Adult

For 24-year-old Jane, finding love in New York City is even harder than making it as a playwright. So when Jane meets Colin, she can’t believe her luck: they’re perfect for each other. Even when Colin breaks off their relationship after six dates, Jane knows this is just a stumbling block. She’ll get him back. She knows she will. That is, until Colin starts dating Zoe --- perfect, luminous Zoe. Even worse, she’s actually kind of nice. But Zoe doesn’t have what it takes to love Colin. All Jane has to do is prove it, and they’ll be so happy together. But when Jane sneaks into Colin’s apartment, she makes a shocking discovery --- one that will ensnare them all in a dark web of lies, secrets and murder.

Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner’s status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In this comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America’s forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post–Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law.

One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. What really happened to Louisa’s father?

They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses --- all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone transport warplanes. Thus, 25 daring young aviators bolted for England in 1942, becoming the first American women to command military aircraft. In SPITFIRES, Becky Aikman follows the stories of nine of the women who served, drawing on unpublished diaries, letters and records, along with her own interviews, to bring these forgotten heroines fully to life.

At 24, Nicole “Nic” Monroe lives alone in a dinky apartment in her hometown of Mishawaka, Indiana, she’s just gotten a DWI, and she works the same dead-end job she’s been working since high school. Everyone has felt sorry for her for the last seven years --- since the day her older sister, Kasey, vanished without a trace. The only real clue in her disappearance was Jules Connor, another young woman from the same area who disappeared in the same way, two weeks earlier. But with so little for the police to go on, both cases eventually went cold. Nic wants nothing more than to move on from her sister’s disappearance and the state in which it has left her. But then one day, Jules’ sister, Jenna Connor, walks into Nic’s life and offers her something she hasn’t felt in a long time: hope.

When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter, Jill Bialosky. Grief, of course, but also guilt, confusion and doubt, all of which were compounded by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it impossible for Jill to be with her mother as she was dying and to attend her mother’s funeral. Starting with her mother’s end and the physical/cognitive decline that led her to a care home, THE END IS THE BEGINNING explores Iris’ battle with depression, the tragedy of a daughter’s suicide, a failed second marriage, the death of her beloved first husband only five years into their young marriage, her joyful teenage years, and the trauma of losing her own mother at just eight years old.

Sarah Morgan is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Washington, DC. With a perfect case record and having made partner before the age of 35, her life is going exactly as she planned. However, the same cannot be said for her husband, Adam, a failed author who has grown to resent his wife's meteoric success as he feels it has come at the expense of their relationship. For almost two years, Adam has kept his affair with Kelly Summers a secret, but everything changes when her body is discovered at the couple's lake house, and Adam is arrested on suspicion of murder. Sarah now finds herself facing her most challenging case yet when she vows to defend her husband. While Adam is certainly guilty of sleeping with Kelly, the question remains: Is he guilty of killing her too?

There is a heatwave across Europe, and four siblings have gathered at their family’s lake house to seek answers about their father, a famous artist, who recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his long-awaited masterpiece. Now he is dead. As the siblings try to piece together what happened, they spend the summer in a state of lawlessness: living under the same roof for the first time in decades, forced to confront the buried wounds they incurred as his children and waiting for answers. Though they have always been close, the things they learn that summer will drive them apart before they can truly understand his legacy. Meanwhile, their stepmother’s enigmatic presence looms over the house. Is she the force that will finally destroy the family for good?

Beatrice Steele has traded her etiquette-obsessed community of Swampshire for the big city of London, accompanied by her ever-trusty chaperone, Miss Bolton. They’ve settled in a lovely neighborhood, Sweetbriar, which is home to DS Investigations, the new office she opened with the prickly, annoyingly logical Inspector Drake to solve the city’s brutally thrilling crimes. However, nothing is turning out how Beatrice imagined it would, and she begins to wonder if she can become a true detective in a city that feels full of false promises. That is, until a string of murders thrusts Beatrice and Drake into the center of a scandal that pits the neighborhood’s wealthiest against the arts community. Beatrice must survive threats to her partnership, her business, and her place in society to break the case --- before it’s too late.

After Baz Luhrmann’s movie, Elvis, hit theaters, audiences and critics alike couldn't help but question the Black origins of Elvis Presley’s music and style, reigniting a debate that has been circling for decades. In BEFORE ELVIS​, author Preston Lauterbach answers these questions definitively, based on new research and extensive, previously unpublished interviews with the artists who blazed the way and the people who knew them. Within these pages, Lauterbach examines the lives, music, legacies and interactions with Elvis of the four innovative Black artists who created a style that would come to be known as Rock ’n’ Roll: Little Junior Parker, Big Mama Thornton, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and mostly unknown eccentric Beale Street guitarist Calvin Newborn.