Art scams are so numerous today that the specter of a lawsuit arising from a mistaken attribution has scared a number of experts away from the business of authentication and forgery, and with good reason. Art scams are increasingly convincing and involve incredible sums of money. The cons perpetrated by unscrupulous art dealers and their accomplices are proportionately elaborate. Anthony M. Amore's THE ART OF THE CON tells the stories of some of history's most notorious yet untold cons.

Jennifer Chiaverini’s resonant and heartfelt novel chronicles the events of 1863, when the peace and contentment of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s family circle was suddenly, tragically broken, cutting even deeper than the privations of wartime. Through the pain of profound loss and hardship, Longfellow’s patriotism never failed, nor did the power of his language. “Christmas Bells,” the poem he wrote that holiday, lives on, spoken as verse and sung as a hymn.

In Kulumani, a village in present-day Mozambique, lions are killing local women, including three of the four daughters of the Mpepe family. Only 32-year-old Mariamar is left. Village elders recruit Archangel Bullseye, a hunter from Maputo who saved Mariamar from danger 16 years earlier, to end the attacks. Now, as she wonders whether or not she wants to see the hunter she once loved, Mariamar suspects that spiritual forces may be the cause of the village’s troubles.

Ashley Davison, a graduate student in California, desperately wants to spend the holidays with her family in Seattle. Dashiell Sutherland, a former army intelligence officer, has a job interview in Seattle and must arrive by December 23. Ashley and Dash reluctantly decide to share the car, but neither anticipates the wild ride ahead. Though Ashley and Dash may never reach Seattle in time for Christmas, the season is still full of surprises --- and their greatest wishes may yet come true.

Lady Frances Ffolkes is incensed when she finds out that her dear friends Gwendolyn and Thomasina have been subject to vicious threats. Promising to uncover their attacker, she travels with them to Kestrel's Eyrie, the fabled estate belonging to Gwen's family. But soon Frances faces an even greater problem, when Gwen’s father, a powerful diplomat, is stabbed to death with his prized ruby dagger. Frances, with her loyal maid June Mallow at her side, jumps right into interrogating the estate's numbered guests. But as the case unfolds, Frances' righteous conviction might just be the very thing that leads danger --- and even more death --- to her own doorstep.

From the drunkenness of the Pilgrims to Prohibition hijinks, drinking has always been a cherished American custom: a way to celebrate, grieve, and take the edge off. At many pivotal points in our history, alcohol has acted as a catalyst. In DRINKING IN AMERICA, Susan Cheever chronicles our national love affair with liquor, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has changed our nation's history.

Christian Thydell’s dream has come true. His debut novel, The Mermaid, has been published to rave reviews. So why is he as distant and unhappy as ever? When crime writer Erica Falk, who helped Christian discover and develop his talents, learns he has been receiving anonymous threats, she investigates not just the messages but also the young author’s mysterious past. Then, one of Christian’s closet friends, Magnus, goes missing. Erica’s husband, Detective Patrik Hedström, has his worst suspicions confirmed as the mind games aimed at Christian become a disturbing reality.

Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past. Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage. Meanwhile, Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss. As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all.

The Explorers Guild is a clandestine group of adventurers who bravely journey to those places in which light gives way to shadow and reason is usurped by myth. The secrets they seek are hidden in mountain ranges and lost in deserts, buried in the ocean floor and lodged deep in polar ice. Their aim is to discover the mysteries that lie beyond the boundaries of the known world. Set against the backdrop of World War I, with Western Civilization on the edge of calamity, this first installment in The Explorers Guild series concerns the Guild's quest to find the golden city of Buddhist myth.

GOD’S KINGDOM explores the Kinneson family through the coming of age of the heir, Jim, and its rich and complicated history. Earnest and innocent, Jim grows curious about the unspoken "trouble in the family" that haunts his father and grandfather. Layer by layer, tale by tale, sorting out fact from deliberately obscured legend, Jim explores the Kinnesons' long relationship with others in the Kingdom, culminating in a discovery that forever changes his life and place in that world.

