Adult

In the wake of 9/11, Paris is living in a state of fear. For Aimée Leduc, November is bittersweet: the anniversary of her father’s death and her daughter’s third birthday fall on the same day. A gathering for family and friends is disrupted when a bomb goes off at the police laboratory --- and Boris Viard, the partner of Aimée’s friend Michou, is found unconscious at the scene of the crime with traces of explosives under his fingernails. Aimée doesn’t believe Boris set the bomb. When a member of the French secret service drafts Aimée to help investigate possible links to an Iranian Revolutionary guard and fugitive radicals who bombed Interpol in the 1980s, Aimée uncovers ties to a cold case of her father’s.

Commissario Guido Brunetti is approached for a favor by Elisabetta Foscarini. Her son-in-law, Enrico Fenzo, has alarmed his wife (her daughter) by confessing that their family might be in danger because of something he’s involved with. Since Fenzo is an accountant, Brunetti logically suspects the cause of danger is related to the finances of a client. Yet his clients seem benign. However, when his friend’s daughter’s place of work is vandalized, Brunetti asks his own favors --- that his colleagues Claudia Griffoni, Lorenzo Vianello and Signorina Elettra Zorzi assist his private investigation, which soon enough turns official as they uncover the dark and Janus-faced nature of a venerable Italian institution.

In the first line of OCEAN STATE, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there is thus one of the build-up to and fallout from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer; Carol, her mother; and Birdy; the victim all converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister Marie, who reflects on that doomed autumn of 2009 with all the wisdom of hindsight. Angel and Birdy love the same teenage boy and are compelled by the intensity of their feelings to extremes neither could have anticipated.

When a driver slams his pickup truck into a tandem bike being ridden by Carlos Guzman and his fiancée, Tasha, it's more than a simple hit-and-run; the driver clearly intended to harm them. Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman gets the call with the news of her son's accident and wastes no time racing to his side. While Carlos struggles with critical injuries, an employee at the bike shop where Carlos bought the tandem is found shot dead in a dumpster --- the same man who had borrowed the truck that mowed down Carlos and Tasha. Not a believer in coincidence, Estelle pursues every possible angle with a cop's determination to solve the case, and a mother's resolve to keep her son safe at any cost.

Maria moved to Madrid in 1969, leaving her daughter with her family but hoping to save enough to take care of her one day. She worked as a housekeeper, then a caregiver and later a cleaner, and somehow she was always taking care of someone else. Two generations later, in 2018, Alicia was working at the snack shop in Madrid’s Atocha train station when it overflowed with protestors and strikers. All women --- and so many of them --- protesting what? Alicia wasn’t entirely sure. She couldn’t have known that Maria was among them. Alicia didn’t have time for marches; she was just trying to hang on until the end of her shift, when she might meet someone to take her away for a few hours, to make her forget.

Meddy Chan can't wait to marry her college sweetheart, Nathan. Instead of having Ma and the aunts cater to her wedding, she wants them to enjoy the day as guests. As a compromise, they find the perfect wedding vendors: a Chinese-Indonesian family-run company just like theirs. Meddy is hesitant at first, but she hits it off right away with the wedding photographer, Staphanie, who reminds Meddy of herself, down to the unfortunately misspelled name. But Meddy realizes that is where their similarities end when she overhears Staphanie talking about taking out a target. Horrified, Meddy can’t believe Staphanie and her family are the actual mafia, and they're using Meddy's wedding as a chance to conduct shady business.

Once Leigh and Susy were close friends and teammates bound for Olympic hockey gold, but when Leigh’s surefire plan to make the final roster backfired, she left everything behind to start over. Two decades later, Leigh is a successful investment banker and a happily married mother of a hockey prodigy. So when a career opportunity lands the family back in Minnesota, Leigh takes the shot for her kid. The move puts her in Susy’s orbit, but she believes keeping Susy at arms’ length is the only way to hide her history with her former coach, Jeff Carlson. When he hints of new favors in exchange for her son’s ice time, Leigh is caught in the ultimate bind: come clean about what happened when she was an Olympic hopeful and risk her marriage, or play Jeff’s game.

Nola Trenholm is looking to begin her life anew in New Orleans. But the historic fixer-upper she buys comes with even more work than she anticipated when the house’s previous occupants don’t seem to be ready to depart. Although she can’t communicate with ghosts like her stepmother can, luckily Nola knows someone in New Orleans who is able to --- even if he’s the last person on earth she wants anything to do with ever again. Beau Ryan comes with his own dark past --- a past that involves the disappearance of his sister and parents during Hurricane Katrina --- and he’s connected to the unsolved murder of a woman who once lived in the old Creole cottage Nola is determined to make her own...whether the resident restless spirits agree or not.

Jason Bennett is driving his family home after his daughter’s field hockey game when a pickup truck begins tailgating them. Suddenly two men jump from the pickup and pull guns on Jason, demanding the car. A horrific flash of violence changes his life forever. Later that awful night, Jason and his family receive a visit from the FBI. The carjackers were members of a dangerous drug-trafficking organization, and now Jason and his family are in their crosshairs. The agents advise them to enter the witness protection program, and they have no choice but to agree. The Bennetts begin to fall apart at the seams. Then Jason learns a shocking truth and realizes that he has to take matters into his own hands.

Hadrian Marlowe is trapped. For nearly a century, he has been a guest of the Emperor, forced into the role of advisor, a prisoner of his own legend. But the war is changing. Mankind is losing. The Cielcin are spilling into human space from the fringes, picking their targets with cunning precision. The Great Prince Syriani Dorayaica is uniting their clans, forging them into an army and threat the likes of which mankind has never seen. And the Empire stands alone. Now the Emperor has no choice but to give Hadrian Marlowe, once his favorite knight, one more impossible task: journey across the galaxy to the Lothrian Commonwealth and convince them to join the war.