Adult

Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. They are two couples who have little in common, and are separated by years and experience. Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the human heart.

A controversial newspaper columnist named Damon Blundy has been murdered, and the detectives begin peppering Nicki Clements with questions. Why was she seen fleeing the scene? What is her connection to the victim? Why was the knife that killed him used in such a peculiar way? Why were the words “HE IS NO LESS DEAD” painted on the wall of Blundy’s study, and what do they signify? One simple answer could clear her. But she can’t explain why she fled that day without revealing the secret that could ruin her.

On the afternoon of September 8, 1900, 200-mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot waves slammed into Galveston, the prosperous and growing port city on Texas’s Gulf Coast. By dawn the next day, when the storm had passed, the city that existed just hours before was gone. Shattered, grief-stricken survivors emerged to witness a level of destruction never before seen: 8,000 corpses littered the streets and were buried under the massive wreckage. In less than 24 hours, one storm destroyed a major American metropolis --- and awakened a nation to the terrifying power of nature.

Still recovering from his life-threatening wounds, private detective Charlie Parker has retreated to the small Maine town of Boreas to regain his strength. There he befriends a widow named Ruth Winter and her young daughter, Amanda. But Ruth has her secrets. Old atrocities are about to be unearthed, and old sinners will kill to hide their sins. Now Parker is about to risk his life to defend a woman he barely knows, one who fears him almost as much as she fears those who are coming for her.

Jo Marie Rose and her handyman, Mark Taylor, are good friends --- and are becoming something more --- yet he still won’t reveal anything about his past. When Mark tells her that he’s moving out of town, Jo Marie is baffled. As she discovers the secret behind his decision to leave, she welcomes two visitors also seeking their own answers. Best friends Kellie Crenshaw and Katie Gilroy have returned to Cedar Cove for their 10-year high school reunion, looking to face down old hurts and find a sense of closure.

Growing up on idyllic St. Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. She is married off to a widower with three children to save her father’s business. When her husband dies suddenly and his handsome, much younger nephew, Frédérick, arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes her own life story, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal that affects all of her family --- including her favorite son, who will become one of the greatest artists of France.

Caught between her high birth and empty purse, Lady Georgiana Ranoch is glad to get a new assignment from the Queen --- especially one that includes lodging in the supposedly haunted Kensington Palace. As companion to Princess Marina of Greece, who is to marry the King’s youngest son, Georgie expects to live the high life --- until she stumbles across a dead body.

In this world, Dr. Charlotte “Charlie” Stone skillfully probes the twisted minds of incarcerated serial killers to better understand what makes them tick, and to help nab those who remain at large. But in the next world, Charlie’s ghostly lover --- convicted killer Michael Garland --- is facing death yet again. It seems that the only way Charlie can snatch Michael from the jaws of oblivion is by proving his innocence. And this dead man’s dead ringer may just be the key.

Two young men have vanished, and the investigation leads to two troubling clues in two different locations --- a scorched van and a peculiar bloodstain in an abandoned airport hangar. As Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his team scramble for answers, the inquiry takes an even darker turn when a truck careens off an icy road in a freak hailstorm. In the wreckage, rescuers find the driver, who was killed on impact, as well as another body --- a body that was dead well before the crash.

It is 1839, and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East India Company. He makes his way eastward on the Hind, a transport ship that will carry him from Bengal to Hong Kong. FLOOD OF FIRE is the final novel in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy.