Adult

Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings, but destroyed himself in the process. In his final days, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death, but was saved; of the ones who tormented him, and an entity that hides in a ruined stockade. Parker is not like other men. He died and was reborn. He is ready to wage war. Now he will descend upon a strange, isolated community called the Cut, and face down a force of men who rule by terror, intimidation and murder. All in the name of the being they serve. All in the name of the Dead King.

Sil Lai Abrams always knew she was different, with darker skin and curlier hair than her siblings. But when the man who she thought was her dad told her the truth --- that her father was actually black --- her whole world was turned upside down. Raised primarily in the Caucasian community of Winter Park, Florida, Abrams was forced to re-examine who she really was and struggle with her Caucasian, African American and Chinese identities. In her remarkable memoir, she shares this journey and how it speaks to a larger question: Why does race matter?

A wounded officer is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford’s aid station, where she stabilizes him. The odd thing is, the officer isn't British --- he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German. When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, won by the Germans. But on which side of the war do his sympathies really lie? When the French officer disappears in Paris, it’s up to Bess to find out why, even at the risk of her own life.

For two decades, Zeba was a loving wife, a patient mother and a peaceful villager. But her quiet life is shattered when her husband, Kamal, is found brutally murdered. A shocked Zeba is unable to account for her whereabouts at the time of his death. Her children swear she could not have committed such a heinous act. Kamal’s family is sure she did and demands justice. Barely escaping a vengeful mob, Zeba is arrested and jailed. As she awaits trial, she meets a group of women whose own misfortunes have also led them to these bleak cells. Is Zeba a cold-blooded killer, these young ladies wonder, or has she been imprisoned, as they have been, for breaking some social rule?

Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats. She’s in an airport when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. “I’ve got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies,” he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn’t say. What Hannah finds is a horrifying murder that points to the impossible --- someone weaponizing the natural world in a most unnatural way. Discovering who --- and why --- will take her on a terrifying chase from the Arizona deserts to the secret island laboratory of a billionaire inventor/philanthropist. Hannah knows there are a million ways the world can end, but she just might be facing one she could never have predicted --- a new threat both ancient and cutting-edge that could wipe humanity off the earth.

The decade-long Great Depression forever changed the way America eats. Before 1929, America’s relationship with food was defined by abundance. But the collapse of the economy, in both urban and rural America, left a quarter of all Americans out of work and undernourished. In 1933, as women struggled to feed their families, President Roosevelt reversed long-standing biases toward government-sponsored “food charity.” For the first time in American history, the federal government assumed, for a while, responsibility for feeding its citizens. The effects were widespread. Championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, “home economists” who had long fought to bring science into the kitchen rose to national stature.

John Smith has a special gift that seems more like a curse: he can access other peoples’ thoughts. The CIA honed his skills until he was one of their most powerful operatives, but Smith fled the Agency and now works as a private consultant. But now Smith is unexpectedly plunged into dangerous waters when his latest client, billionaire genius Everett Sloan, hires him to investigate a former employee --- a tech whiz kid named Eli Preston --- and search his thoughts for some very valuable intellectual property he’s stolen. Before John can probe Preston’s mind, his identity is compromised and he’s on a run for his life with Preston’s young associate, Kelsey. John knows their only hope for survival is using his powers to their fullest --- even if means putting his own sanity at risk.

With Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot investigating a young woman’s death, newly promoted Detective Superintendent Banks finds himself taking on the coldest of cases: a fifty-year-old assault allegedly per-petrated by beloved celebrity Danny Caxton. Now Caxton stands accused at the center of a media storm, and it’s Banks’s job to discover the shocking truth. As more women step forward with accounts of Caxton’s manipulation, Banks must piece together decades-old evidence --- while the investigation leads him down the darkest of paths…

The producer of a popular television cooking show, Annie Harlow loves her handsome husband and the beautiful Los Angeles home they share. But in an instant, her life is shattered. When Annie awakes from a yearlong coma, she discovers that time isn’t the only thing she’s lost. Grieving and wounded, she retreats to her old family home. There, surrounded by her free-spirited brother, their divorced mother, and four young nieces and nephews, she slowly emerges into a world she left behind years ago. With the discovery of a cookbook her grandmother wrote in the distant past, Annie unearths an age-old mystery that might prove the salvation of the family farm.

Debut novelist Alix Hawley presents Daniel Boone’s life --- from his childhood in a Quaker colony, through two stints captured by Indians as he attempted to settle Kentucky, the death of a son at the hands of the same Indians, and the rescue of a daughter. Boone was a fabulous hunter and explorer, and a “white Indian,” perhaps happiest when he found a place as the captive, adopted son of a chief who was trying to prevent the white settlement of Kentucky. The love story between Boone and his wife, Rebecca, is rich and tangled, but mostly it’s Boone who fascinates, pushing into places where he imagines he can create a new “clean” world, only to find death, trouble and complication.