Adult

Former operative Will Cochrane wakes up in New York’s Waldorf Astoria and is horrified to see blood on his hands. When he then finds a woman murdered in his bathroom and realizes he has no memory of the night before, Will believes he is being framed. Suspecting that the twin boys he recently adopted are in danger as well, he discovers one of them alive and the other missing, most likely kidnapped. With local police, the FBI and even his friends pursuing him, the clever and ruthless operative must track down his adversary, save the boys and prove his innocence before it’s too late.

Still known to millions primarily as the author of “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of such classics as THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE.

When Leah’s former boss and mentor, Judy, dies in an accident and leaves Leah with her most prized possession --- a flashy red sports car --- the shock forces Leah to reevaluate her whole life. Returning to San Francisco to claim the mysterious car she blames for Judy’s death, Leah revisits past lives and loves in several sprawling days colored by sex, sorrow, and unexpected delight. Through the voice of Judy, who advises from afar, the surreal nature of grief is made hauntingly evident as Leah is lead toward a new sense of freedom.

Firefighters walk boldly into battle against the most capricious of elements. Their daughters, mothers, sisters and wives walk through the world with another kind of strength and another kind of sorrow, and no one knows that better than the women of the Keegan-O’Reilly clan. In ASHES OF FIERY WEATHER, debut novelist Kathleen Donohoe takes us from famine-era Ireland to New York City a decade after 9/11, illuminating the passionate loves and tragic losses of six generations of women in a firefighting family.

As members of the yearbook committee, Nick, Zola, Matt and Christina are eager to capture all the memorable moments of their junior year at Lewis and Clark High School. But how do you document a horrific tragedy --- a deadly school shooting by a classmate? Struggling to comprehend this cataclysmic event, these four survivors vow to honor the memories of those lost and the memories forgotten in the shadow of violence. But the shooting is only the first inexplicable trauma to rock their small suburban St. Louis town. A series of mysterious house fires have hit the families of the victims one by one, pushing the grieving town to the edge.

We may love books, but do we know what lies behind them? In THE BOOK, Keith Houston reveals that the paper, ink, thread, glue and board from which a book is made tell as rich a story as the words on its pages --- of civilizations, empires, human ingenuity and madness. In an invitingly tactile history of this 2,000-year-old medium, Houston follows the development of writing, printing, the art of illustrations and binding to show how we have moved from cuneiform tablets and papyrus scrolls to the hardcovers and paperbacks of today.

Independence Day, 1861. The schooner S. J. Waring sets sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later, it limps back into New York’s frenzied harbor with the ship's black steward, William Tillman, at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has been lost to history. Now reclaiming Tillman as the real American hero he was, historian Brian McGinty dramatically returns readers to that riotous, explosive summer of 1861, when the country was tearing apart at the seams and the Union army was in near shambles following a humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run.

At just 47 years old, William Giraldi’s father was killed in a horrific motorcycle crash while racing on a country road. This tragedy, which forever altered the young Giraldi and devastated his family, provides the pulse for THE HERO’S BODY. In the tradition of Andre Dubus III’s TOWNIE, this is a deep-seeing investigation into two generations of men from the working-class town of Manville, New Jersey, including Giraldi’s own forays into obsessive bodybuilding as a teenager desperate to be worthy of his family’s pitiless, exacting codes of manhood.

After a harrowing, otherworldly confrontation on the shores of Exmouth, Massachusetts, Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast is missing, presumed dead. Sick with grief, Pendergast's ward, Constance, retreats to her chambers beneath the family mansion at 891 Riverside Drive --- only to be taken captive by a shadowy figure from the past. Proctor, Pendergast's longtime bodyguard, springs to action, chasing Constance's kidnapper through cities, across oceans, and into wastelands unknown. And by the time Proctor discovers the truth, a terrifying engine has stirred --- and it may already be too late.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial --- admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell --- in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth.