Adult

On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The regulars are telling stories to while away the dark hours, when the door bursts open on a grievously wounded stranger. In his arms is the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later, the girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Is it magic? Or can science provide an explanation? These questions have many answers, some of them quite dark indeed. Those who dwell on the river bank apply all their ingenuity to solving the puzzle of the girl who died and lived again, yet as the days pass the mystery only deepens.

When Elsey's husband, Lukas, hands her a brochure for a weeklong mountain retreat, she knows he is really giving her an ultimatum: Go, or we’re done. Once a successful painter, Elsey set down roots in China after falling in love with Lukas. Now, with two young daughters and unable to find a balance between her identities as artist, mother and wife, Elsey fills her days worrying, drinking and descending into boredom and unhappiness. So she agrees to go. There, she meets a group of men and women who will forever alter the way she understands herself, and help her to finally embark on a journey to address her own pain and find her way back to her marriage.

Aidan Waits and his partner are called to investigate a break-in at The Palace, an immense, empty hotel in the center of the city. There they find the body of a man. He is dead. The tags have been cut from his clothes, his teeth have been filed down, and even his fingertips have been replaced. And he is smiling. But as Waits begins to unravel the mystery of the smiling man, he becomes a target. Someone wants very badly to make this case disappear, and as their threats escalate, Aidan realizes that the answers may lie not only with the wealthy families and organized criminals connected to the Palace, but with a far greater evil from his own past.

Rural Trinidad: a brick house on stilts surrounded by bush; a family, quietly surviving, just trying to live a decent life. Clyde, the father, works long, exhausting shifts at the petroleum plant in southern Trinidad; Joy, his wife, looks after the home. Their 13-year-old sons wake early every morning to travel to the capital, Port of Spain, for school. They are twins but nothing alike: Paul has always been considered odd, while Peter is widely believed to be a genius, destined for greatness. When Paul goes walking in the bush one afternoon and doesn't come home, Clyde is forced to go looking for him. As the hours turn to days, and Clyde begins to understand Paul’s fate, his world shatters --- leaving him faced with a decision no parent should ever have to make.

King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia and Sky. Here on his island, women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. But when King disappears and two men and a boy wash ashore, the sisters’ safe world begins to unravel. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters are forced to confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent.

A demented soul is stalking Naomi Hendrix, waiting for the right moment to snatch her and fulfill a twisted fantasy. When Naomi’s radio station hires PI Rick Cahill to protect Naomi and track down the stalker, he discovers that Naomi is hiding secrets about her past that could help unmask the man. However, before Rick can extract the truth from Naomi, he is thrust into a missing person’s case --- an abduction he may have unwittingly caused. The investigating detective questions Rick’s motives for getting involved and pressures him to stop meddling. While Rick pursues Naomi’s stalker and battles the police, evil ricochets from his own past and embroils Rick in a race to find the truth about an old nemesis.

Charlotte was supposed to be looking after the children, and she swears she was. But when her three kids are all safe and sound at the school fair, and Alice, her best friend Harriet’s daughter, is nowhere to be found, Charlotte panics. Harriet, devastated by this unthinkable, unbearable loss, can no longer bring herself to speak to Charlotte again, much less trust her. Now more isolated than ever and struggling to keep her marriage afloat, Harriet believes nothing and no one. But as the police bear down on both women trying to piece together the puzzle of what happened to this little girl, dark secrets begin to surface --- and Harriet discovers that confiding in Charlotte again may be the only thing that will reunite her with her daughter.

In Riversend, an isolated rural community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest kills five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His assignment is simple: describe how the townspeople are coping as the anniversary of their tragedy approaches. But as Martin meets the locals and hears their version of events, he begins to realize that the accepted wisdom --- that the priest was a pedophile whose imminent exposure was the catalyst for the shooting --- may be wrong. Then the bodies of two German backpackers --- missing since the time of the church shootings --- are discovered. As the media flocks to the scene, Martin finds himself thrown into a whole new mystery.

When he was almost 50 years old, Tommy Tomlinson weighed 460 pounds, at risk for heart disease, diabetes and stroke. Raised in a family that loved food, he had been aware of the problem for years, seeing doctors and trying diets from the time he was a preteen. But nothing worked, and every time he tried to make a change, it didn’t go the way he planned --- in fact, he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to change. He was only one of millions of Americans struggling with weight, body image and a relationship with food that puts them at major risk. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM is Tomlinson’s chronicle of meeting those people, taking the first steps towards health, and trying to understand how, as a nation, we got to this point.

When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation. As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life --- until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples that are key to understanding the disease. Uncertain who to trust, she takes up with former military man Chase Miller, who has his own reasons for wanting to get close to the samples in her possession, and to Wynter herself.