Adult

A scorching heatwave marks the start of the summer in Devon. Detective Matthew Venn is called in to investigate a puzzling death, when the body of a young woman, Lottie, is found in the swimming pool of a luxurious holiday home. The girl’s best friend, Hannah, whose family owns the house, is missing. The girls had arrived a few days earlier to celebrate the end of their school exams, quickly stirring unrest in the small community with incendiary social media videos mocking the place as parochial. The fact that Hannah’s father, Paul Armstrong, is a rising political star with powerful enemies draws intense media scrutiny to the case. With the summer heat come holidaymakers, and it emerges that some of them may have stronger connections with the Armstrong family than first thought. Venn knows all too well that the real answers lie not in what people say, but in the silences that they keep.

Alexander the Great: a wide-eyed boy from the hills of Macedon who ruled most of the known world by his mid-20s. For centuries, historians, refugees, poets and explorers have told his story, and yet Alexander himself has remained a mystery. But over the last few years, a series of remarkable discoveries has changed everything. From the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and the dust of Central Asian hillsides, the remains of Alexander’s cities have emerged. The diaries of Babylonian astronomers who knew him have been deciphered. The tombs of his ancestors have been unearthed. Now, for the first time since antiquity, it is possible to tell a different story. The story of a young man whom almost no-one noticed, until the day he became king. A king who became a hero, a hero who became a living god, and a god who died broken-hearted in Babylon.

On a rainy night, Luke Oshel gets stood up halfway through dinner. But she leaves an old photograph under her napkin --- Luke as a child, a dead body in the shadows of his bedroom, and a terrifying masked man. He has no recollection of this event. Then more photos disrupt his life --- Luke posing with murder victims, covered in blood --- and he falls back into the deep paranoia and repressed memories he’s tried to leave behind. All the drugs and alcohol, therapy and hypnosis sessions have never conquered his deepest fear --- that he hasn’t escaped the hidden legacy of his late father, who killed his victims by exsanguination. But now there is a new string of serial killings, and the evidence all points to Luke. As his journey to uncover the truth unfolds, he must chase his father’s darkness through a centuries-old secret and learn what monsters truly are. And decide if he’s one of them.

When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.” The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation and an early death. But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne’s extraordinary new novel, THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age 46, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the 20th century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous and exhilarating as the first?

In Alvion, magicians have always ruled beside kings. Blessed at birth by one of the seven planets, their abilities are miraculous and extremely rare. At the moment of Bianca Mortlake’s birth, the stars and planets aligned just so, making her the first Moonborn magician in over a thousand years. After a childhood training under the realm’s most powerful magician --- and alongside a most insufferable Venusborn named Roland --- Bianca lives a quiet life far from court. Until a chilling missive arrives in the night, summoning her back. Two queens have met the executioner’s blade, and one wrong move could see any of them next beneath its steel. As power is pulled between ruthless royals and courtiers like the tides by the moon, only this moon-blessed magician and her oldest rival can save the court --- and each other --- from the dark fate they see written in the stars.

SFPD Homicide Inspector Raquel Laing had a “difficult childhood,” until she was taken in by a loving family. She still lives with her adoptive sister, Dee, an online investigator. Trouble arrives with a case for Inspector Laing: the homicide of a drug dealer in San Francisco. But the everyday spirals into complications --- just as a search into the family’s ancestry is throwing Dee into her own world of turmoil. Raquel’s case blows up and she is removed from Homicide and put onto the Cold Case Unit. It leaves her free to look at some disturbing facts about her past --- and at the devastating news that Dee has uncovered in her search for the truth. The two sisters begin to suspect that they are tied together in ways that threaten attention from a powerful and vicious international cartel.

In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their mother changing into someone she didn’t recognize.This family has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with a cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking, and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish --- and there is a 50-50 chance that it will happen to their children, too. The siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them. Barb sets out to find a cure.

After Paul and Chelsea Tanner’s fairytale wedding, their future is full of promise. But their honeymoon to Paris takes a dark, shocking turn when they are kidnapped while on a day trip to the French countryside. Who would target them, and why? It turns out this is not the first crime of its kind. The search for clues soon stretches across borders, with the FBI, CIA and French Intelligence trying to work together to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Struggling to find answers, a young lawyer is recruited to be the bait in an elaborate CIA operation.

Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.

When crime correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn returns to Britain from Singapore in 1945, he takes a quiet job with the Festival of Britain. There, he joins a team of misfits and eccentrics as they help to ready the Festival for launch. When a Frenchwoman goes missing, Flynn becomes the central suspect in her disappearance --- and possible murder. He was the last person to see her alive, yet he has no memory of the evening they spent together. As evidence against him mounts, Flynn begins to wonder if he might actually be to blame. To make matters worse, he is surrounded by people who have their own secret agenda.