Adult

The Paterson Police Department has created a cold case division, and they want to hire the private investigators known as the K Team to look into the crimes. After all, Corey Douglas and his K-9 partner, German shepherd Simon Garfunkel, recently retired from the force. Plus, another K Team member, Laurie Collins, used to be a cop as well. Their first cold case hits home for the K Team. A decade ago, at Laurie's 10th high school reunion, two of their friends simply…vanished. With no leads, the case went cold. As the team starts to delve deeper into the events leading up to that night, the pieces start to come together. But someone wants to stop them from uncovering the truth behind the disappearance, by any means necessary.

Answering a newspaper advertisement for a companion to accompany an orphaned child to Australia, Rose Hamilton becomes enchanted with four-year-old Walter Lucknow. The boy lost his parents and has been living in near seclusion with his elder great aunt. As heir to a wealthy Australian cattle station, Walter must return to his homeland and his mother’s family. Upon arrival, Rose learns the truth about Walter’s relationship to the Lucknows and the land he’s supposed to inherit, a truth that haunts the boy’s Uncle Max, a wounded pilot scarred inside and out. As Max opens his heart up to Walter, Rose is drawn to the man’s strength and compassion, finding herself torn between returning to England and staying with the child and man she’s grown to love.

In the ruggedness of the beautiful Kentucky mountains, Honey Lovett has always known that the old ways can make a hard life harder. As the daughter of the famed blue-skinned, Troublesome Creek packhorse librarian, Honey and her family have been hiding from the law all her life. But when her mother and father are imprisoned, Honey realizes she must fight to stay free, or risk being sent away for good. Picking up her mother's old packhorse library route, Honey begins to deliver books to the remote hollers of Appalachia. Honey is looking to prove that she doesn't need anyone telling her how to survive. But the route can be treacherous, and some folks aren't as keen to let a woman pave her own way.

Carmen Valdez, an assistant at Triumph Comics, is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book. That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx,” Triumph's first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to figure out what happened to him. But that’s complicated by a surprise visitor, a tenacious cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics who write comics for a living.

It’s the countdown to the New Year, and Nur is steeling himself to tell his parents that he’s seeing someone. A young British Pakistani man, Nur has spent years omitting details about his personal life to maintain his image as the golden child. And it’s come at a cost. Once, Nur was a restless college student, struggling to fit in. At a party, he meets Yasmina, a beautiful and self-possessed aspiring journalist. They start a conversation --- first awkward, then absorbing. And as their relationship develops, so too does Nur’s self-destruction. He falls deeper into traps of his own making, attempting to please both Yasmina and his family until he finally must reveal the truth: Yasmina is Black, and he loves her.

The King of Jordan is turning 60! How better to celebrate the occasion than with his favorite pastime --- fencing --- and with his favorite sparring partner, Gabriel Hamdan. Amani, a divorced poet, jumps at the chance to accompany her father to his homeland for the King’s birthday. Her father’s past is a mystery to her --- even more so since she found a poem on blue airmail paper slipped into one of his old Arabic books, written by his mother, a Palestinian refugee who arrived in Jordan during World War I. Her words hint at a long-kept family secret, carefully guarded by Uncle Hafez, an advisor to the King, who has quite personal reasons for inviting his brother to the birthday party. The Hamdan brothers must face a reckoning, with themselves and with each other --- one that almost costs Amani her life.

In Denton, Arkansas, the fate of the high school football team rests on the shoulders of Billy Lowe, a volatile but talented running back. Billy comes from an extremely troubled home: a trailer park where he is terrorized by his unstable mother’s abusive boyfriend. He takes out his anger on the field, but when his savagery crosses a line, he faces suspension. As a born-again Christian, head coach Trent Powers feels a divine calling to save Billy --- save him from his circumstances, and save his soul. Then Billy’s abuser is found murdered in the Lowe family trailer, and all evidence points toward Billy. Now nothing can stop an explosive chain of violence that could tear the whole town apart on the eve of the playoffs.

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.