Ellen Gilchrist’s first collection of short stories since 2005 consists of 10 pieces that take place in the American South, mainly in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Her characters are good-hearted Southerners, many of them wealthy, who are forced to confront life’s toughest challenges --- from natural disasters to terrorist threats to multiple sclerosis and untimely death --- and who emerge from each experience with a renewed belief in the goodness of human nature.

Six years ago in Vienna, terrorists took over a hundred hostages, and the rescue attempt went terribly wrong. The CIA’s Vienna station was witness to this tragedy, gathering intel from its sources during those tense hours, assimilating facts from the ground and from an agent on the inside. So when it all went wrong, the question had to be asked: Had their agent been compromised, and how?

Nicole Frank shouldn’t have been able to survive the car accident, much less crawl up the steep ravine. But one thought allows her to defy the odds and flag down help: Vero. Sergeant Wyatt Foster is frustrated when even the search dogs can’t find any trace of the mysterious missing child. Until Nicky’s husband, Thomas, arrives with a host of shattering revelations: Nicole Frank suffers from a rare brain injury, and the police shouldn’t trust anything she says.

Scotland Yard Detective Joe Sandilands suspects foul play in the violent death of Lady Truelove. He enlists old friend and former constable Lily Wentworth to trail the now-widower Sir James Truelove, and finds an ally in a fellow police officer familiar with the Truelove estate. But as the investigation yields surprising secrets about one of England’s most powerful families, Joe discovers how little he knows about the gilded lives of the moneyed.

While investigating a toxic outbreak in the Caribbean Sea that may ultimately threaten the United States, Dick Pitt unwittingly becomes involved in something even more dangerous --- a post-Castro power struggle for the control of Cuba. Meanwhile, Pitt’s children, marine engineer Dirk and oceanographer Summer, are on an investigation of their own, which brings them both to Cuba as well --- and squarely into harm’s way.

A platoon of young men and one female soldier leaves Italy for one of the most dangerous places on earth: Forward Operating Base (FOB) in the Gulistan district of Afghanistan. Each member in the platoon manages the toxic mix of boredom and fear that is life at the FOB in his own way. But when a much-debated mission goes devastatingly awry, the soldiers find their lives changed in an instant.
 

Camille Verhoeven has reached an unusually content (for him) place in life. He is respected by his colleagues, and he and his lovely wife, Irene, are expecting their first child. But when a new murder case hits his desk --- a double torture-homicide so extreme that even the most seasoned officers are horrified --- Verhoeven is overcome with a sense of foreboding. As links emerge between the bloody set-piece and at least one past unsolved murder, it becomes clear that a calculating serial killer is at work.

Barbara Leaming’s biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s brutal, lonely and valiant 31-year struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that followed JFK’s assassination. Here is the woman as she has never been seen before. In heartrending detail, we witness a struggle that unfolded at times before our own eyes, but that we failed to understand.

Fear commonly affects our ability to live fully, holding us back from what enriches our lives and the lives of others. But our quality of life will improve when we learn how to be courageous in the face of fear. In LIVING COURAGEOUSLY, Joyce Meyer explains how, as Christians, we can overcome the paralyzing power of fear by calling upon the Lord. "Fear not" is written throughout the Bible. God knows His children will be confronted with fear, but He can help us resist it.

When the BP oil spill devastates the Gulf coast, those who made a living by shrimping find themselves in dire straits. For those who inhabit the town of Jeannette, these desperate circumstances serve as the catalyst that pushes them to enact whatever risky schemes they can dream up to reverse their fortunes. Gus Lindquist, a pill-addicted, one-armed treasure hunter, is obsessed with finding the lost treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte. His quest brings him into contact with a wide array of memorable characters who ultimately find themselves on a collision course with each other.

At midnight, December 31, 1925, citizens of the newly proclaimed Turkish Republic celebrated the New Year. For the first time ever, they had agreed to use a nationally unified calendar and clock. Yet in Istanbul --- an ancient crossroads and Turkey's largest city --- people were looking toward an uncertain future. In beguiling prose and rich character portraits, Charles King brings to life a remarkable era when a storied city stumbled into the modern world and reshaped the meaning of cosmopolitanism.

On a wet night in November, Charlo Torp, a former gambler, makes his way through the slush to Harriet Krohn’s apartment. Certain that paying off his debt is the only path to winning his daughter’s forgiveness, Charlo plans to rob the wealthy old woman’s antique silver collection. The following morning Harriet is found dead, her silver missing, and the only clue Inspector Sejer finds is an abandoned bouquet.

Jonathan Sweetwater has been blessed with money, a fulfilling career and a beautiful family. But there’s one thing he never had: a relationship with his late father. On his quest for understanding --- about himself, about manhood, about marriage --- Jonathan decides to track down his father’s five ex-wives. His journey will take him from cosmopolitan cities to the mile-high mountains to a tropical island --- and ultimately back to confront the one thing Jonathan has that his father never did: home.

For the besieged American defenders of Bastogne, time was running out. Hitler’s forces had pressed in on the small Belgian town in a desperate offensive designed to push back the Allies. The U.S. soldiers had managed to repel repeated attacks, but as their ammunition dwindled, the weary paratroopers of the 101st Airborne could only hope for a miracle. In PATTON AT THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE, Army veteran and historian Leo Barron explores one of the most famous yet little-told clashes of World War II, a vitally important chapter in one of history’s most legendary battles.

In print for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits’ PLAYING DAYS is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author’s season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player’s estranged wife that ushers him into adulthood.

Two years after the cataclysmic events that sent him journeying into mystery, Odd Thomas has traveled full circle, back to his beloved hometown of Pico Mundo and the people he loves. Odd has come to save them --- and perhaps humanity --- from the full flowering of evil. He prepares to confront the terrible forces arrayed against him and possibly to journey still farther, to his long-awaited reunion with his lost love, Stormy Llewellyn.

From the Western collectors whose demand for shrunken heads spurred massacres to Second World War soldiers who sent the remains of the Japanese home to their girlfriends, from Madame Tussaud modeling the guillotined head of Robespierre to Damien Hirst photographing decapitated heads in city morgues, from grave-robbing phrenologists to skull-obsessed scientists, Frances Larson explores our macabre fixation with severed heads.

Publishers rejected this early novel by the 1998 Nobel laureate when he submitted it to them in 1953. SKYLIGHT, now appearing in English translation for the first time, dramatizes the overlapping stories of more than a dozen tenants who live in a run-down apartment complex in late 1940s Lisbon. The book is less philosophical than José Saramago’s later works, but the sly wit and left-wing politics for which he became famous are here in abundance.

Included in Richard Lange’s latest short story collection, SWEET NOTHING, are edge-of-your-seat tales: A prison guard must protect an inmate being tried for heinous crimes. A father and son set out to rescue a young couple trapped during a wildfire. An ex-con trying to make good as a security guard stumbles onto a burglary plot. A young father must submit to blackmail to protect the fragile life he's built.

As Allied forces close in on Berlin in spring 1945, a solitary figure emerges from the wreckage that is Germany. It is Marian Sutro, whose existence was last known to her British controllers in autumn 1943 in Paris. Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesn’t understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. When the mysterious Major Fawley, the man who hijacked her wartime mission to Paris, draws her into the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Cold War, she sees a way to make amends for the past and to find the identity that has never been hers.