouse, long-held secrets surface and truths twist into lies as we piece together what happened, why and who to believe.

Coming of age in a free Black community in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie is to go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie is hungry for something else. Is there really only one way to be independent? And she is constantly reminded that, unlike her light-skinned mother, she will not be able to pass for white. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises a better life on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men. As she tries to parse what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it --- for herself and for generations to come.

Nobody robs banks in Belfast without the IRA getting a cut --- not even former Provo James “Ructions” O'Hare. But when word gets around that O'Hare may be up to something, the pressure from the IRA begins. Ructions trusts his crack squad of former paramilitary compadres, and has full confidence in his audacious plan: To literally empty the biggest bank in Belfast by kidnapping the families of two employees --- known as a "tiger" kidnapping --- in order to force them to help Ructions and his crew get into the bank's vault. But keeping the plan --- and the money --- from the IRA is another plan entirely, one requiring all of Ructions' cunning and skill.

Twenty-four-year-old New York bookseller Naomi Ackerman is desperate to write a novel, but she struggles to find a story to tell. When, after countless disastrous dates, she meets Caleb, she thinks she's finally stumbled onto a time-honored subject: love. Then Caleb's ex-girlfriend, Rosemary, enters the scene. Upon learning that Rosemary is not safely tucked away in Caleb’s homeland overseas, but in fact lives in New York and also works in the literary world, Naomi is threatened and intrigued in equal measure. If they both fell for the same man, what else might they have in common? The more Naomi learns about Rosemary, the more her curiosity consumes her. Before she knows it, her casual Instagram stalking morphs into a friendship under false pretenses --- and becomes the subject of her nascent novel.

Rafael de Bourbon recently married a wealthy English beauty and is days away from opening a luxury boutique hotel off the southern coast of Thailand. But when the Royal Thai Police storm the hotel and arrest him for blackmail and extortion, "Rafa" is thrown into Bangkok's most notorious jail. In desperation, he reaches out to the one man who can prove his innocence. Simon Riske, ex-con and now "private spy," owes Rafa his life. Once they were the closest of friends, until a woman came between them. Riske rushes to Bangkok to secure his friend's release, and overnight he finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue larger and more dangerous than he could imagine. In hours, it is Riske who finds himself the wanted man.

One night, three women go to the theater to see a play. Wildfires are burning in the hills outside, but inside the theater it is time for the performance to take over. Margot is a successful, flinty professor on the cusp of retirement, distracted by her fraught relationship with her adult son and her ailing husband. After a traumatic past, Ivy is now a philanthropist with a seemingly perfect life. Summer is a young drama student, an usher at the theater, and frantically worried for her girlfriend whose parents live in the fire zone. While the performance unfolds on stage, so does the compelling trajectory that will bring these three women together, changing them all.

Glenn Frankel’s SHOOTING MIDNIGHT COWBOY tells the story of a modern classic that, by all accounts, should never have become one in the first place. The film’s boundary-pushing subject matter --- homosexuality, prostitution, sexual assault --- earned it an X rating when it first appeared in cinemas in 1969. For Midnight Cowboy, director John Schlesinger enlisted Jerome Hellman, a producer coming off his own recent flop and smarting from a failed marriage, and Waldo Salt, a formerly blacklisted screenwriter with a tortured past. The decision to shoot on location in New York, at a time when the city was approaching its gritty nadir, backfired when a sanitation strike filled Manhattan with garbage fires and fears of dysentery.

In the fictional Chinese city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness --- save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self.

Two young American women have been badly injured in a boating accident, joy riding in the Laguna with two young Italians. However, Commissario Guido Brunetti’s curiosity is aroused by the behavior of the young men, who abandoned the victims after taking them to the hospital. He and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, discover that one of the young men works for a man rumored to be involved in more sinister nighttime activities in the Laguna. As a result, Brunetti enlists the help of both the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Costiera. Determining how much trust he and Griffoni can put in these unfamiliar colleagues adds to the difficulty of solving a peculiarly horrible crime whose perpetrators are technologically brilliant and ruthlessly organized.

Born into the House of Romanov to the all-powerful Peter the Great and his wife, Catherine, a former serf, beautiful Tsarevna Elizabeth is the envy of the Russian empire. She is insulated by luxury and spoiled by her father, who dreams for her to marry King Louis XV of France and rule in Versailles. But when a woodland creature gives her a Delphic prophecy, her life is turned upside down. Her volatile father suddenly dies, her only brother has been executed and her mother takes the throne of Russia. As friends turn to foe in the dangerous atmosphere of the Court, the princess must fear for her freedom and her life. Elizabeth matures from suffering victim to strong and savvy survivor. But only her true love and their burning passion finally help her become who she is.

The bold one, they call her --- too bold for most. To her father, the great duke of Poland, Swietoslawa and her two sisters represent three chances for an alliance. Three marriages on which to build his empire. But Swietoslawa refuses to be simply a pawn in her father's schemes; she seeks a throne of her own, with no husband by her side. The gods may grant her wish, but crowns sit heavy, and power is a sword that cuts both ways.

In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness --- a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society. Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. WOMEN IN WHITE COATS tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same.

1774. Gently bred noblewoman Adrienne Lafayette works with her husband, the Marquis de Lafayette, in the fight for American independence. But when their idealism sparks revolution in France, Adrienne must renounce the complicated man she loves or risk her life for a legacy that will inspire generations to come. 1914. After witnessing the devastation in France firsthand, New York socialite Beatrice Chanler takes on the challenge of a lifetime: convincing America to fight for what's right. 1940. French schoolteacher and aspiring artist Marthe Simone wants nothing to do with war. But as the realities of Nazi occupation transform her life in the isolated castle where she came of age, she makes a discovery that calls into question who she is and who she is willing to become.