Adult

Rebecca Wright is a defense attorney living in the Lower 48 when she suddenly finds herself a widow and an empty nester. In need of a radical change, she accepts a public defender position in Utqiagvik on Alaska’s North Slope. When two well-known sisters, Bernice and Wanda Ipalook, are found murdered, Wright is tasked with representing Amos Lane, a drifter on the short list of murder suspects. Criminal charges are looming. But this is summer in northern Alaska, the season of the midnight sun, when 24-hour sunlight makes it difficult for witnesses to confirm the time --- or even the day --- they last saw anyone. Wright must navigate, among other things, an unreliable client and a prosecution willing to entrap her to get a conviction.

By turns tender and irreverent, the 11 genre-bending stories in PLEASE DON’T TOUCH THE BODY are thrillingly concerned with the devastation --- and power --- of being alive today. In the collection's first story, a Japanese woman finds healing in a secret life as a sex advice columnist after being fetishized by her white husband for decades. In the fourth story, Ronald Reagan is reincarnated as a puppy and must cope with being squeezed, dropped and controlled by his young, queer owner. And in “Thank You No Thank You,” a young woman grapples with the rules she learned in her religious childhood, the freedoms of her new and more liberal life, and her actual desires as she vacations with her long-term boyfriend.

2020: Teresa, a Cuban-born mystery writer now living in America, gets an unexpected call from her childhood best friend, Estrella, inviting her to Havana. Estrella is determined to get answers about a case that has haunted them for decades: the purported dual suicides of a teacher and student at their high school. Teresa is along for the ride as she always wanted to write a novel about this case. 1980: Fourteen-year-old Teresita knows who’s been skimming off the top of the amphetamine stash in her mother’s pharmacy, which teacher keeps cyanide in his cabinet at school, and that their classmate, Yoyi, is sleeping with their English teacher. Over the course of one fateful day, Teresita gets closer than ever to learning the “Truth of Life” --- even if it means coming face to face with death.

The seventh of nine children, Bobby Kennedy has long been overlooked by his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., who governs his children with the same firm hand that earned him a fortune, an ambassadorship, and enough clout to plant the seeds of an American political dynasty. But when Bobby’s eldest brother, the anointed heir, dies in a wartime mission, the burden to become the first Kennedy in Congress shifts to Jack, the next in line. Bobby is forced to step up, especially as debilitating chronic pain threatens Jack’s Senate seat and aspirations to higher office. With their sights eventually set on the White House, Bobby evolves into the ruthless operative behind the scenes. But at what personal cost?

After years of close calls, O’Conner --- the former “Warlord of Willow Ridge” --- spends most of his time in semi-retirement, running his legitimate businesses and playing pickleball. Except for his longtime girlfriend, no one in his middle-class neighborhood is the wiser to his double life. But O’Conner’s past refuses to stay dead. When he’s approached with a job he can’t resist, he agrees to mastermind his biggest heist yet: a multi-million-dollar raid of a tech billionaire’s secret bunker, hidden beneath his newly constructed basketball arena. As the job goes down, testing O’Conner’s mettle with new challenges, the promise of the score attracts ghosts from his past he thought were long buried.

Will Miles is trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. But when she stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer 40 years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she has found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known? Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, and their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives her sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined. But when a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.

In a world divided into four rival dominions, power is everything --- and Rubi Morningtail has almost none. Three years after the Annihilation destroyed her homeland and shattered her memories, she lives as an Azure refugee in the Dominion of the Silver Tyger. When Rubi wounds a massive battle tyger on her doorstep, she draws the notice of Blake Axefire --- supreme metal mage and leader of the royal Tyger Warriors. His sentence? Cast her into the Bonding, a brutal trial where tygers choose their riders and slaughter the rest. Surviving is unthinkable. But survive she does. Now she’s stuck on Blake’s elite team racing to reseal the Anchors to the Demon Realm. Rubi must unlock the truth of her magic and her past…while resisting her dangerous attraction to the ruthless warrior who could be her redemption --- or her ruin.

When Nicola Fischer’s father is arrested for the murder of five women --- including her best friend --- the entire world watches it unfold on “To Catch a Killer,” the hit true-crime TV show hosted by Greer Woods. Overnight, Nicola becomes a pariah. And to make matters worse, Greer --- once a budding friend and fellow child of a serial killer --- hasn’t returned a single call since the show aired. Then comes an unexpected invitation to the Death Row Club, a secret retreat for the adult children of serial killers, founded by none other than Greer herself. Desperate for answers and human connection, Nicola agrees to go. But when a mysterious girl arrives, claiming her father is a killer too, the club’s fragile peace is shattered, unraveling the buried secrets at its core. By morning, the girl has vanished. By afternoon, one of the club members is dead.

In the aftermath of 9/11, 11-year-old Maggie’s first instinct was rage. But when her parents took her to an open house at a mosque, she glimpsed a faith of beauty and peace --- and over time came to embrace Islam as her own. A decade later, Maggie has left Maine for the life in New York she always dreamed of. Yet her joy is shadowed by images from Syria: civilians starving, children buried under rubble. Then she meets Ahmet, the handsome and headstrong son of a neighborhood baker. Ahmet leaves his life behind to join a new rebel group emerging in Syria, electrified by its sweeping vision to fight Assad and create a Muslim utopia. The group is ISIS. Maggie slowly gleans the brutal nature of the group she has joined, one that does not share her vision of Islam.

For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises, he married nine women --- some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a 14-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik’s account of his "confession" helped put Dailey on death row. More than three decades later, another man took responsibility for the killing, but Skalnik refused to recant his testimony.