Adult

The fire at a boarded-up Catholic church killed three firefighters who were trapped in the inferno. A year later, there are still no answers about how the deadly fire started. Boston firefighter Jack McGee, who lost his best friend in the blaze, suspects arson. McGee is convinced that department investigators aren’t sufficiently connected to the city’s lowlifes to get a handle on who's behind the blaze, so he takes the case to Spenser. Spenser quickly learns that the fire might be linked to a rash of new arsons spreading through the city, burning faster and hotter every night.

At once bighearted and remorseless in its excavation of a lost world, PORCELAIN is both a chronicle of a city and a time and a deeply intimate exploration of finding one’s place during the most gloriously anxious period in life --- when you are on your own and betting on yourself, but have no idea how the story ends, and so you live with the honest dread that you’re one false step from being thrown out on your face. Moby’s voice resonates with honesty, wit and, above all, an unshakable passion for his music that steered him through some very rough seas.

This is the story of Bull Meecham, the epitome of the Marine officer. Demanding, authoritarian, as tough a disciplinarian at home as at the base, Bull is a difficult man to please, and even harder to love. This is also the story of Ben Meecham, Bull’s oldest son. A gifted athlete whose best never satisfies his father, Ben must balance his own ambition with his father’s expectations --- and decide what course he will chart for himself and what kind of man he will become.

Many changes have happened to the Murder Squad. Rash actions have cost Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith his job, and in response he has set up his own private detective agency. Inspector Walter Day has been missing for a year, and no one knows where he is --- though there is a strong suspicion that Saucy Jack has him. Hammersmith has made finding Day his primary case, and he has company --- a pair of bounty hunters, a man and a woman. It is only gradually that he has come to realize that they are not what they seem.

Marcus Samuel, Jr. is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889, John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and possessing near-total domination of the market, even the U.S. government is wary of challenging the great “anaconda” of Standard Oil. The Standard never loses --- that is until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell. BREAKING ROCKEFELLER traces Samuel’s rise from outsider to the heights of the British aristocracy, Deterding’s conquest of America, and the collapse of Rockefeller’s monopoly.

When Garrard Conley was 19 years old, he was outed to his parents and forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program heavy on Bible study, Garrard was supposed to emerge heterosexual and stronger in his faith in God for his brush with sin. Instead, he found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness.

Joan Fortier is the epitome of Texas glamour and the center of the 1950s Houston social scene. Every man who sees her seems to want her; every woman just wants to be her. The money may flow as freely as the oil, but the freedom and power all belong to the men. What happens when a woman of indecorous appetites and desires like Joan wants more? What does it do to her best friend? Devoted to Joan since childhood, Cece Buchanan is either her chaperone or her partner in crime, depending on whom you ask. But as Joan’s radical behavior escalates, Cece’s perspective shifts --- forcing one provocative choice to appear the only one there is.

Elizabeth was crowned at 25 after a tempestuous childhood as a bastard and an outcast, but it was only when she reached 50 and all hopes of a royal marriage were dashed that she began to wield real power in her own right. For 25 years, she had struggled to assert her authority over advisers who pressed her to marry and settle the succession; now, she was determined not only to reign but also to rule. In this intimate biography of England's most ambitious Tudor queen, John Guy introduces us to a woman who is refreshingly unfamiliar: at once powerful and vulnerable, willful and afraid.

England, 1337: Edward III is beset on all sides, plagued by debt and surrounded by doubters. He refuses to pay homage to the newly crowned Philip Valois of France and seeks to secure his French holdings, but he is outmanned. Philip can put 50,000 men in the field, but he is having his own problems: he has summoned the angels themselves to fight for France, but the angels refuse to fight. Both kings send priests far and wide, seeking holy relics and heavenly beings to take up the cause of their country, but God remains stubbornly silent, refusing to grant favor to either side.

Raised in genteel poverty after the First World War, Maria Magdalena Dietrich dreams of a life on the stage. With her sultry beauty, smoky voice, seductive silk cocktail dresses and androgynous tailored suits, Marlene performs to packed houses and becomes entangled in a series of stormy love affairs. For the beautiful, desirous Marlene, neither fame nor marriage and motherhood can cure her wanderlust. Setting sail for America, she quickly becomes one of Hollywood’s leading ladies. C. W. Gortner’s novel reveals the inner life of a woman of grit, glamour and ambition who defied convention, seduced the world, and forged her own path on her own terms.