Adult

The wicked, bawdy Restoration court is no place for a child princess. Ten-year-old Anne cuts an odd figure: a sickly child, she is drawn towards improper pursuits. Cards, sweetmeats, scandal and gossip with her Ladies of the Bedchamber figure large in her life. But as King Charles' niece, Anne is also a political pawn, who will be forced to play her part in the troubled Stuart dynasty. Transformed from overlooked princess to the heiress of England, she will be compelled to overcome grief for her lost children, the political maneuverings of her sister and her closest friends, and her own betrayal of her father, before the fullness of her destiny is revealed.

Thirty-four-year-old marine biologist Kyra Winthrop remembers nothing about the diving accident that left her with a complex form of memory loss. With only brief flashes of the last few years of her life, her world has narrowed to a few close friendships on the island where she lives with her devoted husband, Jacob. But all is not what it seems. Kyra begins to have visions --- or are they memories? --- of a rocky marriage, broken promises and cryptic relationships with the island residents, whom she believes to be her friends. As Kyra races to uncover her past, the truth becomes a terrifying nightmare.

PLAID AND PLAGIARISM begins on a morning shortly after the four new owners of Yon Bonnie Books take possession of their bookshop in the Highlands. Unfortunately, Janet Marsh is told she’ll have to wait before moving into her new home. Then she finds out the house has been vandalized. Again. The chief suspect is Una Graham, an advice columnist for the local paper. When Janet and her business partners go looking for clues at the house, they find Una in the garden shed with a sickle in her neck. Who wanted Una dead? After discovering a cache of nasty letters, Janet and her friends are beginning to wonder who didn’t, including Janet’s ex-husband.

Cursed from birth by the bird-shaped blemish across her face, Flavia spends much of her life hidden from the outside world. After sabotaging her sister’s wedding in a fit of jealous rage, she is exiled to serve in the convent of Santa Giuliana. Soon she finds that another exile dwells in the convent: a former Venetian courtesan named Ghostanza, whose ostentatious appearance clashes with the otherwise austere convent. When Ghostanza claims Flavia as her ornatrix --- her personal hairdresser and handmaid --- Flavia is pulled into a world where admiration is everything and perfection is the ultimate, elusive goal.

"Edward Hopper is surely the greatest American narrative painter. His work bears special resonance for writers and readers, and yet his paintings never tell a story so much as they invite viewers to find for themselves the untold stories within." So says Lawrence Block, who has invited 17 writers to join him in an unprecedented anthology of brand-new stories. Contributors include Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott, Joe R. Lansdale, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeffery Deaver and Lee Child.

A young woman is found beheaded in the Stockholm home of business tycoon Jesper Orre. Investigator Peter Lindgren and psychological profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön are put on the case. Side-stepping their own dangerous relationship, Peter and Hanne find they can’t yet identify the woman --- and Orre is missing. In a separate thread, two months earlier, Emma Bohman, a timid beauty with a dark past, works in Orre’s company. A chance encounter between them leads to a love affair. Orre insists their relationship stay a secret, then leaves her without explanation --- and frightening things begin to happen to Emma. Why does Orre want to hurt her? And how far would he go to silence his secret lover?

In the spring of 1944, Ernest Hemingway traveled to London and then to France to cover World War II for Colliers magazine. Obviously he was a little late in arriving. Why did he go? He had resisted this kind of journalism for much of the early period of the war, but when he finally decided to go, he threw himself into the thick of events and so became a conduit to understanding some of the major events and characters of the war. HEMINGWAY AT WAR is also an investigation into Hemingway’s subsequent work --- much of it stemming from his wartime experience --- which shaped the latter stages of his career in dramatic fashion.

In the early 1920s, in the remote village of Ghamsar, teenagers Talla and Sardar fall in love and marry. Sardar brings his young bride with him across the mountains to the suburbs of Tehran, where the couple settles down and builds a home. From the outskirts of the capital city, they will watch as the Qajar dynasty falls and Reza Khan rises to power as Reza Shah Pahlavi. Into this family of illiterate shepherds is born Bahram, a boy whose brilliance and intellectual promise are apparent from a very young age. Through his education, Bahram will become a fervent follower of reformer Mohammad Mosaddegh and will participate first-hand in his country's political and social upheavals.

The French Revolution casts a long shadow, one that reaches into our own time and influences our debates on freedom, equality and authority. Its significance morphs according to the sympathies of the viewer, who may see it as a series of gory tableaux, a regrettable slide into uncontrolled anarchy --- or a radical reshaping of the political landscape. Ian Davidson provides a fresh look at this vital moment in European history. He reveals how it was an immensely complicated and multifaceted revolution, and how subsequently it became weighted with political, social and moral values.

January 1946: Two WACs leave an officers’ club in Munich, and four Soviet NKGB agents kidnap them at knifepoint in the parking lot and shove them in the back of an ambulance. That is the agents’ first mistake, and their last. One of the WACs, a blond woman improbably named Claudette Colbert, works for the new Directorate of Central Intelligence, and three of the men end up dead and the fourth wounded. The “incident,” however, will send shock waves rippling up and down the line and have major repercussions not only for her, but for her boss, James Cronley, Chief DCI-Europe, and for everybody involved in their still-evolving enterprise.