Adult

A whaler's daughter, Flora Mackie first crossed the Arctic Circle at the age of 12. Years later, in 1892, determination and chance lead her back to northern Greenland as a scientist at the head of a British expedition. Geologist Jakob de Beyn was raised in Manhattan. Yearning for wider horizons, he joins a rival expedition. Jakob and Flora's paths cross. It is a fateful meeting, where passion and ambition collide and an irresistible attraction is born. The violent extremes of the north obsess them both: perpetual night and endless day; frozen seas and coastal meadows, and the strange, maddening pull it exerts on the people trying to make their mark on its vast expanses --- a pursuit of glory whose outcome will reverberate for years to come.

It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father’s deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conway’s thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down through the “vortex of his being,” surveying all the linked circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he makes us feel --- if only for an instant --- all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires.

In September 1873, Elizabeth Coughlin, a widow bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, embarks on a buffalo hunt with her estranged and mysterious brother-in-law, Michael. With no money, family, job or security, she hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who depend on her. Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named Deadline demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers. They’re on borrowed time: the Comanche are in winter quarters, and the cruel work of slaughtering the buffalo is unraveling their souls. They must get back alive.

Constance Kopp is back --- with a badge and a taste for justice. She has finally earned her deputy sheriff’s badge and is ready to tackle a new kind of case: defending independent young women brought into the Hackensack jail on dubious charges of waywardness, incorrigibility and moral depravity. Such were the laws --- and morals --- of 1916. Constance uses her authority as deputy sheriff, and occasionally exceeds it, to investigate and support these women when no one else will. But it’s her sister Fleurette --- who runs away from their sleepy farm to join the glamorous world of vaudeville --- who puts Constance’s beliefs to the test. Is there a wayward girl in her own family?

Buddy Steel has been content working homicide at the LAPD until his father, the legendary Sheriff Burton Steel, falls ill with Lou Gehrig's disease. Sheriff Steel asks Buddy to come home to cover his back and to groom him to be his successor. No sooner does he hit town than Buddy learns that the wife of the high-flying star of a world-renowned television ministry has gone missing. A visit to the woman's home leads to a hostile confrontation with her husband's family and Buddy’s realization that something greater than simply a missing person is at stake.

Liza Cole has one month to write the thriller that could land her back on the bestseller list, while her husband is distracted by the disappearance of his best friend, Nick. Liza’s latest heroine, Beth, suspects that her husband is cheating on her while she’s home caring for their newborn. Before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s tossing the body of her husband’s mistress into the East River. Then, the lines between Liza’s fiction and her reality eerily blur. Nick’s body is dragged from the East River, and Liza’s husband is arrested for his murder. Before her deadline is up, Liza will have to face up to the truths about the people around her, including her own. If she doesn’t, the end of her heroine’s story could be the end of her own.

In the first comprehensive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy clambered to the top of a system designed to keep people like him down, found common ground with America’s arch-conservative president Ronald Reagan, and permitted the USSR and its East European empire to break apart without using force to preserve them. Drawing on interviews with Gorbachev himself, transcripts and documents from the Russian archives, and interviews with Kremlin aides and adversaries, Taubman’s intensely personal portrait extends to Gorbachev’s remarkable marriage to a woman he deeply loved.

Vivian is a cosmopolitan Taiwanese-American tourist who often escapes her busy life in London through adventure and travel. Johnny is a 15-year-old Irish teenager, living a neglected life on the margins of society. As Vivian looks to find her calling professionally, she delights in exploring foreign countries, rolling hillsides and new cultures. But all of that changes when Vivian's path collides with Johnny and culminates in a horrifying act of violence. In the aftermath of the incident, Vivian must struggle to recapture the woman she was and the woman she aspired to be. And when Johnny is finally brought to reckon for his crimes, Vivian learns that justice is not always as swift or as fair as she would hope.

THE COUNTESS OF PRAGUE is the exciting introduction to Beatrice von Falklenburg, known to her intimates as Trixie, who will lead us from Prague through Europe and occasionally beyond on a 10-book set of investigations that begins in 1904 and finishes in 1914. The assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo that summer effectively ended the Old Europe into which she was born to a noble Czech father and an English mother. Through the lens of Trixie, whose own journey from pampered aristocrat (albeit in a polite and impoverished marriage) to a degree of emancipation has an exciting yet humorous and sympathetic dynamic, we witness stirring events and societal shifts.