Adult

You want to walk away from the things that are bad for you and never look back. That's what Corinne Callahan wants. Cast out of the fundamentalist church she was raised in and cut off from her family, Corinne builds a new life for herself. A good one. But she never stops missing the life --- and the love --- she's left behind. It's Enoch Miller who ruins everything for her. It was always Enoch Miller. She'll never get him out from under her skin.

When Detective Anjelica Henley is called to investigate the murder of a popular preacher in his own church, she discovers a second victim, tortured and tied to a bed in an upstairs room. He is alive, but barely, and his body shows signs of a dark religious ritual. With a revolving list of suspects and the media spotlight firmly on her, Henley is left with more questions than answers as she attempts to untangle both crimes. But when another body appears, the case takes on a new urgency. Unless she can apprehend the killer, the next victim may just be Henley herself.

Eight-year-old Malaya Clondon hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings in the church’s stuffy basement community center. For Malaya, the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are compounded by the high expectations passed down over generations from her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother. But their relentless prescriptions don’t work on her. As Malaya comes of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit neatly within the suffocating confines of a so-called “femininity” that holds no room for her body. Meanwhile, tensions at home mount as rapidly as Malaya’s weight. Nothing seems to help --- until a family tragedy forces her to finally face the source of her hunger on her own terms.

The first time Aja Owens encounters the man of her dreams, she’s having a panic attack in the frozen foods section of the Piggly Wiggly. The second time, he’s being introduced to her as her favorite bingo buddy’s semi-estranged grandson. From there, all it takes is one game for her to realize that he’s definitely going to be a problem. In Walker Abbott’s mind, there are only two worthwhile things in Greenbelt, South Carolina --- the peach cobbler at his old favorite diner and his ailing grandmother. Dragging himself back after more than a decade away, he’s counting down the days until Gram heals and he can get back to his real life. Just when he thinks his plan is solid, enter Aja to shake everything up.

One warm summer night 25 years ago, Liza Gold and her friends celebrated their high school graduation with a party on the beach. It should have been the best night of their lives, but one of them never came back out of the ocean. The tragedy haunted Liza Gold for years. Now, she's a recently divorced working mom struggling to connect with her standoffish teenage daughter, Zoe, when history repeats itself. Another young woman has drowned at Beach Week, and this time the victim is Zoe’s secret best friend. Liza begins to suspect that the two deaths are somehow related, which causes her to face hard truths and take an unflinching look at the people she’s called her closest friends for the past two decades. She must discover what really happened to both women before it’s too late.

As a politician, Emma has sacrificed a great deal for her career --- including her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, Flora. A former teacher, the glare of the spotlight is unnerving for Emma, particularly when it leads to countless insults, threats and trolling as she tries to work in the public eye. Fourteen-year-old Flora is encountering heartless bullying. When another teenager takes her own life, Emma lobbies for a new law to protect women and girls from the effects of online abuse. Now, Emma and Flora find their personal lives uncomfortably intersected…but then the unthinkable happens. A man is found dead in Emma’s home. A man she had every reason to be afraid of and to want gone.

At Banneker Terrace, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows of them. Longtime tenants’ lives are entangled together in the ups and downs of the day-to-day, for better or for worse. The neighbors in the unit next door are friends or family, childhood rivals or enterprising business partners. In other words, Harlem is home. But the rent is due, and the clock of gentrification --- never far from anyone’s mind --- is ticking louder now than ever. In eight interconnected stories, Sidik Fofana conjures a residential community under pressure. We root for the tight-knit cast of characters as they weave in and out of one another’s narratives, working to escape their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love. All the while we brace, as they do, for the challenges of a rapidly shifting future.

When law grad Cass Walker wakes up after surviving a car accident, she is flooded with memories of a man named Devin. The only problem? Devin --- as confirmed by family, friends and doctors --- doesn’t exist. Everything about him is a figment of Cass’ coma-addled imagination. Still, she can’t get him out of her head. So when she happens upon the real Devin a year later in a Cleveland flower shop, she’s completely shocked. Even more surprising is that Devin actually believes her story, and despite his protective younger brother’s doubts, they soon embark on a real-life romance. With her dream man by her side and a new job at a prestigious law firm, Cass’ future seems perfect. But fate might have other plans.

DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery and learns the bones are connected to a cold case that left three people dead 30 years ago. Rachel Rimmer’s husband, Michael, has been found dead in his cellar. The French police need Rachel to answer questions about Michael and his past that she very much doesn’t want to answer. After fleeing London 30 years ago in the wake of a horrific tragedy, Lucy Lamb is coming home. While she settles in with her children and is just about to purchase their first-ever house, her brother takes off to find the boy from their shared past whose memory haunts their present. As they all race to discover answers to these convoluted mysteries, they will come to find that they’re connected in ways they never could have imagined.

Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw’s New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind. But despite his colossal skills, Thorpe’s life was a struggle against the odds. For all his travails, though, Thorpe did not succumb. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth.