Adult

When the 1969 season began, fans of the New York Mets weren’t expecting much from “the Lovable Losers.” But as the season progressed, the Mets inched closer to first place and then eventually clinched the National League pennant. They were underdogs against the Baltimore Orioles, but beat them in five games to become world champions. Playing right field for the ’69 Mets was Art Shamsky, who had stayed in touch with his former teammates over the years. He organized a visit to ailing star pitcher Tom Seaver's home in California, accompanied by the #2 pitcher, Jerry Koosman, outfielder Ron Swoboda and shortstop Bud Harrelson. Together they recalled the highlights of that amazing season as they reminisced about what changed the Mets’ fortunes in 1969.

When Catherine Saxon, an American correspondent reporting on the war in Europe, is found murdered in her London digs, news of her death is concealed by British authorities. Serving as a linchpin between Scotland Yard and the Secret Service, Robert MacFarlane pays a visit to Maisie Dobbs. He is accompanied by Mark Scott, an agent from the US Department of Justice who helped Maisie escape Hitler’s Munich in 1938. MacFarlane asks Maisie to work with Scott to uncover the truth about Saxon’s death. As the Germans unleash the full terror of their blitzkrieg upon the British Isles, Maisie must balance the demands of solving this dangerous case with her need to protect Anna, the young evacuee she has grown to love and wants to adopt.

Nikki Griffin isn't your typical private investigator. In her office above her bookstore’s shelves and stacks, she also tracks certain men. Dangerous men. Men who have hurt the women they claim to love. And Nikki likes to teach those men a lesson, to teach them what it feels like to be hurt and helpless. When a regular PI job tailing Karen, a tech company's disgruntled employee who might be selling secrets, turns ugly and Karen's life is threatened, Nikki has to break cover and intervene. Karen tells Nikki that there are dangerous men after her. She says she'll tell Nikki what's really going on. But then something goes wrong, and suddenly Nikki is no longer just solving a case --- she's trying hard to stay alive.

When former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, he hoped Crimson Lake would be a good place to disappear. But nowhere is safe from Claire's devastated father. Dale Bingley has a brutal revenge plan all worked out --- and if Ted doesn't help find the real abductor, he'll be its first casualty. Meanwhile, in a dark roadside hovel, the bodies of two young bartenders lie on the floor. It's Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney's first homicide investigation --- complicated by the arrival of private detective Amanda Pharrell to “assist” on the case. Amanda's conviction for murder a decade ago has left her with some odd behavioral traits…and a keen eye for killers.

RADICALIZED is comprised of four sci-fi novellas connected by social, technological and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future. “Unauthorized Bread” is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting to survive and prosper. In “Model Minority,” a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy police corruption, only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims. “Radicalized” is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer. The fourth story, “Masque of the Red Death,” takes on issues of survivalism versus community.

An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice, the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions, and the dire consequences of their presence.

For the last 20 years, Melinda Gates has been on a mission to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. Throughout this journey, one thing has become increasingly clear to her: If you want to lift a society up, you need to stop keeping women down. In THE MOMENT OF LIFT, Melinda shares lessons she’s learned from the inspiring people she’s met during her work and travels around the world. As she writes in the introduction, “That is why I had to write this book --- to share the stories of people who have given focus and urgency to my life. I want all of us to see ways we can lift women up where we live.”

In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota’s Gilead River, Odie O’Banion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother, Albert, their best friend, Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own. Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds.

A young woman, S.H., moves to New York City in 1978 to look for adventure and write her first novel, but finds herself distracted by her mysterious neighbor, Lucy Brite. As S.H. listens to Lucy through the thin walls of her dilapidated building, she carefully transcribes the woman’s bizarre monologues about her daughter’s violent death and her need to punish the killer. Forty years later, S.H. stumbles upon the journal she kept that year and writes a memoir, Memories of the Future, in which she juxtaposes the notebook’s texts, drafts from her unfinished comic novel, and her commentaries on them to create a dialogue among selves over the decades. As the book unfolds, you witness S.H. write her way through vengeance and into freedom.

In the city of Houston --- a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America --- the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.