Adult

Furniture artisan Meli Hynes still abides by her uncle’s truism: the only lasting love story is the one between artists and their creations. Having already given marriage a shot --- for all of 24 hours during a Las Vegas fling --- the wood-crafting shop that is her family legacy will always come first. But when her uncle decides to sell to a competitor, Meli’s promised inheritance goes belly-up. She’ll do anything to muddle the deal. Including a marriage of convenience to an unforgettable and very practical old friend --- the competitor’s son, Aaron. After all, this isn’t the first time he and Meli got hitched on a whim. The rules of the ruse are simple: public displays of affection and live together as happy newlyweds. The hardest rule of all? Never let real feelings get in the way of what they plan to be a purely professional second time around.

After 10 years on the force, LAPD cop Sonny Rush relocates with her elderly mother to peaceful Haven, California, to join her godfather’s burgeoning PI business. Sonny’s first case: find Figgy, a missing goldendoodle last seen sporting a Versace collar. At least scouting out a dognapper gives Sonny a chance to get to know her new neighbors. Forty-eight hours in town and Figgy’s disappearance entangles Sonny in an unwelcome reunion with her ex, one of Haven’s wealthiest citizens. And when the body of a teenage boy is found along a popular hiking trail, Sonny is drawn into a web of strange beyond anything she ever saw in LA. Then comes a local’s warning: question everything. Haven hides secrets that could destroy its idyllic facade. Or destroy Sonny first.

Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. She is 16 years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, 30 years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begin to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, GIRL, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion. As in her landmark previous work, UNQUIET, Linn Ullmann’s narrator continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward 16-year-old girl lost in Paris.

An apparent suicide in a London townhouse uncannily mirrors a similar incident from twenty-five years ago, prompting Scotland Yard's George Flint to delve deep into the past. Meanwhile, Joseph Spector travels with a coach party to visit an allegedly haunted house on a lonely island called Devil’s Neck. The house, first built by a notorious alchemist and occultist, was later used as a field hospital in the First World War before falling into disrepair. The visitors hold a seance to conjure the spirit of a long-dead soldier. But when a storm floods the causeway, they find themselves stranded in the haunted house. Before long, the guests begin to die one by one. Flint's and Spector's investigations are in fact closely linked, but it is only when they are reunited at Devil's Neck that the truth is finally revealed.

In 11 stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains and Southern metropolitan cities, MAKE YOUR WAY HOME follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them. A preteen pregnant alongside her mother refuses to let convention dictate who she names as the father of her child. Centuries after slavery separated his ancestors, a native Texan tries to win over the love of his life, despite the grip of a family curse. A young deaconess, who falls for a new church member, wonders what it means when God stops speaking to her. And at the very end of the South as we know it, two sisters seek to escape North to freedom, to promises of a more stable climate.

New Bethlehem, Connecticut. Picture-perfect lawns, manicured hedges, multi-million-dollar homes. But beneath the designer yoga gear and country club memberships lies a darker reality. In this world of excess, Devon and Belle have it all --- beauty, money, status. But they want something more. Something dangerous. Something that makes them feel alive. Their solution? A party --- a meticulously curated gathering of New Bethlehem’s elite, from a desperate ex-NFL quarterback to a hockey coach with a penchant for married women, and a ruthless Wall Street “closer” who wields his wealth like a weapon. One night. Multiple betrayals. And a murder that will shatter New Bethlehem’s carefully constructed facade.

Ye Lian is thriving in Beijing. She’s wanting for nothing --- until her childhood best friend, Luo Wenyu, comes whirling back into her life after a decade in California with seemingly everything. As the two women rekindle their friendship, Wenyu reveals a shocking secret about a past love that pushes Lian to question her own relationship. A few neighborhoods away, aging architect Song Chen is forced to confront his own past and the dissolution of his marriage as he’s tasked with building Wenyu’s dream home. And when the dark side of Wenyu’s enviable life emerges and threatens everything Lian and Wenyu have built for themselves, they must make a choice between the stable known and the frightening unknown that may have devastating and unexpected consequences.

Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

B.A. Shapiro embeds us in a circle of famous painters in late-19th-century Paris, centering on the anguished Impressionist artist Berthe Morisot --- the one woman in their midst who never got her due --- and the story of Morisot’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Tamara Rubin, who has inherited Édouard Manet’s Party on the Seine, a painting that completely upends her life. Tamara discovers a long-hidden family history replete with unanswered questions: How had it been stolen by the Nazis? How had the painting managed to survive three disasters that destroyed every other artwork around it? And why had she never known about her ancestor, Berthe Morisot? As the painting begins to metamorphose into darker and more terrifying versions of itself, Tamara’s ordinary life is thrown into turmoil.

When Audrey Collet’s ex, Tyson calls, threatening to expose the skeletons in her closet unless she helps him figure out who is blackmailing him, she wants nothing more than to refuse. But a foot has washed ashore in the Everglades, and Tyson is quick to remind Audrey that it’s one whose long-dead owner they both have a connection to. She reluctantly agrees to meet him at his home on the swanky Caribbean island of St. Barth’s to help him figure out who in his entourage is extorting him and what they know about the secrets he and Audrey share. Once there, she realizes that each person staying at Tyson’s lavish estate has a reason to wish him harm. When Tyson’s birthday dive turns deadly, Audrey is aware that one of the seven people trapped on his yacht with her is not just a blackmailer but a murderer.