Adult

Leo Maxwell has left private practice and is working as a public defender in San Francisco. He and his co-counsel, Jordan Walker, are brilliantly defending Randall Rodriguez, a mentally ill homeless man whom they contend falsely confessed to the rape of a young San Francisco socialite. After their client is acquitted, Leo and Jordan fall into an intense relationship --- until Jordan is found brutally raped and murdered in her apartment. The story takes a shocking turn when Leo and Jordan's freshly acquitted client walks into the police station and offers to confess to Jordan's murder.

When Joanna Connors was thirty years old on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to review a play at a college theater, she was held at knife point and raped by a stranger who had grown up five miles away from her. Setting out to uncover the story of her attacker, Connors embarked on a journey to find out who he was, where he came from, who his friends were and what his life was like. What she discovers stretches beyond one violent man’s story and back into her own, interweaving a narrative about strength and survival with one about rape culture and violence in America.

When Kim Barker first arrived in Kabul as a journalist in 2002, she barely owned a passport, spoke only English and had little idea how to do the “Taliban Shuffle” between Afghanistan and Pakistan. No matter --- her stories about Islamic militants and shaky reconstruction were soon overshadowed by the bigger news in Iraq. In this darkly comic and unsparing memoir, Barker uses her wry, incisive voice to expose the absurdities and tragedies of the “forgotten war,” finding humor and humanity amid the rubble and heartbreak.

Journalist Devin Leonard tackles the fascinating, centuries-long history of the USPS, from the first letter carriers through Benjamin Franklin’s days, when postmasters worked out of their homes and post roads cut new paths through the wilderness. Under Andrew Jackson, the post office was molded into a vast patronage machine, and by the 1870s, over 70% of federal employees were postal workers. As the country boomed, USPS aggressively developed new technology --- from mobile post offices on railroads and air mail service to mechanical sorting machines and optical character readers.

Rob Spillman --- the award-winning, charismatic co-founding editor of the legendary Tin House magazine --- has devoted his life to the rebellious pursuit of artistic authenticity. After an unsettled youth moving between divorced parents in disparate cities, Spillman would eventually find his way into the literary world of New York City, only to abandon it to return to Berlin just months after the Wall came down. Twenty-five and newly married, Spillman and his wife, the writer Elissa Schappell, moved to the anarchic streets of East Berlin in search of the bohemian lifestyle of their idols. But Spillman soon discovered he was chasing the one thing that had always eluded him: a place, or person, to call home.

In a collection of essays, Harrison captures moments and impulses that shape a family. In “Keeping Virgil,” Harrison reflects on the loss of her father-in-law and how he managed to repair something her own father had broken. In “Holiday Lies,” she describes the uneasy but necessary task of lying to her children about Santa Claus and the Tooth fairy. In “Mini-Me,” she writes about the birth of her youngest daughter. In “True Crime,” she writes for the first time in almost two decades since THE KISS, about her affair with her father, and how she has reckoned with the girl she once was.

After spending the war years in a Canadian internment camp, 13-year-old Aya Shimamura and her father are barred from returning home to the west coast. Grieving the loss of Aya’s mother, they move back to Tokyo, where Aya’s father struggles to find work. Meanwhile, Aya is alienated and bullied at school for being foreign. When a rumor surfaces that General MacArthur might help citizens in need, Aya's classmate, Fumi, asks her to write a letter asking him to find her beloved sister. With no response, the girls take matters into their own hands, venturing into the dark and dangerous underside of Tokyo’s Ginza district.

Beth Swahn, a young lawyer, makes a rookie mistake when she believes her client. Because of her naïveté, Leonard Sloane, president of a U.S. division of C. K. Leung’s Chinese conglomerate, has absconded to the Caribbean with his banker girlfriend and 70 million dollars of the judgment money. While attempting to retrieve Leung’s money and save her firm from bankruptcy, she falls for Sloane’s handsome son, and his torn between her attraction for him and fear that he may be involved in the theft.

Mary Russell is used to dark secrets --- her own, and those of her famous partner and husband, Sherlock Holmes. Trust is a thing slowly given, but over the course of a decade together, the two have forged an indissoluble bond. And what of the other person to whom Russell has opened her heart: the couple’s longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson? Russell’s faith and affection are suddenly shattered when a man arrives on the doorstep claiming to be Mrs. Hudson’s son. What Samuel Hudson tells Russell cannot possibly be true, yet she believes him --- as surely as she believes the threat of the gun in his hand. In a devastating instant, everything changes.