Adult

It's Christmas in Oxford, and firefighters have pulled two children from the smoking ruin of their home. The mystery deepens when it becomes clear that the parents are nowhere to be found. Why were the children left in the house alone? Why is neither parent answering their phone? Were they kidnapped? Murdered? From the start, DI Adam Fawley knows that this house fire is the scene of a crime, not an accident. Then new evidence comes to light and confirms the team’s worst suspicions. The blaze was arson. Who would have torched a seemingly happy family’s home on Christmas? As DI Fawley and his team of detectives sift through the evidence, old tensions and new problems in the family are slowly revealed. Something terribly out of the ordinary has happened, and the truth slowly begins to reveal itself.

Emily Hunt went missing from her affluent liberal arts school on graduation weekend. Her body was found floating in a river, and a quiet loner died by suicide. A tenuous link --- one text --- bound the two dead students together and was enough for law enforcement to close the case. But they got it wrong, and now someone is determined to set it right. Twelve years later, college friends gather to celebrate an engagement over a long-overdue getaway on a swanky private island in Maine --- with only one way in and one way out. Sierra Prescott, invited as a guest and unconnected to past events, is the only person who soon senses not all is what it seems. The tension in the air is ignited when they find a dead man in the trunk of a car with a note: time to tell the truth. And things only get worse.

Teacher, mother, wife and all-around good citizen Ellen Walsh is juggling nonstop commitments --- from raising a teen and two toddlers to job-hunting to finally renovating her dream home, the Meadowhouse. Amidst the chaos, an ominous note arrives in the mail, declaring: People have to learn there are consequences, Ellen. And I’m going to teach you that lesson. Right under your nose. Why would someone send her this? Ellen has no clue. But someone blames her for all the bad they’ve experienced. Could the five bad deeds that come to haunt Ellen explain why things have gone so horribly wrong? As she races to discover who’s set on destroying her reputation and her future, Ellen continues to receive increasingly threatening messages…each one hitting closer to everything she cherishes.

An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she’s a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall --- until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreakingly serious characters --- an arriviste sister, an alcoholic brother-in-law and, most importantly, the love of her life recently married to the sister’s best friend --- Rachel must come to terms with her past, the sorrow she has long buried, and the ghost of the mother who, for better and worse, made her the woman she is.

Thirtysomething Flores and her mother, Paula, still live in the same Brooklyn apartment, but that may be the only thing they have in common. It’s been nearly three years since they lost beloved husband and father Martín. One day, cleaning beneath his urn, Flores discovers a note written in her mother’s handwriting: Perdóname si te falle. Recuerda que siempre te quise. (“Forgive me if I failed you. Remember that I always loved you.”) But what would Paula need forgiveness for? Now newfound doubts and old memories come flooding in, complicating each woman’s efforts to carve out a good life for herself and support the other in the same. When Flores and Paula learn they will be forced to move, they finally must confront their complicated past --- and decide if they share the same dreams for the future.

De’Andrea Whitman, her husband Malik, and their five-year-old daughter, Nina, are new to the upper-crust white suburb of Rolling Hills, Virginia. To ease the transition, De’Andrea’s therapist proposes a challenge: make a white girlfriend. When Rebecca Myland learns about her new neighbors, she's thrilled. As chair of the Parent Diversity Committee at her daughters’ school, she’s championed racial diversity in the community. What could be better than a brand-new Black family? It’s serendipitous when her daughter, Isabella, and Nina become best friends on the first day of kindergarten. Following her therapist’s suggestion, De’Andrea reluctantly joins Rebecca’s committee. When Rolling Hill’s rising racial sentiments bring the two women together in common cause, they find it isn’t the only thing they have in common.

After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and housemate in Exeter. She’s avoided dwelling on the past, but it always has a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she’d never return. A foreboding fortress, Penryth Hall is home to Ruby’s once dearest friend, Tamsyn, and her husband, Sir Edward Chenowyth. It’s an unsettling place, and after a more unsettling evening, Ruby is eager to depart. But her plans change when Penryth’s bells ring for the first time in 30 years. Edward is dead; he met a gruesome end in the orchard, and with his death brings whispers of a returned curse.

James Falconer, a tycoon and a self-made man, seems to have the world in the palm of his hand. But the Great War looms, and James decides to fight for king and country. He returns a changed man, with wounds both physical and mental. His beloved wife is dead, but a new woman returns to help nurse him back to health. Georgiana Ward once held James in her thrall, but years have passed and bitterness has set in. Still, the old attraction is there, and James is determined to make amends to both Georgiana and his child, Leonie --- now a grown woman and someone he hasn't seen in decades. Leonie is having none of it and is embarking on a dangerous journey with a man who might very well destroy her. As James fights to return to the man he once was, he needs to find a way to heal his body, soul and family.

What’s it like to be the first to enter an Egyptian burial chamber that’s been sealed for thousands of years? What horrifying secret was found among the prehistoric ruins of the American Southwest? Who really was the infamous Monster of Florence? From the jungles of Honduras to macabre archaeological sites in the American Southwest, Douglas Preston's explorations have taken him across the globe. THE LOST TOMB brings together a compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present.

As an archaeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land's indigenous past. While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown 15 years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling. When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister's disappearance, or the remains, go ignored --- as so often happens in cases of missing Native women. But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades.