Adult

The year is 1548, and the Chinese Empire faces an imminent Mongol invasion. All that prevents the violent end of a dynasty is the Great Wall. Yet even this famed fortification has weaknesses, and against his will, a talented Chinese craftsman is taken from his home and wife, so that he may labor alongside the wall's defenders. Fan has been missing for a year when his wife, Meng, decides to do the impossible --- to leave everyone and everything she knows in a daunting effort to find him. At a time when many women fear even stepping outside their homes, Meng disguises herself as a man and begins a perilous journey of deliverance.

There he stood in the doorway: overweight, depressed and nearly homeless --- a pug named Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy was Brydie Benson’s latest problem, arriving on top of her messy divorce and sudden move. Brydie needed a place to start over, so this rent-free home seemed a great idea. She just never counted on Teddy, or his owner, the Germantown Retirement Village’s toughest customer, Pauline Neumann. And because rent-free doesn’t mean bills-free, Brydie gets a night-shift job at a big-box grocery. Then, she gets an idea: Why not combine her baking skills with her new-found dog knowledge? And so her store Pupcakes is born. Along with a new start comes a possible new love, in the form of Nathan Reid, a local doctor with a sassy Irish Wolfhound named Sasha.

I have something for you. When Quinn Cruz receives that cryptic text message from her older sister Nora, she doesn’t think much of it. They haven’t seen each other in nearly a year, and their relationship consists mostly of infrequent phone calls and an occasional email or text. But when a haunted Nora shows up at the lake near Quinn's house just hours later, a chain reaction is set into motion that will change both of their lives forever. Nora’s “something” is more shocking than Quinn could have ever imagined: a little girl, cowering, wide-eyed and tight-lipped. But before Quinn can ask even one of the million questions swirling around her head, Nora disappears, and Quinn finds herself the unlikely caretaker of a girl introduced simply as Lucy.

A shy young man leaves his home in rural Turkey to learn a trade and discover life in 1920s Berlin. There, amidst the city’s bustling streets, elegant museums, passionate politics and infamous cabarets, a chance meeting with a beautiful half-Jewish artist transforms him forever. Caught between his desire for freedom from tradition and his yearning to belong, he struggles to hold on to the new life he has found with the woman he loves.

Mr. Polopetsi tells Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi a troubling story about a woman who has been wrongly dismissed from her job. Never one to let an injustice go unanswered, Mma Ramotswe begins to investigate, but she soon discovers that the case is more complicated than she initially suspected. Other surprises await our intrepid proprietress. Mma Ramotswe happens to hear of a local nurse named Mingie Ramotswe. Who is this mystery lady? Then she finds out that an unpleasant figure from her past has recently been spotted in town.

It has been 10 years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all visible evidence of her small-town roots. Now working as an environmental lawyer in Chicago, she has a thriving career, a modern apartment, and her pick of meaningless one-night stands. But when a new case takes her back home to Barrens, Indiana, the life she painstakingly created starts to crack. Tasked with investigating Optimal Plastics, the town’s most high-profile company and economic heart, Abby begins to find strange connections to Barrens’s biggest scandal from more than a decade ago, involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her closest friends --- just before Kaycee disappeared for good.

Hired by a mysterious “Mr. Smith” to find a woman who vanished 21 years earlier, Donald Lam finds himself facing a sadistic cop, a desperate showgirl, a duplicitous client, and one very dogged (and beautiful) newspaper reporter --- while Bertha Cool’s attempts to cut herself in on this lucrative opportunity land them both hip-deep in murder.

Eight months after their move from Boston to Budapest, Annie and Will’s efforts to assimilate are thrown into turmoil when they receive a message from friends in the US asking that they check up on an elderly man, a fiercely independent Jewish American WWII veteran who helped free Hungarian Jews from a Nazi prison camp. They soon learn that the man, Edward Weiss, has come to Hungary to exact revenge on someone he is convinced seduced, married and then murdered his daughter. What Annie does not anticipate is that in helping Edward she will become enmeshed in a dark and deadly conflict that will end in tragedy and a stunning loss of innocence.

When it comes to crime, it’s not always a question of “whodunit?” Sometimes there’s more mystery in the why or the how. And what about the clever few who carry out what appears to be the perfect crime? Or whose most essential selves are changed by the crimes they commit? And what about those who know the identity of the murderer but keep the information to themselves? These are some of the questions that these six stories begin to unlock as they draw us into the inner workings --- the thoughts and emotional machinations, the recollections and rationalizations, the dreams and desires --- behind both murderous cause and effect.

Having brought his legions of devoted readers to Oz in WICKED and to Wonderland in AFTER ALICE, Gregory Maguire now takes us to the realms of the Brothers Grimm and E. T. A. Hoffmann --- the enchanted Black Forest of Bavaria and the salons of Munich. HIDDENSEE imagines the backstory of the Nutcracker, revealing how this entrancing creature came to be carved and how he guided an ailing girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a Christmas Eve. At the heart of Hoffmann's mysterious tale hovers Godfather Drosselmeier --- the ominous, canny, one-eyed toy maker made immortal by Petipa and Tchaikovsky's fairy tale ballet --- who presents the once and future Nutcracker to Klara, his goddaughter.