Adult

Nothing much happens in Peaceful Valley, Montana. And that’s just how Sheriff Lucas Monk likes it. Aside from the occasional drunken brawl or minor disturbance out on the reservation, he hasn’t had to resort to his fists or sidearm in years. That is, until mid-October 1914, when the theft of a wooden cigar store Indian sets off a crime wave like nothing Lucas has ever seen. Teenager Charity Axthelm goes missing, Reba Purvis’ housekeeper is poisoned with cyanide Reba is sure was meant for her, and Lucas’ gut tells him that this is only the beginning. It’s not long before the first corpse shows up, bringing the peace in the valley to a thundering end.

On Midsummer’s Eve, Alinor waits in the church graveyard, hoping to encounter the ghost of her missing husband and thus confirm his death. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run. She shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marshy landscape of the Tidelands, not knowing she is leading a spy and an enemy into her life. England is in the grip of a bloody civil war that reaches into the most remote parts of the kingdom. Alinor’s suspicious neighbors are watching each other for any sign that someone might be disloyal to the new parliament, and Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her as a woman who doesn’t follow the rules. They have always whispered about the sinister power of Alinor’s beauty, but the secrets they don’t know about her and James are far more damning.

College senior Parveen Shams feels pulled between her charismatic and mercurial anthropology professor and the comfortable but predictable Afghan-American community in her Northern California hometown. When she discovers a bestselling book called Mother Afghanistan, a memoir by humanitarian Gideon Crane that has become a bible for American engagement in the country, she is inspired. Galvanized by Crane's experience, Parveen travels to a remote village in the land of her birth to join the work of his charitable foundation. When she arrives, however, Crane's maternity clinic is mostly unstaffed. The villagers do not exhibit the gratitude she expected to receive. And Crane's memoir appears to be littered with mistakes, or outright fabrications.

Exhausted by dead-end forays in the gay dating scene, surrounded constantly by friends but deeply lonely in New York City, and drifting into academic abyss, twenty-something graduate student Richard has plenty of sources of anxiety. But at the forefront is his crippling writer’s block. Enter Anne: his brilliant classmate who offers to “help” Richard write his papers in exchange for his company, despite Richard’s fairly obvious sexual orientation. What begins as an initially transactional relationship blooms gradually into something more complex. But then a one-swipe-stand with an attractive, successful lawyer becomes serious, and Richard suddenly finds himself unable to detach from Anne.

A year has passed since Pete Fernandez’s latest, closest brush with death. After months of recovery, the newly sober Pete has managed to rebuild his life, contentedly running a small Miami bookstore and steering clear of the dangers of private-eye work. So when an aging Cuban mobster asks Pete to find out who killed his drug-addicted, jazz pianist son and to locate his missing daughter-in-law, Pete balks. Until another victim suggests that the murder of the gangster’s son may be connected to the people who nearly ended Pete’s life, while revealing an unexpected, dangerous truth about the death of the Miami PI's own mother.

Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997, Don Shula remains the winningest coach of all time with 347 career victories and the only undefeated season in NFL history. But before he became the architect of the Dolphins dynasty, Shula was a hardworking kid selling fish on the banks of Lake Erie, the eldest of six children born during the Depression to Hungarian immigrant parents. As acclaimed sports biographer Mark Ribowsky shows, Shula met serious resistance at home when he asked to play high school football. But when his parents finally relented, they discovered that their son, though perhaps short on the physical gifts of the truly blessed, had an unmatched mind for the game’s strategy and a stomach for its brutality.

It begins in Bloomington, Minnesota, with a 13-year-old kid staging his own author photo that he hopes will someday grace the cover of a book jacket. And it ends at a desk in the legendary Time & Life building, with that same boy --- now in his early 20s and writing professionally --- reflecting on how he got there from what seems like a distant universe. In between, Steve Rushin whisks us along on an extraordinarily funny and tender journey. From a menial summer job at suburban Bennigan's, to first-time college experiences in Milwaukee, to surviving early adulthood in seedy New York City, NIGHTS IN WHITE CASTLE will remind any reader of those special moments when they too went from innocence to experience.

Champagne, 1940: Inès has just married Michel, the owner of storied champagne house Maison Chauveau, when the Germans invade. As the danger mounts, Michel turns his back on his marriage to begin hiding munitions for the Résistance. Inès fears they’ll be exposed, but for Céline, the French-Jewish wife of Chauveau’s chef de cave, the risk is even greater --- rumors abound of Jews being shipped east to an unspeakable fate. When Céline recklessly follows her heart in one desperate bid for happiness, and Inès makes a dangerous mistake with a Nazi collaborator, they risk the lives of those they love --- and the vineyard that ties them together.

In the summer of '69, the hard-living rockers of the British Invasion still rule London when former Rolling Stone Brian Jones is found floating in the pool of his palatial home. On a quiet residential block that should be far removed from the swinging party scene, Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen investigates the murder of a young woman. But the victim, known professionally as Julie Teenager, was a call girl for the rich and famous. As DS Breen hones in on his prime target, he receives a pointed warning: Watch your back. Fortunately, Breen doesn't have to work alone. His keenly intuitive, deeply moral partner Helen Tozer, despite the pregnancy that's interrupted her policing career, can't help being drawn into the case of a girl used and cast aside.

Established by the leaders of America’s only successful slave revolt in the mid-19th century, the mythical town of Cross River, Maryland, still evokes the rhythms of its founding. Among its residents --- wildly spanning decades, perspectives and species --- are David Sherman, a struggling musician who just happens to be God’s last son; Tyrone, a ruthless yet charismatic PhD candidate, whose dissertation about a childhood game ignites mayhem in the neighboring, once-segregated town of Port Yooga; and Jim, an all-too-obedient robot who obeys his Master.