Adult

Even though his firearms store is failing, things are looking up for David Rizzo. His son, Nick, has just recovered after a near-fatal overdose, which means one thing: Rizzo can use Nick’s resurrection to create the most compelling television commercial for a gun emporium that the world has ever seen. After all, this is America, Rizzo tells himself. Surely anything is possible. But the relationship between father and son is fragile, mired in mutual disappointment. And when the pair embarks on their scheme to avoid bankruptcy, a high-stakes crash of hijinks, hope and disaster ensues.

These eight stories from James Lee Burke moves from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons and trailer parks across the South, weaving together love, friendship, violence, survival and revenge. A boy and his father watch a German submarine sink an oil tanker as evil forces in the disguise of federal agents try to ruin their family. A girl is beaten up outside a bar as her university-professor father navigates new love and threats from a group of neo-Nazis. A pair of undercover union organizers are hired to break colts for a Hollywood actor, whose “Western hero” façade hides darkness. An oil rig worker witnesses a horrific attack on a local village while on a job in South America and seeks justice through one final act of bravery.

This collection of three interconnected novellas follows each generation of the iconic Swagger family. In “City of Meat,” Charles Swagger is on the hunt for notorious bank robber Baby Face Nelson when he traces a tip to the Chicago stock yards. While there, he’s brutally assaulted and discovers that the madman who attacked him is involved in a nearby narcotics ring. Earl Swagger investigates a violent bank robbery in “Johnny Tuesday” that left two dead and a fortune missing in small-town Maryland. At every turn, however, he’s met with silence and hostility from the townsfolk. Finally, in “Five Dolls for the Gut Hook,” a 32-year-old Bob Lee Swagger is back from Vietnam nearly broken over good men lost for nothing. But one afternoon he’s wakened from his nightmares by two men with a problem.

Anna Sinjari --- refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker --- has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. Enter Ssrin, a many-headed serpent alien who is on the run from her own past. Ssrin and Anna are inexorably, dangerously drawn to each other, and their contact reveals universe-threatening stakes. While humanity reels from disaster, Anna must join a small team of civilians, soldiers and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they can manage to face their own demons, they just might save the world.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children. So when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it. But when the heist goes awry and his younger brother, Hugo, is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge. In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors’ crimes unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

It's 1990 in London, and reporter Tom Hargreaves’ star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and “bad apples”: the Greens. At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life --- and love --- got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. In her bones, Ricki knows that a more exciting life awaits her somewhere. When regal nonagenarian Ms. Della invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers. One evening in February, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

If you're lucky enough to get that bonus time, what are you going to do with it? For Glenda, Harmony and Jan, it's heading south to age feistily in side-by-side townhouses on St. Simons Island. One minute, they're just out of college and working together in Marshbury, Massachusetts. The next, they're using their golden parachutes to land just south of Savannah on the Golden Isles. They're ready for reinvention, not withering on the vine. Plus all this ageism is getting really old. So they hatch a plan to take care of Butt, the dishonest, lecherous head of their HOA. To ramp up their supershero skills, they get jobs working as role players at FLETC, the massive, hot-guy-filled Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Because age is just a number when you’re taking names and kicking butt.

No one knows why Lucy's 14-year-old daughter, Eden, almost drowned in the lake after school one day. But now she’s safe and well. Lucy can start being a good mother. The mother she should have been all these years --- years that were fraught with grief over the loss of Eden’s twin during pregnancy. Yes, all that matters is that Eden is fine. But then Eden starts saying that Eden isn’t her name. Her name is Eli. The name Lucy had reserved for Eden’s unborn twin. Don’t worry, says the doctor. Eden is completely fine, says her husband. Of course I’m fine, Eden says, with that strange new smile of hers. I didn’t die. I’m here. But Lucy knows something is very wrong with Eden. She’s not her maddening, complicated teenage girl anymore --- this straight-backed, even-tempered and steady-eyed child in her house is someone else entirely. Eden, it seems, is the twin who disappeared.

An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, Piglet has lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit. One of the many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking. But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. By the day of her wedding, Piglet is undone but is also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.