Meet the women of AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE. They wear lipstick, pearls and sunscreen, even when it’s cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies from the oven. Taking us from a haunted pre-war Manhattan apartment building to the unique initiation ritual of a book club, these 12 delightfully demented stories are a refreshing and wicked answer to the question: “What do housewives do all day?”

When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb. After a brief stint at university in America, Mansoor returns to Delhi, where his life becomes entangled with Ayub, a fearless young activist whose own allegiances and beliefs are more malleable than Mansoor could imagine.

Since his first collection, NIGHTSHIFT, published 35 years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection, he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. There are thrilling connections between stories: themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past.

Reed Stewart thought he had left all his small town troubles --- including a broken heart --- behind when he ditched tiny Bloomville, Indiana, 10 years ago to become rich and famous on the professional golf circuit. Then one tiny post on the Internet causes all of those troubles to return...with a vengeance. Becky Flowers has worked hard to build her successful senior relocation business, but she has worked even harder to forget Reed Stewart ever existed. She has absolutely no intention of seeing him when he returns --- until his family hires her to save his parents. Now Reed and Becky can’t avoid one another --- or the memories of that one fateful night.

In the middle of a World Cup match in June 2010, Martin Servaz receives a call from a long-lost lover. A few miles away in the town of Marsac, Classics professor Claire Diemar has been brutally murdered. As if that weren't disturbing enough, Servaz receives a cryptic email indicating that Julian Hirtmann, the most twisted of all serial killers, is back…and hitting a little too close to home. With the help of detectives Irene Ziegler and Esperandieu, Servaz will have to uncover a world of betrayal and depravity to connect the dots between these gruesome murders that keep reopening wounds from his past.

CRIME PLUS MUSIC collects 20 darkly intense, music-related noir stories by world-renowned mystery authors Brendan DuBois, Alison Gaylin, Craig Johnson, David Liss, Val McDermid, Gary Phillips, Peter Robinson, and, from the music world, Galadrielle Allman, author of PLEASE BE WITH ME: A Song for My Father, Duane Allman and award-winning songwriter-novelist Willy Vlautin. Edited by novelist and Wall Street Journal rock and pop music critic Jim Fusilli, CRIME PLUS MUSIC exposes the nasty side of the world of popular music, revealing it to be the perfect setting for noir.

Paul Theroux has spent 50 years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his 10th travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America --- the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing and unemployment rates. It’s these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux’s keen traveler’s eye.

Drawing on President Bush’s personal diaries, the diaries of his wife, Barbara, and extraordinary access to the 41st president and his family, Jon Meacham paints an intimate and surprising portrait of an intensely private man who led the nation through tumultuous times. From the Oval Office to Camp David, from his study in the private quarters of the White House to Air Force One, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the first Gulf War to the end of Communism, DESTINY AND POWER charts the thoughts, decisions and emotions of a modern president who may have been the last of his kind.

Seven years ago, carefree college student Flora Dane was kidnapped while on spring break. For 472 days, she learned just how much one person can endure. Miraculously alive after her ordeal, she has spent the past five years reacquainting herself with the rhythms of normal life. When Boston detective D. D. Warren is called to the scene of a crime --- a dead man and the bound, naked woman who killed him --- she learns that Flora has tangled with three other suspects since her return to society. Is Flora a victim or a vigilante?

They were five kids with five different fathers and an alcoholic mother who left them to fend for themselves for weeks at a time. Yet, through it all, they had each other. Rosie, the youngest, is fawned over and shielded by her older sister, Regina. But when Regina discloses the truth about her abusive mother to her social worker, she is separated from her younger siblings, Norman and Rosie. And as Rosie discovers after Cookie kidnaps her from foster care, the one thing worse than being abandoned by her mother is living in Cookie’s presence. Beaten physically, abused emotionally, and forced to labor at the farm where Cookie settles in Idaho, Rosie refuses to give in.

Like fiction, cars take us into a different world: from the tony enclaves of upper crust society to the lowliest barrio; from muscle car-driving con men to hardscrabble kids on the road during the Great Depression; from a psychotic traveling salesman to a Mexican drug lord who drives a tricked-out VW Bus. We all share the roads, and our cars link us together. Including entirely new stories from Michael Connelly, C.J. Box, George Pelecanos, Diana Gabaldon, James Sallis, Ace Atkins, Luis Alberto Urrea, Sara Gran, Ben H. Winters and Joe Lansdale, THE HIGHWAY KIND is a street-level look at modern America, as seen through one of its national obsessions.

