Adult

Julie Parker’s kids are her greatest gift. Still, she’s not exactly heartbroken when they ask to skip a big Christmas. Her son, Nick, is taking a belated honeymoon with his bride, Blair, while her daughter, Dana, will purge every reminder of the guy who dumped her. Again. Julie feels practically giddy for one-on-one holiday time with Heath, the (much) younger man she’s secretly dating. But her plans go from cozy to chaotic when Nick and Dana plead for Christmas at the family cabin in memory of their late father, Julie’s ex. She can’t refuse, even though she dreads their reactions to her new man when they realize she’s been hiding him for months. As the guest list grows in surprising ways, from Blair’s estranged mom to Heath’s precocious children, Julie’s secret is one of many to be unwrapped.

Agnes Corey, a junior editor at a small independent publisher, has been hired by enigmatic author Veronica St. Clair to transcribe the sequel to her 1993 hit phenomenon, The Secret of Wyldcliffe Heights. St. Clair has been a recluse since the publication of the JANE EYRE-esque book, which coincided with a terrible fire that blinded and scarred her. Agnes arrives in the Hudson Valley at her crumbling estate, which was once a psychiatric hospital for “wayward women.” As St. Clair dictates, Agnes realizes there are clues in the story that reveal the true --- and terrifying --- events three decades ago that inspired the original novel. The line between fact and fiction becomes increasingly blurred, and Agnes discovers terrible secrets about an unresolved murder from long ago, which have startling connections to her own life.

Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a 3,000-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

First came the secretaries from Brooklyn and Queens --- the “smart cookies” who saw that making money, lots of it, might be within their grasp. Then came the first female Harvard Business School graduates, who were in for a rude awakening because an equal degree did not mean equal opportunity. But by the 1980s, as the market went into turbodrive, women were being plucked from elite campuses to feed the belly of a rapidly expanding beast, playing for high stakes in Wall Street’s bad-boy culture by day and clubbing by night. In SHE-WOLVES, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging '60s to 9/11 --- starting at a time when “No Ladies” signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks.

For the past 20 years, Lee Child has been one of the best-selling authors in the world, thanks to the popularity of his iconic and instantly recognizable hero, Jack Reacher. But even at the height of Reacher’s fame, Child’s short story writing was not confined to the series. Throughout the course of his career, he published tales about a range of characters on both sides of the law, including assassins, a bodyguard, CIA and FBI agents, gangsters and more. Meticulously plotted and packed with Child’s trademark action and suspense, the stories show his mastery of the short form. They’ve never been collected before now.

After years of personal and professional turmoil, things are finally looking up for Columbus, Ohio, private eye Andy Hayes. As SICK TO DEATH opens, Andy is relishing his new gig: a drama-free, family-friendly stint as a guard at the Columbus Museum of Art. However, Andy’s newfound equilibrium comes crashing down when he interrupts the theft of a painting by famed Ashcan school realist George Bellows --- and is promptly fired for breaking museum protocols. Helping him thwart the robbers is Alex Rutledge, the adult daughter he never knew he had, the result of a one-night stand during his misspent youth a quarter century earlier. Alex wants to hire her newly discovered father to find the driver who killed her mother five months earlier in a still unsolved hit-skip accident.

When Tere Sanchez’s husband dies unexpectedly, she finds herself completely broken. Taking a leave from the university where she works, Tere hopes that she can mourn her husband and get back on her feet, but instead she spends a year consumed by grief. Until the day she levitates. Suddenly, Tere's life is thrown into disarray, and the repeated incidents of levitation not only make her question her sanity, but also put her in danger. She decides she will do anything to stop them. So when she's reminded that her family is related to renowned levitating mystic Saint Teresa of Avila, she leaves the refuge of her home and travels to Spain, hoping to find answers. But Saints can be elusive, and not all answers are easily found.

Engineers across the world were puzzling over how to build a powered flying machine --- and Wilbur and Orville Wright wanted in on the challenge. But their younger sister, Katharine, knew they couldn't do it without her. The three siblings made a pact: the three of them would solve the problem of human flight. As her brothers obsessed over blueprints and risked life and limb testing new models, Katharine became the mastermind behind the scenes of their inventions. And in 1903, the Wright brothers made the first controlled, sustained flight of humankind. But at the height of their success, tragedy wrenched the Wright family apart…and forced Katharine to make an impossible choice that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Devils Island is home to abundant wildlife, making it the ideal place to reintroduce endangered Tasmanian devils. Working to rescue, rehabilitate and release devils has been Kerry’s job and passion for years, but a new opportunity to work as a naturalist guide for a tour company offers her a respite from the emotionally grueling task of trying to save an endangered species. When one of the guests disappears on the first night, the group assumes she has wandered too far in the stormy weather. Yet it turns out she has a secret connection to one of the other guests. When another hiker is found dead in camp, the group finds itself isolated by the worsening storm and wondering who among them might be responsible.

After attempting to sever all ties to her life as a hired assassin, a woman struggles to understand who she has become. She knows she doesn’t want to kill again --- but it proves to be a difficult habit to break. Adrift and disconnected, she meets an old woman: Imogen O’Brien, a world-famous artist who has spent the last three decades living a hermit-like existence on a rustic desert estate in a national forest. Imogen invites her to stay and work for her, offering mentorship in return as the woman deepens her own interest in art. What quickly becomes apparent is that elements of Imogen’s past are shrouded in danger, sorrow and darkness. Rather than growing as an artist, the former hitwoman soon finds herself enmeshed in a dangerous mystery with strands that stretch decades into the past.