Adult

Lt. Eve Dallas is just home from a long-overdue vacation when she responds to a call of an unattended death. The victim is Martin Greenleaf, retired Internal Affairs Captain. At first glance, the scene appears to be suicide, but the closer Eve examines the body, the more suspicious she becomes. An unlocked open window, a loving wife and family, a too-perfect suicide note --- Eve's gut says it's a homicide. After all, Greenleaf put a lot of dirty cops away during his 47 years in Internal Affairs. It could very well be payback --- and she will not rest until the case is closed.

Growing up in the 1960s, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding --- a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it. WHILE YOU WERE OUT begins as the personal story of one family’s struggles and then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country’s flawed mental health care.

Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is 45, perimenopausal and stalled --- the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian. And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away. Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her 16th birthday. Today is the day she’ll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again. Because Grace Adams used to be amazing. Her husband thought so. Her daughter thought so. Even Grace thought so. But everyone seems to have forgotten. Grace is about to remind them...and, most important, remind herself.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces --- death, violence, estrangement --- come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.

Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration to the civil unrest of the 1960s to the quest for women’s equality in the early 2000s, Denene Millner’s beautifully wrought novel explores three women’s intimate --- and often complicated --- struggle with what it truly means to be family. According to author Tara M. Stringfellow, “In delicious, decadent prose, Denene Millner does what few authors can --- compose a sprawling multigenerational tale that is necessary American reading. ONE BLOOD sings the song of the South in a voice that is heartbreaking, hopeful, and resilient. A masterpiece.”

Kimmie Park has finally met a man who gets her and laughs at her jokes. Matt West is kind, compassionate and a smoking hot FDNY firefighter. But they’ve never met in person. He doesn’t know that her life recently imploded when she very publicly quit her retail job and became a meme in a viral video, known as the woman who twerked as she tells off her boss. Kimmie now focuses on her Etsy shop designing purses and accessories. She’d posted pictures of her best friend Alicia with her merchandise, not realizing that people would assume Alicia was Kim from My Crafty Bao. As the chemistry between her and Matt sizzles, she knows that she needs to tell him the truth. Especially since Matt’s father, the CEO of a huge retail store, sees Kimmie’s shop and wants to partner with her.

It’s autumn in the town of Harrow, but something besides the season is changing there. Because in that town there is an orchard with seven most unusual trees. From those trees grows a new sort of apple: strange, beautiful, with skin so red it’s nearly black. Take a bite, and you will desire only to devour another. And another. You will become stronger and more vital. But then your appetite for the apples and their peculiar gifts will keep growing --- and become darker. Soon it seems that everyone is consumed by an obsession with the magic of the apples. However, something else is buried in the orchard besides the seeds of these extraordinary trees: a bloody history whose roots reach back to the very origins of the town. Now it’s harvest time, and the town will soon reap what it has sown.

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave --- only to discover that the earth refuses to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

An MI6 operative is found dead, locked in a suitcase inside his own apartment. Despite an exhaustive search, no fingerprints are found at the scene. Emma Makepeace and her handler, Ripley, know an assassination when they see one, and such an obvious murder can mean only one thing: Someone is sending a message. As she digs into his past, Emma discovers that the unfortunate spy had been investigating two Russian oligarchs based in London. He’d become obsessed with the idea that the two were spies, aided by a third man --- whose identity he had yet to uncover. When he shared his findings within MI6 in the weeks before he died, the response came back fast and clear: Drop the investigation and move on. Had he uncovered a secret that cost him his life?

Not far from the sprawling grounds of Wyndham Hall, the body of longtime MI6 agent John Repton is found, shot dead with a single bullet to the heart. Repton was killed while surveilling the members of a household with alleged ties to fascists who threaten the security of the country, as Hitler’s influence spreads across Europe. Elena Standish is assigned the case, thanks to her new connection to the Wyndham family: Her older sister, Margot, is being courted by Lady Wyndham’s brother. As Elena and her colleague, James Allenby, dig deeper into the Wyndham family’s nefarious connections, Margot grows suspicious. Can Elena reconcile her political and professional obligations with her loyalty and love for her sister? Will Elena and Allenby uncover their colleague’s killer?