Adult

High in the Hollywood Hills, writer Lady Daniels has decided to take a break from her husband. Left alone with her children, she’s going to need a hand taking care of her young son if she’s ever going to finish her memoir. In response to a Craigslist ad, S arrives, a magnetic young artist who will live in the secluded guest house out back, care for Lady’s toddler, Devin, and keep a watchful eye on her teenage son, Seth. S performs her day job beautifully, quickly drawing the entire family into her orbit and becoming a confidante for Lady. But in the heat of the summer, S’s connection to Lady’s older son takes a disturbing, and possibly destructive, turn.

Annie Darling’s friend and fellow shop owner Ves Roundtree is a very wealthy woman. Her rich brother entrusted her with his estate, and upon her death, his fortune is to be divided. Several cash-strapped islanders are in line to collect life-changing inheritances. The problem is that Ves is very much alive and hosts a dinner for the prospective beneficiaries. Not long after, she suffers a bad fall that was no accident. Everyone at the table had a motive, but not a shred of evidence was left behind. When one of the suspects is found floating in the harbor and Ves disappears, Annie and her husband Max spring into action to catch a calculating killer before greed takes another life.

Estranged from her family, best friends with her driverless car, partnered with a Frenchman who believes in post-sexual sex, international trend forecaster Sloane Jacobsen is the perfect candidate to lead tech giant Mammoth's conference for affluent consumers who prefer virtual relationships to the real things. But early in her contract, Sloane starts picking up on cues that physical intimacy is going to make a major comeback, leaving many --- Sloane included --- to question if the 40-year-old's intuitions are as dependable as they once were. And if Sloane goes rogue against her all-powerful employer, will she be able to let in the love and connectedness she's long been denying herself?

Connie Kelly thought she’d found her perfect man on an online dating site. She fell so hard for M. Brooks Welles that she wrote him a check for almost $300,000, hoping for a big return on her investment. But within weeks, both Welles and her money are gone. Enter Spenser, who quickly discovers that everything about Welles is phony. But uncovering the truth won’t be easy, as he’ll have to keep the mystery man alive long enough to get back his client’s money. As the trail winds from Boston to backroads Georgia, Spenser will need help from trusted allies Hawk and Teddy Sapp to make sure Welles’ next con is his last.

In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius’ villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. “Abroad” captures the low point of an artist couple’s tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories in Penelope Lively’s first story collection in decades reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery and even retribution --- as in “The Third Wife,” when a woman learns her husband is a serial con artist and turns a house-hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap.

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met --- a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and constantly jams on the guitar. His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church’s country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents’ rectory, their two worlds collide. In PRIESTDADDY, Patricia Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents’ household after a decade of living on their own.

When the most advanced aircraft ever designed vanishes over the South Pacific, Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala are drawn into a deadly contest to locate the fallen machine. But they know what others don’t --- that the X-37 is carrying a dangerous secret, a payload of exotic matter, extracted from the upper reaches of the atmosphere and stored at a temperature near absolute zero. As long as it remains frozen, the cargo is inert, but if it thaws, it will unleash a catastrophe of nearly unthinkable proportions. The entire NUMA team will risk everything in an effort to avert disaster…but they may be caught in a race that no one can win.

Arriving at his fifth school in as many years, diplomat’s son Osei Kokote knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day --- so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players --- teachers and pupils alike --- will never be the same again. The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard, where kids fall in and out of love with each other before lunchtime, and practice a casual racism picked up from their parents and teachers.

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are lovesick doctors, students, ex-boyfriends, actors, bartenders and even Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, brought together to tell stories that speak to us all. In MEN WITHOUT WOMEN, Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic, marked by the same wry humor and pathos that have defined his entire body of work.

On January 2, 1942, Japanese troops marched into Manila unopposed by U.S. forces. Manila was a strategic port, a romantic American outpost and a jewel of a city. Tokyo saw its conquest of the Philippines as the key in its plan to control all of Asia, including Australia. Thousands of soldiers surrendered and were sent on the notorious 80-mile Bataan Death March. But thousands of other Filipinos and Americans refused to surrender and hid in the Luzon hills above Bataan and Manila. MacARTHUR’S SPIES is the story of three of them, and how they successfully foiled the Japanese for more than two years, sabotaging Japanese efforts and preparing the way for MacArthur’s return.