Adult

One fateful night in Baja, Caroline’s husband convinces her to leave their two young daughters, Michelle and Samantha, alone in their hotel suite while the couple enjoys an anniversary dinner in the restaurant downstairs. But when they return, they discover that two-year-old Samantha has vanished without a trace. What follows are days, weeks and years of anguish for Caroline. She’s tormented by media attention that has branded her a cold, incompetent mother, while she struggles to save her marriage. Years later, a phone call plunges back into the still-raw heartbreak of her daughter’s disappearance, and the suspicions and inconsistencies surrounding a case long gone cold, Caroline doesn’t know whom or what to believe.

Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and the country was a bleak Communist backwater. It was one of the darkest corners of Europe, but few Westerners were paying attention. What ensued was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often overlooked country --- a country that, today, is key to understanding the current threat that Russia poses to Europe. Through the lens of one country, Kaplan examines larger questions of geography, imperialism, the role of fate in international relations, the Cold War, the Holocaust and more.

Psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware meets actress Zelda Chase when called upon to evaluate her five-year-old son, Ovid. Years later, he is unexpectedly reunited with Zelda when she is involuntarily committed after a bizarre psychotic episode. Shortly after her release, she is discovered dead on the grounds of a palatial Bel Air estate. Alex turns to his friend, LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis, for help in finding out who ended Zelda’s broken life. At the same time, he is caught up in another quest: the search for her missing son. And when other victims vanish from the same upscale neighborhood, worry turns to terror.

Rebecca Wright has found her way out of grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the Internet dating site where she first met her husband. However, she has a persistent, strange sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter. Her husband Philip's decade-long dedication to the causality violation device (which he would greatly prefer you do not call a "time machine") has effectively stalled his career and made him a laughingstock in the physics community. But he may be closer to success than either of them knows or imagines.

He was once the kingpin's fixer, but after betraying him, Ulf is now the one his former boss wants fixed. Hiding out at the end of the line in northern Norway, Ulf lives among the locals. A mother and son befriend him, and their companionship stirs something deep in him that he thought was long dead. As he awaits the inevitable arrival of his murderous pursuers, he questions if redemption is at all possible or if, as he's always believed, “hope is a real bastard.”

In INTERIOR DARKNESS, Peter Straub explores the deepest, shadow-filled corners of his imagination. His world is made up of damaged people --- from the righteous to the depraved, from the working class to the wealthy. No one and no place is safe from the darkness that he reveals. In “Blue Rose,” an adolescent sociopath inflicts secret violence on his younger brother; in “Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” a stern estate lawyer hires a pair of "Private Detectives Extraordinaire" to investigate and seek revenge on his unfaithful wife; and in “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” a man and his much younger lover explore their decadent and increasingly sinister fantasies aboard a luxurious yacht on the remotest stretch of the Amazon River.

In Cold War England, Professor Henry Lytten, having renounced a career in espionage, is writing a fantasy novel that dares to imagine a world less fraught than his own. He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscape. There she meets a young boy named Jay, who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives. Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine. When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decision --- one that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds.

On a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later, seeking total immersion, she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and write solely in her adopted tongue. A startling act of self-reflection, IN OTHER WORDS is Lahiri’s meditation on the process of learning to express herself in another language --- and the stunning journey of a writer seeking a new voice.

It is Illinois in the 1830s and 1840s. Abraham Lincoln is a circuit-riding lawyer, a member of the state legislature, a man of almost ungovernable ambition. To his friends he is also a beloved figure, by turns charmingly awkward and mesmerizingly self-possessed. Among his friends and political colleagues are Joshua Speed, William Herndon, Stephen Douglas and many others who have come to the exploding frontier town of Springfield to find their futures. It is through another friend, fictional poet Cage Weatherby, that we will come to know Lincoln in his 20s and 30s, as a series of formative, surprising incidents unfolds.

In 1938, 28-year-old Pauli Murray wrote a letter to the President and First Lady, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, protesting racial segregation in the South. Eleanor wrote back. So began a friendship that would last for a quarter of a century, as Pauli became a lawyer, principal strategist in the fight to protect Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a co-founder of the National Organization of Women, and Eleanor became a diplomat and first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.