Adult

Every other weekend, Hope and Eden wait for their father to pick them up at a strip-mall bus stop. It’s the divorce shuffle; they’re used to it. Only this weekend, he’s forgotten, and their world will irrevocably change when a stranger lures them into his truck. More than 20 years later, Hope is a playwright with only one play produced long ago, newly evicted from an illegal sublet, working a humiliating temp job. Eden has long since distanced herself from her family, and no one seems to know where she is. When the man who abducted them is up for parole, the sisters might be able to offer testimony to keep him jailed. Hope sets out to find her sister --- and to find herself --- and it becomes the journey of a lifetime.

Merry, Sam and Conor are the perfect family in the perfect place. Merry adores the domestic life. Sam, formerly an academic, is pursuing a new career as a filmmaker. When Merry's childhood friend Frank visits their Swedish paradise, she immediately becomes part of the family. She befriends the neighbors, and even finds herself embracing the domesticity she's always seemed to scorn. All their lives, Frank and Merry have been more like sisters than best friends. And that's why Frank soon sees the things others might miss --- treacherous things, which are almost impossible to believe when looking at this perfect family. But Frank, of all people, knows that the truth is rarely what you want the world to see.

Sergeant Alexandra Cupidi, a recent transfer from the London metro police to the rugged Kentish countryside, faces a bizarre case: a woman found floating in local marsh land, dead of no apparent cause. The case gets even stranger when detectives contact the victim's next of kin, her son, a high-powered graphic designer living in London. Adopted at the age of two, he'd never known his mother until a homeless woman knocked on his door, claiming to be his mother, just the night before --- at the same time her body was being dredged from the water. Detective Cupidi must discover who the woman really was, who killed her, and how she managed to reconnect with her long lost son, apparently from beyond the grave.

Second-string linebacker turned disillusioned defense attorney Jake Lassiter finally switches teams. Appointed special prosecutor in a high-profile murder case, Lassiter vows to take down a prominent surgeon accused of killing his wife. But there is no evidence, no witness and no body. And standing in Lassiter’s way are the defense lawyers: slick-talking Steve Solomon and blueblood Victoria Lord, who have their own complicated history with the defendant. Not to mention the specter of CTE, the lethal brain disease Lassiter may have contracted banging heads in the NFL. Drained of his mental edge just when he needs it most, Lassiter must do whatever it takes to win this case --- even if it costs him his life.

In the beautiful Maine woods, a partly preserved body is discovered. Investigators realize that the dead young woman gave birth shortly before her death. But there is no sign of a baby. Private detective Charlie Parker is hired by a lawyer to shadow the police investigation and find the infant, but Parker is not the only searcher. Someone else is following the trail left by the woman, someone with an interest in much more than a missing child…someone prepared to leave bodies in his wake. And in a house by the woods, a toy telephone begins to ring and a young boy is about to receive a call from a dead woman.

Lucy Albright is far from her Long Island upbringing when she arrives on the campus of her small California college, and happy to be hundreds of miles from her mother, whom she has never forgiven for an act of betrayal in her early teen years. Quickly grasping at her fresh start, Lucy embraces college life and all it has to offer. And then she meets Stephen DeMarco, who sees something in Lucy that no one else has. Meanwhile, Stephen is determined to forget an incident buried in his past that, if exposed, could ruin him. Lucy knows there’s something about Stephen that isn’t to be trusted. Stephen knows Lucy can’t tear herself away. And their addicting entanglement will have consequences they never could have imagined.

Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the West, THE REMOVES tells the intertwining stories of 15-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie’s husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family’s homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated --- living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer. But when what Anne and Libbie have come to know is suddenly altered through tragedy and loss, they realize how indelibly shaped they are by life on the treacherous, extraordinary American plains.

Julia Swann, mother of two young boys, is on the phone with her husband, Michael, when the call abruptly cuts out. It isn’t until later in the evening when she discovers that something terrible has happened at Penn Station, where Michael was waiting for a train home. Julia races to New York City to look for Michael, her panicked searching interwoven with memories of meeting and falling in love with the husband she’s now desperate to find. When someone finds a flier she’s posted and tells her they may have seen her husband, her prayers seem to be answered. Yet as she tries to find him, her calls go unanswered. Did Michael survive? If so, why hasn’t he contacted her? Was he --- or is he still --- the man she fell in love with?

Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom.

Investigative journalist Laura Chambers is back in her tiny hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina. Fired from the Boston Globe, she reluctantly takes a job with the local paper. The work is boring --- at least until a missing girl turns up dead. Years earlier, 10-year-old Patty Finch left home and never made it back. But for the people of Hillsborough, Patty was just the beginning. Child after child disappeared, a reign of terror the town desperately wants to forget. Now that terror has returned to seize another girl. And another. And another. Laura dives deeper into a case that runs colder by the second, only to discover the truth may be far closer to home than she ever could have imagined.