Adult

By age 50, Elin Boals has created for herself a perfect life. Her wildly successful business as Manhattan’s preeminent fashion photographer is flourishing. Her handsome, patient husband is devoted to her. Her teenaged daughter, Alice, has been accepted to the ballet academy of her dreams. But then Elin receives an innocuous-looking envelope. Folded inside is a star-chart, with an address written by a familiar hand. Shaken, Elin begins to have startling flashbacks, to a life very different from the childhood in a Paris bookstore that she has so lovingly recounted to Alice. As she becomes consumed by these memories, her New York life begins to crumble dramatically. Finally, her family’s troubling questions drive her to face, at last, the brutal secret from her past.

The death of a 90-year-old woman with a heart condition should not be suspicious. Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur certainly sees nothing out of the ordinary when Peggy’s caretaker, Natalka, begins to recount Peggy Smith’s passing. But Natalka had a reason to be at the police station. While clearing out Peggy’s flat, she noticed an unusual number of crime novels, all dedicated to Peggy. And each psychological thriller included a mysterious postscript: PS: for PS. When a gunman breaks into the flat to steal a book and its author is found dead shortly thereafter, Detective Kaur begins to think that perhaps there is no such thing as an unsuspicious death after all.

They were the closest of sisters and the best of friends. But when their uncle Edward Vlll decided to abdicate the throne, the dynamic between Elizabeth and Margaret was dramatically altered. Elizabeth would always look upon her younger sister's antics with a kind of stoical amusement, but Margaret's struggle to find a place and position inside the royal system --- and her fraught relationship with its expectations --- was often a source of tension. From the idyll of their cloistered early life, through their hidden wartime lives, into the divergent paths they took following their father's death and Elizabeth's ascension to the throne, Andrew Morton's book explores their relationship over the years.

When a drive-by shooting on Chicago's west side turns political, Detective Billy Harney leads the way to a quick solve. But his instincts --- his father was once chief of detectives, and his twin sister, Patti, is also on the force --- run deep. As a population hungry for justice threatens to riot, he realizes that the three known victims are hardly the only casualties. When Harney starts asking questions about who's to blame, the easy answers prove to be the wrong ones. On the flip side, the less he seems to know, the longer he can keep his clandestine investigation going…until Harney's quest to expose the evil that's rotting the city from the inside out takes him to the one place he vowed never to return: his own troubled past.

Paris, 1925: To enter the Secret Circus is to enter a world of wonder. It's the only world Cecile Cabot knows until she meets a charismatic young painter and embarks on a passionate affair that could cost her everything. Virginia, 2004: Lara Barnes is on top of the world, until her fiancé disappears on their wedding day. When her desperate search for answers unexpectedly leads to her great-grandmother’s journals, Lara is swept into a story of a dark circus and ill-fated love. Soon secrets about Lara’s family history begin to come to light, revealing a curse that has been claiming payment from the women in her family for generations. A curse that might be tied to her fiancé’s mysterious disappearance.

Over 20 years ago, the heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family's estate, then locked inside an isolated cabin for months. Patricia escaped, but so did her captors --- and the items stolen from her family were never recovered. Until now. On the Upper West Side, a recluse is found murdered in his penthouse apartment, alongside two objects of note: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase bearing the initials WHL3. For the first time in years, the authorities have a lead --- not only on Patricia's kidnapping, but also on another FBI cold case --- with the suitcase and painting both pointing them toward one man: Windsor Horne Lockwood III…or Win, as his few friends call him.

In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance, he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her. ACTS OF DESPERATION renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. Author Megan Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive mysteries: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?

Florence Darrow has always felt she was destined for greatness, but after a disastrous affair with her married boss, she starts to doubt herself. All that changes when she sets off for Morocco with her new boss, the celebrated but reclusive author Maud Dixon. Amidst the colorful streets of Marrakesh and the windswept beaches of the coast, Florence begins to feel she’s leading the sort of interesting, cosmopolitan life she deserves. But when she wakes up in the hospital after a terrible car accident, with no memory of the previous night --- and no sign of Maud --- a dangerous idea begins to take form.

A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the span of the next 20 years. As love is built and lost, and the past never too far behind, WHAT’S MINE AND YOURS moves between the years, from the foothills of North Carolina, to Atlanta, Los Angeles and Paris. It explores the unique organism that is every family: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.

A decade ago, Emily Carlino vanished after her car broke down on a California highway. She was presumed to be one of serial killer Ronny Lee Jessup’s victims whose remains were never found. Writer David Thorne still hasn’t recovered from losing the love of his life, or from the guilt of not being there to save her. He then meets the beguiling and playful Maddison Sutton, who is keenly aware of all he has lost. But what really takes his breath away is that everything about Maddison is just like Emily. As the fantastic becomes credible, David’s obsession grows, Maddison’s mysterious past deepens --- and terror escalates. Is she Emily? Or an irresistible dead ringer? Either way, the ultimate question is the same: What game is she playing?