Adult

In the first century, under Domitian's reign, strange and brutal goings-on are nothing new in Rome. Flavia Albia, daughter of Marcus Didius Falco, has taken over her father's business as a private informer, but she tries to shy away from the brutal, the complicated and the political. Unfortunately, she's not very good at turning them down. This time a commission shows up on her doorstep --- someone is staging brutal murders in some of the most beautiful buildings in Rome. So far, the only clue was the phrase that one survivor managed to croak: "The undertaker did it..." With little to go on and bodies starting to pile up, Albia has to unravel the strangest mystery of her career in short order if she is to stop this dismaying orgy of murder.

The Right Sort Marriage Bureau was founded in 1946 by two disparate individuals: Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, whose husband was killed in the recent World War, and Miss Iris Sparks, who worked as an intelligence agent during the recent conflict, though this is not discussed. Miss Sparks finds herself followed, then approached, by a young woman who has a very personal connection to a former paramour of Sparks. But something is amiss, and it seems that Iris' past may well cause something far more deadly than mere disruption in her personal life. Meanwhile, Gwendolyn is struggling to regain full legal control of her life, her finances and her son --- a legal path strewn with traps and pitfalls.

Emme Wynn has wanted nothing more her whole life than to feel like part of a family. Having grown up on the run with her con artist mother, she’s been shuffled from town to town, drawn into bad situations, and has learned some unsavory habits that she’s tried hard to overcome. When her estranged grandmother tracks her down out of the blue and extends a job offer --- helping to run her booth at an open-air marketplace in small-town Sweetgrass, Alabama --- Emme is hopeful that she’ll finally be able to plant the roots she’s always dreamed of. But some habits are hard to break, and she risks her newfound happiness by keeping one big truth to herself.

Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives --- or so he was told. In DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS, Fitzgerald recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. Fitzgerald's memoir-in-essays begins with a childhood that moves at breakneck speed from safety to violence, recounting an extraordinary pilgrimage through trauma to self-understanding and, ultimately, acceptance.

When Mercy Carr’s grandmother, Patience, marries her longtime beau, Claude Renault, at the five-star Lady’s Slipper Inn, it promises to be the destination wedding of the year. Just as the four-day extravaganza is due to begin, the inn’s spa director, Bodhi St. George, disappears --- and Mercy’s mother, Grace, sends Mercy and Elvis to find him. But what they discover instead is a stranger skewered by a pitchfork in the barn on the goat farm where St. George lived. As Mercy tries to figure out who the victim is and where St. George is hiding, the bride and groom’s estranged relations gather for the first of the pre-wedding festivities. Long-buried rivalries and resentments surface --- and Mercy realizes that they’re all keeping secrets that could tear both families apart.

When Paris Peralta is arrested in her own bathroom --- covered in blood, holding a straight razor, her celebrity husband dead in the bathtub behind her --- she knows she'll be charged with murder. With the unwanted media attention now surrounding her, it's only a matter of time before someone from her long-hidden past recognizes her and destroys the new life she's worked so hard to build. Twenty-five years earlier, Ruby Reyes was convicted of a similar murder in a trial that riveted Canada in the early ’90s. Reyes knows who Paris really is, and when she's unexpectedly released from prison, she threatens to expose all of Paris' secrets. Left with no other choice, Paris must finally confront the dark past she escaped.

Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with a wine bottle opener. Or a ballpoint pen. Or a dinner napkin. But the truth is, she’s an Executive Protection Agent (aka "bodyguard"), and she just got hired to protect superstar actor Jack Stapleton from his middle-aged, corgi-breeding stalker. When Jack’s mom gets sick, he comes home to the family’s Texas ranch to help out. There's only one catch: He doesn’t want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah --- against her will and her better judgment --- finds herself pretending to be Jack’s girlfriend as a cover. But the more time she spends with Jack, the more real it all starts to seem.

It begins quietly on a balmy Southern night as some locals gather at Bo Peep’s, one of the town’s favorite watering holes. Within an hour, however, a man will be murdered and his companion will be “disappeared.” An unlikely detective, Morgana Musgrove, doyenne of Savannah society, is called upon to unravel the mystery of these crimes. Morgana is an imperious, demanding and conniving woman, whose four grown children are weary of her schemes. But one by one she inveigles them into helping with her investigation, and soon the family uncovers some terrifying truths --- truths that will rock Savannah’s power structure to its core.

“Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories, she's come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there, beneath the house he'd built for his family. Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren’t alone. A parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back and is slowly stripping Vera’s childhood for spare parts. He insists that he isn’t the one leaving notes around the house in her father’s handwriting. But who else could it possibly be? There are secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder House.

July 1985. It’s a normal, sweltering New Jersey summer for soon-to-be seventh grader Bee Kocsis. Her thoughts center only on sunny days spent at Deer Chase Lake, on evenings chasing fireflies around her cul-de-sac with the neighborhood kids, and on Max, the boy who just moved in across the street. There's also the burgeoning worry that she'll never be as special as her younger sister, Audrina, who seems to effortlessly dazzle wherever she goes. But when Max’s little sister, Sally, goes missing at the lake, Bee’s long-held illusion of stability is shattered in an instant. As the families in her close-knit community turn inward, suspicious and protective, things in Bee’s own home become increasingly strained, most of all with Audrina, when a shameful secret surfaces.