Adult

Eva Sandeski, known as “Necco” on the street, has been a part of an underworld known as “Burntown” for years, ever since the night her father Miles drowned in a flood. A respected professor, Miles was also an inventor of fantastic machines, including one so secret that the plans were said to have been stolen from Thomas Edison’s workshop. According to Necco’s mother, Lily, it’s this machine that got Miles murdered. Necco has always written off this claim as the fevered imaginings of a woman consumed by grief. But when Lily dies under mysterious circumstances, and Necco’s boyfriend is murdered, she’s convinced her mother was telling the truth. Now, on the run from the man called “Snake Eyes,” Necco must rely on other Burntown outsiders to survive.

To call these unsettling times is an understatement. Our political leaders are less and less respectable; in business, cheating, lying and stealing are hazily defined; and in daily life, technology permits us to act in ways inconceivable without it. Yet somehow, people still draw lines between what is acceptable and what is not. In BEHAVING BADLY, Eden Collinsworth speaks with a wide range of figures --- from experts to everyday people --- to parse out the parameters of modern morality.

Before Chipper Jones became an eight-time All-Star who amassed Hall of Fame-worthy statistics during a 19-year career with the Atlanta Braves, he was just a country kid from small town Pierson, Florida. He grew up playing baseball in the backyard with his dad dreaming that one day he’d be a major league ballplayer. With his trademark candor and astonishing recall, Chipper Jones tells the story of his rise to the MLB ranks and what it took to stay with one organization his entire career in an era of booming free agency.

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place. But not everyone at Camp Patience is who they claim to be. Eventually Sarat is befriended by a mysterious functionary, under whose influence she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. The decisions that she makes will have tremendous consequences not just for Sarat but for her family and her country, rippling through generations of strangers and kin alike.

The dogs days of August in Brooklyn and the detectives of the 61st Precinct are battling to keep all hell from breaking loose. Lives are taken in the name of greed, retribution, passion and the lust for power...and the only worthy opponent of this senseless malevolence is the uncompromising resolve to rise above it, rather than descend to its depths. The heart-pounding sequel to the acclaimed novel GRAVESEND, from Shamus Award-winning author J.L. Abramo, CONEY ISLAND AVENUE continues the dramatic account of the professional and personal struggles that constitute everyday life for the dedicated men and women of the Six-One and of the saints and sinners who share their streets.

The summer of 1927 might be the height of the Roaring Twenties, but Bonnelyn Parker is more likely to belt out a church hymn than sling drinks at an illicit juice joint. However, when her boyfriend, Roy Thornton, springs a marriage proposal on her, and financial woes jeopardize her ambitions, Bonnelyn finds salvation in an unlikely place: Dallas's newest speakeasy, Doc's. When Roy discovers her secret life, he embraces it --- perhaps too much, especially when it comes to booze and gambling. Maybe Bonnie can have it all: the American Dream, the husband, and the intoxicating allure of jazz music. But her life --- like her country --- is headed for a crash. Bonnie Parker is about to meet Clyde Barrow.

Taking a midnight stroll along the Hudson River, Mike Hammer gets more than he bargained for: a partial corpse on an ice floe. The body is that of a butler who spent the last years of his life working for a millionaire --- also now deceased --- and his notoriously privileged children. Were both master and servant murdered? Captain Pat Chambers thinks so. But to prove it, Hammer must travel to upstate New York to investigate the dead man’s family, all of whom have a motive for murder --- and one of whom has a taste for it.

Sixteen years ago, a tragic accident cost Emma Metz her two best friends --- one human and one equine. Now, following her father’s death, Emma has reluctantly returned to the Maryland hometown she’d left under a cloud of guilt and uncovers a history of lies tying her broken family to the one place she thought she could never return --- her girlhood sanctuary, Jumping Frog Farm. She finds herself drawn back to the stable after all these years, but is having a hard time winning forgiveness from her former friend, Jillian. To exorcise the past, Emma will have to release her guilt, embrace an uncertain future, and trust again in the healing power of horses.

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza --- known to his friends as Hubert, Etc --- was too old to be at that Communist party. But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be --- except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society --- and walk away.

Nina Riggs was just 37 years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer. Within a year, the mother of two sons received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal. How does one live each day, “unattached to outcome”? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty? Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs’ memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR. She asks: What makes a meaningful life when one has limited time?