Adult

In turn-of-the-century South Africa, fourteen-year-old Lettie, her younger brother and her mother are Dutch Afrikaner settlers who have been taken from their farm by British soldiers and are being held in a concentration camp. It is early in the Boer War, and Lettie’s father, grandfather and brother are off fighting the British as thousands of Afrikaner women and children are detained. The camps are cramped and disease ridden; the threat of illness and starvation are ever present. Determined to dictate their own fate, Lettie and her family give each other strength and hope as they fight to survive amid increasingly dire conditions. 

Like Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, John Philip Holland was completely self-taught, a brilliant man raised in humble circumstances, earning his living as a schoolteacher and choirmaster. But all the while he was obsessed with creating a machine that could successfully cruise beneath the waves. His struggle to unlock the mystery behind controlled undersea navigation would take three decades. But his indestructible belief in himself and his ideas led him to finally succeed where so many others had failed. GOING DEEP is a vivid chronicle of the fierce battles not only under the water, but also in the back rooms of Wall Street and the committee rooms of Congress.

For over five years, the Four Monkey Killer has terrorized the residents of Chicago. When his body is found, the police quickly realize he was on his way to deliver one final message, one that proves he has taken another victim who may still be alive. When Detective Sam Porter, the lead investigator on the 4MK task force, discovers a personal diary in the jacket pocket of the body, he finds himself caught up in the mind of a psychopath, unraveling a twisted history in hopes of finding one last girl, all while struggling with personal demons of his own. With only a handful of clues, the elusive killer’s identity remains a mystery. Time is running out, and the Four Monkey Killer taunts from beyond the grave.

The mission: Drop into the Mexican jungle, infiltrate a drug cartel’s compound and extract a kidnapped DEA agent. But when Jonathan Grave and his partner, Boxers, retrieve the hostage and return to the exfil point, all hell breaks loose. Ambushed, abandoned and attacked on all sides, their only hope of survival lies inside a remote orphanage where innocent children have been targeted for death. Even if Grave can lead his precious cargo to safety across a hundred miles of treacherous jungle filled with enemies, he can’t shake the feeling that something bigger is at play: a vast conspiracy of international power players who take no prisoners --- and leave no survivors.

In Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, summer has brought Officer Henry Farrell nothing but trouble. Heroin has arrived with a surge in burglaries and other crime. When local carpenter Kevin O’Keeffe admits that he shot a man and that his girlfriend, Penny, is missing, the search leads the small-town cop to an industrial vice district across state lines that has already ensnared more than one of his neighbors. With the patience of a hunter, Farrell ventures into a world of shadow beyond the fields and forests of home.

When Eleanor Harper becomes the director of a renowned artists’ retreat, she knows nothing of Cliffside Manor’s dark past as a tuberculosis sanatorium, a “waiting room for death.” After years of covering murder and violence as a crime reporter, she hopes that being around artists and writers in this new job will be a peaceful retreat for her as much as for them. But from her first fog-filled moments on the manor’s grounds, Eleanor is seized by a sense of impending doom and realizes there’s more to the institution than its reputation of being a haven for creativity. As the chilling mysteries of Cliffside Manor unravel and the eerie sins of the past are exposed, she must fight to save the new fellows --- and herself --- from sinister forces.

At the heart of this collection are girls and women confronting the danger around them, and the danger hidden inside their turbulent selves. In the title story, a precocious 11-year-old named Jill is in thrall to an older male relative, the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family. Without telling her parents, Jill climbs into his sky-blue Chevy to be driven to an uncertain, and unforgettable, fate. In “The Drowned Girl,” a university transfer student becomes increasingly obsessed with the drowning/murder of another female student, as her own sense of self begins to deteriorate. And in the final story, “Welcome to Friendly Skies,” a trusting group of bird-watchers is borne to a remote part of the globe, to a harrowing fate.

By day, Ella Broden works as a buttoned-up attorney on some of the city’s most grueling cases. By night, she pursues her passion for singing in the darkest clubs of Manhattan. No one knows her secret, not even her younger sister, Charlotte. But it seems she’s not the only one in the family with something to hide. When Charlotte announces she’s sold her first novel, Ella couldn’t be more thrilled…until she gets a call that her sister has gone missing. Ella starts investigating with the help of Detective Gabriel Velasquez, an old flame in the NYPD, and what she finds is shocking. If art imitates life, then Charlotte's novel may contain details of her real-life affairs. And any one of her lovers could be involved in her disappearance.

The epic tale of Beren and Lúthien became an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of J.R.R. Tolkien’s First Age of the World. Always key to the story is the fate that shadowed their love: Beren was a mortal man, Lúthien an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, imposed on Beren an impossible task before he might wed Lúthien: to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, of a Silmaril. Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a continuous and stand-alone story, BEREN AND LÚTHIEN reunites fans of THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS with Elves and Men, along with the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

In 1978, 12-year-old Lou Cove is uprooted from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Salem, Massachusetts --- a backwater town of witches, Puritans and sea-captain wannabes. An old friend of Lou’s father, free-wheeling (and free-loving) Howie Gordon, announces his intention of posing nude for Playgirl magazine and a wild idea for how to do it: win Playgirl’s Man of the Year. And he knows just who should manage his campaign. As Lou and Howie canvas Salem for every vote in town --- little old ladies at bridge club, the local town witch, construction workers, and everyone in between --- Lou is forced to juggle the perils of adolescence with the pursuit of Hollywood stardom.