The conventional story goes that Lyndon Johnson married Lady Bird for her money, demeaned her by flaunting his many affairs, and that her legacy was protecting the nation’s wildflowers. But she was actually a full political partner throughout his ascent. And while others were shocked that she put up with his womanizing, she always knew she had the upper hand. In LADY BIRD AND LYNDON, Betty Boyd Caroli paints a vivid portrait of a marriage with complex, but familiar and identifiable overtones.

Molly Arnette is very good at keeping secrets. She and her husband live in San Diego, where they hope to adopt a baby soon. But the process terrifies her. As the questions and background checks come one after another, Molly worries that the truth she's kept hidden about her North Carolina childhood will rise to the surface and destroy not only her chance at adoption, but her marriage as well. As she tries to find a way to make peace with her past and embrace a future filled with promise, she discovers that even she doesn't know the truth of what happened in her family of pretenders.

Joe and Rose Kennedy’s strikingly beautiful daughter, Rosemary, attended exclusive schools, was presented as a debutante to the Queen of England, and traveled the world with her high-spirited sisters. And yet, Rosemary was intellectually disabled --- a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and glamorous family. Kate Larson reveals both the sensitive care Rose and Joe gave to Rosemary and then the often desperate and duplicitous arrangements the Kennedys made to keep her away from home as she became increasingly intractable in her early 20s.

Widowerhood at 33 and 12-hour workdays have left a gap in Charlie Goldwyn’s relationship with his quirky five-year-old son, Caleb. The only thing Charlie has going for him is his job at a prestigious law firm, where he is finally close to becoming a partner. But when a slight lapse in judgment at an office party leaves him humiliatingly unemployed, stuck at home with Caleb for the summer, and forced to face his own estranged father, Charlie starts to realize that there’s more to fatherhood than financially providing for his son, and more to being a son than overtaking his father’s successes.

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly. But its merchant ships were under attack by pirates from North Africa’s Barbary coast who routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves. In response, Jefferson sent the U.S. Navy’s new warships and a detachment of marines to blockade Tripoli --- launching the Barbary Wars and beginning America’s journey toward future superpower status.

In WAR OF TWO, John Sedgwick explores the long-standing conflict between Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and Vice President Aaron Burr. A study in contrasts from birth, they had been compatriots, colleagues and even friends. But above all they were rivals. Matching each other’s ambition and skill as lawyers in New York, they later battled for power along political fault lines that would not only decide the future of the United States, but define it.

A fragile peace reigns in Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia. King Alfred’s son, Edward, and formidable daughter, Aethelflaed, rule the kingdoms. But all around the restless Northmen, eyeing the rich lands and wealthy churches, are mounting raids. Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the kingdoms’ greatest warrior, controls northern Mercia from the strongly fortified city of Chester. But forces are gathering against him. Northmen allied to the Irish, led by the fierce warrior Ragnall Ivarson, are soon joined by the Northumbrians, and their strength could prove overwhelming.

Flora Fraser provides us with a brilliant account of the public George Washington and of the war he waged, and gives us, as well, the domestic Washingtons, whether at Mount Vernon before and during the war or in New York and Philadelphia during his presidency. This is a remarkable story of a remarkable pair as well as a gripping narrative of the birth of a nation --- a major, and vastly appealing, contribution to the literature of our founding fathers…and founding mother.

For 16 years, Whitey Bulger eluded the long reach of the law. But finally, in 2011, he was arrested in southern California and returned to Boston, where he was tried and convicted of racketeering and murder. T. J. English covered the trial at close range, interviewing Bulger’s associates as well as lawyers, former federal agents, and even members of the jury in the backyards and barrooms of Whitey’s world. In WHERE THE BODIES WERE BURIED, English offers a startlingly revisionist account of Bulger’s story.

Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year --- KING LEAR, MACBETH and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. THE YEAR OF LEAR sheds light on these tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions.

Grief-stricken after his mother's death and three years of wandering the world, Victor is longing for a family and a sense of purpose. He believes he's found both when he returns home to Seattle only to be swept up in a massive protest. With young, biracial Victor on one side of the barricades and his estranged father --- the white chief of police --- on the opposite, the day descends into chaos, capturing in its confusion the activists, police, bystanders and citizens from all around the world who had arrived that day brimming with hope. By the day's end, they have all committed acts they never thought possible.