Before downtown Manhattan was scrubbed clean, gentrified, and overrun with designer boutiques and trendy eateries and bars, it was the center of a burgeoning art scene. Running from the shipwreck of her glamorous and unstable childhood with a volatile mother, Wendy Lawless landed in the center of it all. She navigated this demi-monde of jaded punk rockers, desperate actors, pulsing parties and unexpected run-ins with her own past as she made every mistake of youth, looked for love in all the wrong places, and eventually learned how to grow up on her own.

In Draper, Utah, a tight-knit Mormon community is thrown into upheaval when their ward’s second counselor --- one of the bishop’s right-hand men --- is found dead in an elaborately staged murder on church property. Carl Ashby was known as a devout Mormon, a pillar of the community, and a loving husband and father. Who would want him dead? Linda Wallheim, the wife of the ward’s bishop, can’t rest as long as the ward is suffering. But the entire case is turned upside down by the autopsy report, which reveals Carl was a biological female.

Meet Dan Marshall: 25, good job, great girlfriend, and living the dream life in sunny Los Angeles without a care in the world. Until his mother calls. It turns out her cancer, which she had battled throughout his childhood with tenacity and a mouth foul enough to make a sailor blush, is back. And add insult to injury, his loving father has been diagnosed with ALS. As Dan steps into his role as caregiver, wheelchair wrangler and sibling referee, he watches pieces of his previous life slip away, and comes to realize that the further you stretch the ties that bind, the tighter they hold you together.

Adrift in Cambodia and eager to side-step a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher, 28-year-old Englishman Robert Grieve decides to go missing. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future. And on that first night, a small windfall precipitates a chain of events --- involving a bag of “jinxed” money, a suave American, a trunk full of heroin, a hustler taxi driver, and a rich doctor’s daughter --- that changes Robert’s life forever.

The year is 1855. The Crimean War is raging. The incompetence of British commanders causes the fall of the English government. The Empire teeters. Amid this crisis comes opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, one of the most notorious and brilliant personalities of Victorian England. Along with his irrepressible daughter, Emily, and their Scotland Yard companions, Ryan and Becker, De Quincey finds himself confronted by an adversary who threatens the heart of the nation.

Following an extended leave, Louise Rick returns to work at the Special Search Agency, an elite unit of the National Police Department. She's assigned a case involving a 15-year-old who vanished a week earlier. When Louise realizes that the missing teenager is the son of a butcher from Hvalsoe, she seizes the opportunity to combine the search for the teen with her personal investigation of her boyfriend's long-ago death. As she moves through the small town's cramped network of deadly connections, Louise unearths toxic truths left unspoken and dangerous secrets.

It is 1880, and Gracy Brookens is the only midwife in a small Colorado mining town where she has delivered hundreds, maybe thousands, of babies in her lifetime. The women of Swandyke trust and depend on Gracy, and most couldn't imagine getting through pregnancy and labor without her by their sides. But everything changes when a baby is found dead...and the evidence points to Gracy as the murderer. She didn't commit the crime, but clearing her name isn't so easy when her innocence is not quite as simple, either.

Bob Woodward exposes one of the final pieces of the Richard Nixon puzzle in THE LAST OF THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. He reveals the untold story of Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed the secret White House taping system that changed history and led to Nixon’s resignation. In 46 hours of interviews with Butterfield, supported by thousands of documents, many of them original and not in the presidential archives and libraries, Woodward has uncovered new dimensions of Nixon’s secrets, obsessions and deceptions.

For Alex Mercer, his wife, Millicent, and their precocious 11-year-old son, Max, are everything. But when he and Max find their enigmatic next-door neighbor dead in his apartment, their lives are suddenly and irrevocably changed. The police begin an extremely methodical investigation, and Alex becomes increasingly impatient for them to finish. After all, it was so clearly a suicide. As new information is uncovered, troubling questions arise --- questions that begin to throw suspicion on Alex, Millicent and even Max. It seems each of them has secrets. And each has something to hide.

When Alizée Benoit, a young American painter working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), vanishes in New York City in 1940, no one knows what happened to her. Not her Jewish family living in German-occupied France. Not her arts patron and political compatriot, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not her close-knit group of friends and fellow WPA painters. And, some 70 years later, not her great-niece, Danielle Abrams, who, while working at Christie’s auction house, uncovers enigmatic paintings hidden behind works by those now-famous Abstract Expressionist artists. Do they hold answers to the questions surrounding her missing aunt?

Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, and her love for her two daughters.

A fiercely independent divorce lawyer learns the power of family and connection when she receives a cryptic message from her estranged mother in this latest novel from Joshilyn Jackson, the nationally bestselling author of SOMEONE ELSE’S LOVE STORY and GODS IN ALABAMA. THE OPPOSITE OF EVERYONE is an emotionally resonant tale about the endurance of love and the power of stories to shape and transform our lives.

For more than 40 years, Frederick Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels of intrigue --- from the groundbreaking THE DAY OF THE JACKAL to the prescient THE KILL LIST. Whether writing about the murky world of arms dealers, the shadowy Nazi underground movement, or the intricacies of worldwide drug cartels, every plot has been chillingly plausible because every detail has been minutely researched. But what most people don’t know is that some of his greatest stories of intrigue have been in his own life.

Broadway’s most respected (and feared) commentator pulls back the curtain on its stars, producers and mega-hits to reveal all the shocking drama, intrigue and power plays that happened off stage. RAZZLE DAZZLE is a no-holds-barred narrative account of the people, money and power that reinvented an iconic quarter of New York City, turning its gritty back alleys and sex shops into the glitzy, dazzling Great White Way --- and bringing a crippled New York from the brink of bankruptcy to its glittering glory.

In this prequel to his critically acclaimed Inspector Erlendur series, Arnaldur Indridason gives devoted fans a glimpse of Erlendur as a young, budding detective. The beat on the streets in Reykjavik is busy: traffic accidents, theft, domestic violence, contraband…and an unexplained death. When a tramp he met regularly on the night shift is found drowned in a ditch, no one seems to care. But his fate haunts Erlendur and drags him inexorably into the strange and dark underworld of the city.

Despite good intentions, Ash McKenna made a mess of his life in New York, so he tried to build a new one in Portland. But after a traumatic turn of events, he ends up on a commune in the Georgia woods, binge-drinking cheap whiskey and waiting for his passport to flee the country and nightmares that have followed him. Then a man is found dead. Known only as “Crusty Pete,” the commune dweller is sprawled in the dirt, having fallen from a high rope bridge. It’s written off as an accident, but Ash suspects something more sinister. As he looks into Pete’s death, Ash is shocked to find that the supposedly peaceful community houses a rogue faction preparing to commit an unspeakable act of violence.

Born Declan Patrick MacManus, Elvis Costello was raised in London and Liverpool, grandson of a trumpet player on the White Star Line and son of a jazz musician who became a successful radio dance-band vocalist. Costello went into the family business and before he was 24 took the popular music world by storm. UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK describes how Costello’s career has endured for almost four decades through a combination of dumb luck and animal cunning, even managing the occasional absurd episode of pop stardom.

Jessica and Phyllis Melville have grown up at Ellinghurst, a family estate fraught with secrets. Into their midst walks Oskar Grunewald, a frequent visitor fascinated by the house but alternately tormented and ignored by the Melville children. The Great War arrives to devastate and reshape their world. In a country unrecognizable from the idylls of their youth, the Melville sisters struggle to forge new paths without the guidance of the old rules. But Oskar’s life has become entwined with theirs once again, in ways that will change all of their futures.