Adult

MATCHUP takes the never-before-seen bestseller pairings of FACEOFF and adds a delicious new twist: gender. Eleven of the world’s best female thriller writers, from Diana Gabaldon to Charlaine Harris, are paired with 11 of the world’s best male thriller writers, including John Sandford, C.J. Box and Nelson DeMille.

When a long-hidden specter from his troubled past emerges, former covert ops agent Tom Sexton is shaken out of his safe, furtive life. With no choice but to lock and load, Tom falls back into a world where valor and violence collide. Summoned into the ranks of top-secret intelligence, Tom is tasked with protecting a teenage girl targeted by agents of an infamous mercenary. It’s a high-risk mission that will pit all his combat and espionage skills against ruthless paramilitary hit squads. Leading them is a legendary and mysterious killer for hire who’s making Tom doubt everything, and everyone, he has come to believe in. Even himself.

An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over 20 years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other's wisdom and, ultimately, rescue. Meanwhile, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe under troubling conditions. Wanting to help, but also looking for a lost sense of home, our grown-up transplant finds herself quickly entranced by a world that is at once everything she has missed and nothing that she has ever known.

It's the year 2147. Advancements in nanotechnology have enabled us to control aging. We’ve genetically engineered mosquitoes to feast on carbon fumes instead of blood, ending air pollution. And teleportation has become the ideal mode of transportation. Joel Byram spends his days training artificial-intelligence engines to act more human and trying to salvage his deteriorating marriage. He’s pretty much an everyday 22nd-century guy with everyday problems --- until he’s accidentally duplicated while teleporting. Now Joel must outsmart the shadowy organization that controls teleportation, outrun the religious sect out to destroy it, and find a way to get back to the woman he loves in a world that now has two of him.

Every law firm has its backroom bench of brilliant workaholic nerds ferocious in their commitment to the law and to their clients. Such a player is Milton Bernstein of Abbott & Windsor. He's highly valued by the partners for his skills, but untested in the courtroom. Milton's younger brother, Hal, is his polar opposite --- strikingly handsome, a high school baseball legend in St. Louis who was on his way to the major leagues until he destroyed his prospects in a motorcycle accident. Neither brilliant nor driven, Hal has to face up to earning a living. For now he's killing time as a lifeguard at an exclusive country club. But the lives of both brothers are about to change.

Akhil Sharma delivers eight stories that focus on Indian protagonists at home and abroad, plunging readers into the unpredictable workings of the human heart. A young woman in an arranged marriage awakens one day surprised to find herself in love with her husband. A retired divorcé tries to become the perfect partner by reading women’s magazines. A man’s longstanding contempt for his cousin suddenly shifts inward when he witnesses his cousin caring for a sick woman. The protagonists in A LIFE OF ADVENTURE AND DELIGHT deceive themselves and engage in odd behaviors as they navigate how to be good, how to make meaningful relationships, and the strengths and pitfalls of self-interest.

Left to fend for a younger sister with learning difficulties when their mother goes to prison, Sam Morpeth is forced to watch her dreams of university evaporate. But Sam learns what it is to be truly powerless when a stranger begins to blackmail her online. Meanwhile, reporter Jack Parlabane seems to have finally gotten his career back on track with a job at a flashy online news start-up, but his success has left him indebted to a volatile source on the wrong side of the law. Now that debt is being called in, and it could cost him everything. Thrown together by a common enemy, Sam and Jack are about to discover they have more in common than they realize --- and might be each other's only hope.

Divorcée Caitlin Stoller and her children recently moved into a charming old Tudor-style house. As weeks pass, Caitlin starts receiving messages --- first friendly, then unsettling, hinting at the property’s dark past. There are stories about local high school students who have disappeared without a trace --- all star athletes, like Caitlin’s daughter, Lindsay. Then there are the rumors that their new home is cursed. Caitlin doesn’t want to believe the whispers, but something strange is going on. Personal items go missing, and there are too many accidents. The Watcher knows how to get inside the Stollers’ home --- and inside their heads. The rumors are true, but the full horror is even worse.

The Tudor period conjures up images of queens and noblewomen in elaborate court dress; of palace intrigue and dramatic politics. But if you were a woman, it was also a time when death during childbirth was rife; when marriage was usually a legal contract, and the education you could hope to receive was minimal at best. Yet the Tudor century was also dominated by powerful and dynamic women in a way that no era had been before. Historian Elizabeth Norton explores the life cycle of the Tudor woman through the diverging examples of women such as Elizabeth Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister; Mary Howard, widowed but influential at court; and Elizabeth Boleyn, mother of a controversial queen.

Rick van Lam is bui doi, "a child of dust," as the Vietnamese scornfully called a mixed-blood kid whose father was an unknown American GI. Rick’s made a life in Hartford, Connecticut, as a private eye after leaving a career as a cop at the NYPD. Rick is also teaching a part-time course at Farmington College where brainy Vietnamese student Dustin Trang, a scholarship student with no social skills and an oddly hostile family, is scorned and bullied. One night as a blizzard strikes, a professor is shot down in the campus parking lot. Dustin is everyone's hot suspect for the murder, but Rick believes the boy is innocent. As the investigation stalls and the cops close in, Rick realizes he has to break though a web of lies, anger, and betrayals, and force Justin to reveal whatever it is he fears more than arrest for murder.