Adult

Victor Li is a man without a past. To his new employer, Mark, he’s just an anonymous hired hand to help with the dirty work. Together, they break into storage units that contain the possessions of the recently deported, pocketing whatever is worth selling. Only Victor and his sister, Jules, know that he’s a wanted man. Amid the backpacks and suitcases, Victor makes the find of a lifetime: a gem rare and valuable enough to change his fortunes in an instant. Thankfully, its former owner, a woman named Song Fei, also left a book of cryptic notes --- including the name of a gemstone dealer in Mexico City. When Victor and Mark cross the southern border, they quickly realize that this gem is wrapped up in a much larger scheme than they imagined.

Carol misses red flags about Joe’s need for control before she marries him, dashing her dreams for herself and her family. Trouble escalates after their daughter, Ellie, is paralyzed by the polio virus and Joe returns from WWII. Carol realizes how brutal waking life can be, and she conceals bruises and protects her children the best she can. THE MOMENTS BETWEEN DREAMS is a captivating story of a 1940s housewife who conforms to the rulebook of society until Joe pushes her too far. His constant intimidation shrinks Carol’s confidence while she tries to boost Ellie’s. Church-going neighbors in Carol’s tight-knit Polish community are complacent, but Sam, a handsome reporter, stirs up Carol’s zest for life. Despite impossible circumstances, Carol plans a secret escape.

During the throes of the Great Depression, Polly marries for money. After her husband, Sam, dies in a freak farm accident, new bride Polly assumes she is financially set to pursue her dream of opening a hat-making business. Instead, she becomes the prime suspect in Sam's murder. Secrets abound, and even Polly's family can't figure out the truth. Narrated by Polly; her self-righteous older sister, Sarah; and Sarah's well-meaning but flawed husband, Wesley, a Methodist minister, the story follows several twists through the landscape of the rural Midwest. Each narrator has a strong compelling voice. Polly's early letters to her mother both reveal and hide her naivete, her fears and her dreams. Sarah is both caring and critical. Wesley is dedicated to his calling and his parishioners, but his weaknesses are prominent.

In the winter of 1969, the bodies of four young women were discovered in a cemetery near the tip of Cape Cod. In a place once known as Helltown, the victims had been shot, stabbed, dismembered and mutilated. As investigators would soon learn, the perpetrator was a young, handsome serial killer named Tony Costa. A bizarre former taxidermist with a split personality and a penchant for violence, Costa ultimately mobilized friends in the hippie community for support and retribution, and captivated literary icons and rivals Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer. Costa embarked on a daring cat-and-mouse game with investigators, who --- as the body count kept growing --- were desperate to put an end to the killing season on Cape Cod.

Jack spent his life amassing wealth, but after losing his family, he has no one to share it with. Alone with his demons and a backpack, he heads to South America, where people with nothing teach him what matters. After thrashing his dog-abusing boss, Hunter learns of his father's death in a mysterious fire. Biker buddies Nugget and Itch ride with him from North Carolina to California. Stories from his father's life help ease the struggles of small-town Americans. Hunter discovers a secret past. Seventeen-year-old Anne flees Tennessee after her older brother attacks her. She whacks him with a skillet and hops a freight to Alabama with her best friend. Living hand to mouth, they build friendships, uncovering something they never had: family.

After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with $10,000 in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true-crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick --- a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy --- lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions.

Kitty Talbot needs a fortune. Or rather, she needs a husband who has a fortune. Left with her father’s massive debts, she has only 12 weeks to save her family from ruin. Kitty has never been one to back down from a challenge, so she leaves home and heads toward the most dangerous battleground in all of England: the London season. Kitty may be neither accomplished nor especially genteel, but she is imbued with cunning and ingenuity, and knows that risk is just part of the game. The only thing she doesn’t anticipate is Lord Radcliffe. The worldly Radcliffe sees Kitty for the mercenary fortune-hunter that she really is and is determined to scotch her plans at all costs, until their parrying takes a completely different turn.

Bob Ryan has scored every baseball game he's attended, at every level, since the start of the 1977 season. It's a deeply personal tradition still going strong at more than 1,400 games and counting. The tattered scorebooks he's filled are worn from age, travel and countless summer days, but their grids and scrawled symbols tell the stories of milestones, rivalries, rare historic achievements and more. IN SCORING POSITION captures the incomparable spirit of baseball, with its infinite possibilities and madcap anomalies. Ryan, alongside baseball historian and statistician Bill Chuck, has scoured his scorecard archives for the most singular events.

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the ’90s, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit and disappointment --- a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, but she still has an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays, Sánchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness and perception.

When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis. ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.