Adult

When Aimee is 10 years old, as the night dips into the witching hour, the Woman in White appears to her. Minutes later, Aimee's father is dead --- and Aimee inherits a fortune. But the Woman in White never really leaves Aimee, appearing as a sinister specter before every tragedy in her life. Despite Aimee's wealth, her cross-continental travels, and her increasingly shocking progression through husbands, Aimee is haunted by the unidentifiable Woman's mysterious motivations. Tearing through millions of dollars, four continents and a hearty collection of husbands, real-life heiress Aimee Crocker blazed an unbelievable trail of public scandal, private tragedy, and the kind of strong independent woman the 1880s had never seen.

When Karen Simmons is murdered on Valentine’s Day, Detective Elise King wonders if she was killed by a man she met online. Karen was all over the dating apps, leading some townspeople to blame her for her own death, while others band together to protest society’s violence against women. Into the divide comes Kiki Nunn, whose aggressive newsgathering once again antagonizes Elise. A single mother of a young daughter, Kiki is struggling to make a living in the diminished news landscape. Getting a scoop in the Simmons murder would do a lot for her career, and she’s willing to go up against not just Elise but the killer himself to do it.

Even in a family of chaotic necromancers, Daria “Dasha” Avramov has always been an outlier. An event planner at the Arcane Emporium occult megastore, Dasha is also a devil eater: a rare necromantic witch with an affinity for banishing demons and traversing the veil, the boundary between this realm and the next. Her worst regret is a devastating breakup with the wise, empathetic and sensual Ivy Thorn, her event-planning counterpart at Honeycake Orchards. When they’re thrown together to plan the Cavalcade --- a month-long festival celebrating Thistle Grove’s ceremonial founding --- Dasha hopes that the third time might be the charm, while Ivy refuses to let herself be hurt again. As they confront the pain and passion lingering between them, Dasha and Ivy also must stand against an otherworldly threat unlike anything Thistle Grove has faced before.

Influencer Meredith Lee didn’t teach Aspen Palmer how to blossom on social media just to be ditched as soon as Aspen became big. So can anyone really blame her for doing a little stalking? Then, Mer gets lucky; she finds one of Aspen’s kids’ iPads and swipes it. Now, she has access to everything. Would anyone else be able to resist tweaking things a little here and there, showing up in Aspen’s place for meetings with potential sponsors? Meanwhile, Aspen doesn’t understand why her perfectly filtered life is falling apart. If she doesn’t find out who’s behind everything, she just might lose it all. When Meredith suddenly goes missing, Aspen’s world is upended, and mysterious threats begin to arrive. But she won’t let anything get in the way of her perfect life again.

When Tia accidentally overhears a whispered conversation between her mother --- who is terminally ill and lying in a hospital bed in Nigeria --- and her aunt, the repercussions will send her on a desperate quest to uncover a secret her mother has been hiding for nearly two decades. Back home in Lagos a few days later, Adunni, a plucky 14-year-old runaway, is lying awake in Tia’s guest room. Having escaped from her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she finally has found refuge with Tia, who has helped her enroll in school. Suddenly, there’s a horrible knocking at the front gate. It’s only the beginning of a harrowing ordeal that will see Tia forced to make a terrible choice between protecting Adunni or finally learning the truth behind the secret her mother has hidden from her.

The vibrant economy of the new Vietnam is a shiny lure for Western capital. Companies are racing to uncover ideal opportunities. Not wanting to be left behind, Hendley Associates has sent their best analyst, Jack Ryan, Jr., to mine for investment gold. And he may have found some in a rare earth mining company: GeoTech. But a trip with a Hendley colleague to the Highlands to observe the company’s operations takes a treacherous turn when their helicopter is shot down. Some things haven’t changed, and Vietnam is still the plaything of powerful neighbors. The Chinese are determined to keep Jack from finding the truth about what exactly is being processed at the isolated factory. Now Jack is in a race for his life. He has to stay one step ahead of a pack of killers while supporting his wounded friend.

Vita Woods produces a popular podcast and lives with her successful doctor boyfriend, Max. But as much as things are going right, the days are dark. Vita is not leaving the house. In fact, she can barely make it out of bed. Instead, she spends long, blurred hours falling in and out of The Pit, dead to the world and to herself. For months, Vita has been sick with an illness that no doctor can diagnose. And recently, Luigi, a Renaissance poet nursing a 500-year-old heartbreak, has started showing up at her bedside. He says he’s come to release her. But he may be a ghost, an apparition of her sickly mind. Then, when an unexpected mix-up pushes her into the path of her upstairs neighbors, Vita finds friendship --- and perhaps more --- in the apartment above. But something about her "condition" keeps nagging at her. What if the problem is Vita herself?

It's Natwest's last day before he leaves for university, and there's only one thing on his mind: the deeply embarrassing package he ordered to his house --- which still hasn't arrived. He won't leave town without it. This is the story of 24 hours in the life of Natwest and his small-town odyssey in pursuit of the missing package. Yet it's also the story of a middle-aged dentist who dreams of being a respected artist --- but the only thing he can seem to paint is the human mouth. And it's the story of a tortured imam involved in a quasi-romantic entanglement with the local vicar; an octogenerian mourning the death of her secretive husband; and a troubled teenager whose nudes have leaked on the internet. It's the story of Natwest's obnoxious ex-boyfriend; his class-traitor mother and her childhood boyfriend; and the life-changing secrets he knows about Natwest's past.

Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In THE BOOKSHOP, we see the stakes: what has been, and what might be lost. Evan Friss’ history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many.

Perla Wultz lives with her husband, Grant, and their precious daughter, Sophie, in a gated Pasadena community. Perla plays the part of loving wife and mother to perfection. It seems an ideal life, if not for a decades-old crime that has become her dark and consuming secret obsession. Twenty-three years ago, Leewood Folcrum confessed to murdering two young girls during a birthday party. Though he’s been condemned to a life sentence, his crime is not forgotten. Not by Perla, nor by an inquisitive doctoral student interviewing Folcrum for his dissertation. He’s getting the killer to open up --- about his motives, his confession and the truth of what really happened on that horrible night. As the past and the present entwine, the deceptions behind the infamous murder begin to surface. But who’s deceiving who now? And why?