Adult

By the end of 1943, nearly all of Europe’s Jewish population had fled, been deported, captured or killed by Hitler. Only Hungary, and its almost 900,000 Jews, remained free from Hitler’s subjugation. That changed in March 1944, after Hitler conquered Hungary and declared his plan for mass extermination of the Jewish people. Theresa Weissbach, a professor at the University of Michigan, hasn’t heard from her parents in Budapest for over a year. Her best friend, Julia Powers, recently awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for her OSS service in occupied Holland, joins with her to locate and rescue Theresa’s family. Their skills and connections in the complex networks of public and secret diplomacy enable Julia, Theresa and others to take enormous risks in an effort to save thousands of innocent lives.

Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing 18 pounds and measuring 27 inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken in by his devout Amish grandparents who disapprove of all the attention and hide him away from the English world. But it’s hard to hide forever when you’re nearly eight feet tall. At 17, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach. What happens next transforms not only Gabriel’s life but the lives of everyone he meets.

The concept of evil is universal, ancient and ever present today. The biblical book of Genesis clearly defines it when Cain kills his brother Abel out of jealousy. Evil is a choice to make another suffer. As long as human beings have walked, evil has been close by. CONFRONTING EVIL by Bill O'Reilly and Josh Hammer recounts the deeds of the worst people in history: Genghis Khan. The Roman Emperor Caligula. Henry VIII. The collective evil of the 19th-century slave traders and the 20th-century robber barons. Stalin. Hitler. Mao. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Putin. The Mexican drug cartels. Collectively, these warlords, tyrants, businessmen and criminals are directly responsible for the death and misery of hundreds of millions of people.

In THE ELEMENTS, acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne has created an epic saga that weaves together four interconnected narratives, each representing a different perspective on crime: the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator and the victim. The narrative follows a mother on the run from her past, a young soccer star facing a trial, a successful surgeon grappling with childhood trauma and a father on a transformative journey with his son. Each is somehow connected to the next, and as the story unfolds, their lives intersect in unimaginable ways. The story resonates on a deeply emotional level, challenging readers to confront their own conceptions of guilt and innocence at every step. Amid the wildly engrossing storytelling, the book ultimately asks: What would you do when faced with the unthinkable?

Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home. Decades later, Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child her mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of family and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and her own fractured history. What did they give up when they sent him away? What kind of life has he been given? And how did it change their own lives?

New York, 1920. Although she’s newly married to the hottest writer in America, Zelda Fitzgerald is at loose ends while Scott works on his next novel, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED. Meanwhile, Atlanta journalist Morris Markey has arrived in New York and is lost in every way possible. Recently returned from the war and without connections, he hovers at the edge of the city’s revels, unable to hear the secrets that might give him his first big story. When notorious man-about-town Joseph Elwell is found shot through the head, the fortunes of the two southerners collide when they realize they were both among the last to see him alive. Zelda encountered Elwell at the scandalous Midnight Frolic revue on the night of his death, and Markey saw him just hours before with a ravishing mystery woman dressed in green. Markey has his story. Zelda has her next adventure. 

Manhattan is filled with galleries and deep-pocketed collectors who can make an artist's career with a wave of a hand. But one man toils in obscurity, his brilliance unrecognized while lesser talents bask in the glory he believes should be his. Come tomorrow, he vows, the city will be buzzing about his work. Indeed, before dawn, Lt. Eve Dallas is speeding toward the home of the two gallery owners whose doorway has been turned into a horrifying crime scene overnight. A lifeless young woman has been elaborately costumed and precisely posed to resemble the model of a long-ago Dutch master, and Dallas plunges into her investigation.

While working the night shift at a San Francisco news agency, Bayla Jeevan has a shocking out-of-body experience. Her consciousness is transported deep into an Indian forest, where she witnesses a noxious liquid spreading through the soil. At the same time, she receives a message from her father, presumed dead for 15 years, warning her of imminent danger. Halfway around the world, agrochemical corporation ZedChem --- led by billionaire Krakun Zed --- tests its latest innovation, a product heralded as the solution to topsoil erosion. But the data reveals something else entirely. As Bayla sets out looking for answers, she learns more about her past --- and her family's connections to a secret organization with ancient roots and to Zed himself. Will Bayla be able to stop the corporation from ruining global agriculture and devastating human existence forever?

Sheriff Joanna Brady is looking forward to the holidays with her busy family, and to celebrating her daughter Jenny’s graduation from the police academy. But the family is interrupted when a body is discovered beneath a flooded bridge in the Arizona desert. A young boy was murdered, and the details of the crime scene tell Joanna two things: This was not the killer’s first murder. And it’s only a matter of time before he kills again. As Joanna digs deeper, she begins to understand this murder is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. She uncovers unlikely connections between cases of mysterious deaths and missing persons, having long since gone cold, that extend far beyond the confines of her small town and include the discovery of a body near Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. Meanwhile, as a dogged journalist is circling the case and privileged information is leaked, Joanna can’t be sure who to trust. 

Chino and Paco Rojas seem well-mannered, at least for Chicanos, to the white cops that pull them over for littering on the long drive from California to Trinity, Texas. So well-mannered, in fact, that Captain Frank McKellan lets them off with a warning and recommends them a job at Stanzik Farms, the largest independent melon grower in the area. Instead, Chino is looking for a mysterious man, Vincent Mora, whose new Valley Agricultural Workers Association is causing a scene striking against the farm owners. Stanzik’s fields and Mora’s union bring together a cast of unlikely characters. Some are neighbors, others just passing through. Some know each other well, or at least thought they did…before the picket line.