Adult

Detective Louise Rick gets a call from her son, Jonas. It's every parent's worst nightmare: A school party has ended in terrifying chaos after a group of violent teenagers forced their way into the building in search of alcohol and valuables. Dashing to the scene, Louise discovers one of the students gravely injured --- struck by a car while attempting to run for help. Now the girl's distraught mother, pushed to her emotional breaking point, will do anything to make those who hurt her daughter pay. So when someone targets the gang members with a vicious attack, the girl's mother is the obvious suspect. But Louise can't shake the feeling that the case might not be as cut-and-dried as it first appears.

The people who call End of the Line need hope. They need reassurance that life is worth living. But some are unlucky enough to get through to Laura. Laura doesn’t want them to hope. She wants them to die. Laura hasn’t had it easy: she’s survived sickness and a difficult marriage only to find herself heading for 40, unsettled and angry. She doesn’t love talking to people worse off than she is. She craves it. But now someone’s on to her --- Ryan, whose world falls apart when his pregnant wife ends her life, hand in hand with a stranger. Who was this man, and why did they choose to die together? The sinister truth is within Ryan’s grasp, but he has no idea of the desperate lengths to which Laura will go.

When single mother Devon Connor hires Elvis Cole, it’s because her troubled teenage son Tyson is flashing cash and she’s afraid he’s dealing drugs. But the truth is devastatingly different. With two others, he’s been responsible for a string of high-end burglaries, a crime spree that takes a deadly turn when one of them is murdered and Tyson and his girlfriend disappear. They stole the wrong thing from the wrong man, and, determined to get it back, he has hired two men who are smart and brutal and the best at what they do. To even the odds, Cole brings in his friend, Joe Pike, but even the two of them together may be overmatched.

The Tufts scholarship that put Nora Stuart on the path to becoming a Boston medical specialist was a step forward. Being hit by a car and then overhearing her boyfriend hit on another doctor when she thought she was dying? Two major steps back. There’s only one place to land: home. But the tiny Maine community she left 15 years ago doesn’t necessarily want her. At every turn, someone holds the prodigal daughter of Scupper Island responsible for small-town drama and big-time disappointments. Balancing loss and opportunity, dark events from her past with hope for the future, Nora will discover that tackling old pain makes room for promise…and the chance to begin again.

An attack on an Israeli port throws the Middle East into chaos. The Mossad, Israel’s feared intelligence service, responds with a campaign of covert sabotage and assassination, determined to protect the homeland. But evidence quickly turns up suggesting that a group of moles inside Langley are helping Mossad wage its covert war. Convinced that Mossad has heavily penetrated the CIA’s leadership, the FBI launches a counterintelligence investigation. New Red Cell Chief Kyra Stryker turns to her former mentors --- now-retired Red Cell Chief Jonathan Burke and his wife, former CIA Director Kathryn Cooke --- to help uncover who is trying to tear the CIA apart from the inside out.

When Jim Cronley hears he's just won the Legion of Merit, he figures there's another shoe to drop, and it's a big one: he's out as Chief, DCI-Europe. His new assignments, however, couldn't be bigger: to protect the U.S. chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials from a rumored Soviet NKGB kidnapping, and to hunt down and dismantle the infamous Odessa, an organization dedicated to helping Nazi war criminals escape to South America. It doesn't take long for the first attempt on his life, and then the second. NKGB or Odessa? Who can tell? The deeper he pushes, the more secrets tumble out.

Diane Rowe is a missing persons expert. Ex-con Karen needs Diane's help to track down her 14-year-old daughter, Sunny, with whom she's lost contact while she's been in prison. To Diane, this appears at first glance to be a simple case of a mother wanting to reunite with a beloved daughter. Tracking the girl down is easy. However, convincing her to meet her mother is no easy task. And at the back of Diane's mind is a nagging thought --- that guilt and innocence aren't straightforward and nothing is quite what it seems. Does Karen really want to fix the wrongs of the past, or is there something darker at play here that will take all of Diane's skills to uncover?

Oscar Martello, president of a film production company, is a self-made man. Despite his humble origins, he has managed to achieve unbelievable fame and success. Andrea Serrano, his best friend, is a scriptwriter who explores the themes of love and murder in his work. The beautiful actress Jacaranda Rizzi, Oscar’s muse, has a secret that has been tormenting her for many years. When a fire devastates Oscar’s villa in one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods and he goes missing, all of Rome is left to wonder about his fate. The evidence points to Jacaranda, but could she have orchestrated something so sinister? More important, could she have done it alone, or has Andrea played some role in the debacle?

Dr. Katie LeClair quickly gets to work in building a life for herself in Baxter, MI, and beyond reviving her love life, she also finds a pair of business partners in a team of father and son family practitioners. But that idyllic dream is immediately shattered when one of her patients is found dead. The death is ruled a suicide, and was a result of the medication Katie had prescribed. But she doesn't remember writing it. When a closer investigation reveals it was murder, Katie is catapulted into an off-the-books investigation that leads her down a dark path of past secrets. But someone is willing to kill to keep part of the town's history in the shadows, and Katie must race to find out who before it's too late.

During the course of a career spanning half a century, Edward Garnett --- editor, critic and reader for hire --- would become one of the most influential men in 20th-century English literature. Known for his incisive criticism and unwavering conviction in matters of taste, Garnett was responsible for identifying and nurturing the talents of a generation of the greatest writers in the English language, from Joseph Conrad to John Galsworthy, Henry Green to Edward Thomas, T. E. Lawrence to D. H. Lawrence. In AN UNCOMMON READER, Helen Smith brings to life Garnett’s intimate and at times stormy relationships with those writers.