Adult

Tensions simmer in small-town Connecticut. A city transplant is haunted by the deer carcass hanging in her neighbor’s garage. A psychiatric patient believes she’s becoming a bird. A disgraced oil executive invites his granddaughter’s kindergarten class to tour his home menagerie --- what could go wrong? THE ANIMAL ROOM delves deep into the town of Old Cranbury and its eclectic mix of residents. Incisive and moving, these stories chart the interconnected lives of neighbors, relatives, coworkers, enemies, lovers and the animals around them, turning an unflinching eye to the natural world to shed light on human nature.

1933. America was still reeling from the crash. It was a newspaperman’s idea: The Game of the Century. Put the world’s best players on one field and let the public decide who belonged there. At a moment when some feared the national pastime would not survive the decade, Chicago would host the ballgame as the highlight of the 1933 World’s Fair. THE FIRST ALL-STAR GAME is the story of a nation and a sport at a crossroads and a sweeping look back at baseball’s early history and the America that shaped it. Deeply researched and filled with remarkable characters --- legendary players like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Lefty Grove rubbing shoulders with Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone and Charles Lindbergh --- Randall Sullivan explores the history of an American obsession and captures the moment when both the sport and the nation found renewal in a single spectacle of hope. 

James Drayton has always found things too easy. Ambitious, brilliant, disciplined --- he graduates with a top first from Oxford and is on track to become the youngest ever partner at leading management consultancy McKinsey. His former classmate Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive dreamer: charming and restless, his boundless enthusiasm matched only by his knack for self-sabotage. When Roland takes a job at the same firm as James, the two men only vaguely remember one another. But as the financial crisis starts to unfold, a chance encounter sparks an idea and an unlikely partnership begins to take shape. Sent to Scotland to shutter offices and lay off hundreds of workers, James and Roland begin to wonder: What if they were made for more than this? What if they could build something that might even change the world?

Rhode Island’s picturesque Ocean House is the perfect setting for Kate Woodward and Conor Reid’s fairy-tale wedding weekend. But there may not be a happily ever after. When an old friend of Conor’s disrupts the rehearsal dinner and reveals a blindsiding secret --- a claim that she and Conor share a child --- Kate calls off the wedding, thinking things can’t get any worse. Until the next morning, when that same woman is found with her throat slashed. As investigators close in and suspicions mount, the evidence points to a mystery deeper than anyone imagined. The soundproof boat with telltale signs of something sinister. The mansion on the hill that lures in young girls and doesn’t let them go. A secret society whose members might be more familiar than not. And the truth of the dead woman’s past that draws Kate and Conor into a nightmare.

In 1990 in Washington State, the bodies of Yolanda Sapp, Nickie Lowe and Kathy Brisbois were found on the banks of the Spokane River. For 22 years their brutal murders went unsolved. In 2012, a DNA cold hit pointed to Douglas Perry. A repeat assault offender, Douglas was currently incarcerated in Carswell, Texas. But there was a twist: The facility was for female prisoners. The man authorities hunted for decades was now Donna Perry. Her gender reassignment not only helped to mask the evil deeds of the past, it ended a life of childhood traumas and a pent-up rage unleashed on nearly 30 victims, according to Donna herself. Through total reinvention, she believed she’d finally slayed the monster within. BY THE RIVER'S EDGE is the astonishing true story of an elusive serial killer.

Lazarus Holloway is no stranger to violent crime. The seasoned detective has built a career on weeding out the worst of the worst from the glittering streets of Las Vegas. But he never knew the worst could get this bad. The Bone Stalker is a new kind of murderous. His MO is brutal, calculated and ritualistic, removing only specific bones from his victims’ bodies. Each bone taken has a symbolic meaning...and they all tie back to Lazarus himself. As Lazarus digs deeper with the help of investigative partner and guardian ad litem Piper Danes, they discover the detective isn’t the only connection. But before they can unravel the web of lies that’s been spun through the city for years, the killer ensnares another innocent in his trap. Someone close to Lazarus becomes the bait. And he’ll stop at nothing to get her back --- even if it means embracing the darkness he’s spent his life fighting against.

When four ride-or-die friends reunite for a getaway, they’re desperate for a break. Marie feels like an impostor teaching “How to Say No” seminars while her marriage falls apart. Brooke’s motherhood is proving out of reach. Lucy’s dream career has broken her spirit. And Collins feels trapped in grief by her late husband’s legacy. Now, at a breaking point, they make a pact: Quit. And help each other through the fallout. A husband gets a much-needed wake-up call. A singles retreat is a widow’s perfect escape. A very public career exit becomes a never-too-late return to college. And a childless life becomes a bold new plan to travel the world. But letting go will be more complicated than they imagined. Confronting hard truths about love, loss and starting over, these four women must discover what’s worth fighting for.

Edison Bixby is wealthy, handsome and, due to a traumatic brain injury, impulsively rude. He’s also a brilliant insurance investigator who solves baffling crimes by figuring out how the design of the man-made world around us makes them possible. Enter Wally Nash: a struggling actor hired to keep Bixby from offending everyone he meets. Their first case together looks like a simple accident. Caroline Crowley took a nasty fall down a staircase at a shopping mall in front of dozens of witnesses. Video clearly shows the deadly misstep. But Bixby is certain she was murdered by design, subtly manipulated into causing her own demise. The mall itself made the crime intentional, if not inevitable. Now Bixby must prove his outrageous theory before a very cunning killer gets others on his hit list.

Kate, consultant for the University of Virginia, is tasked with interviewing six-year-old Henley about the girl’s alleged past-life recollections. 24 years ago, Kate’s friend Becca McGuire vanished from her bunk at a now-shuttered summer camp and was never seen again. But the mystery of her disappearance is only deepening. Because Henley’s memories of her “other life” are ones that could only belong to Becca. For Kate, Henley’s recurring, suffocating nightmares and her disturbing illustrations of places she has never been, seem to spell out the unbelievable. Somewhere, somehow, the truth about what really happened to Becca is locked inside this little girl. As Henley’s uncanny memories surface, so do old secrets --- each one drawing Kate inexorably back to that terrible long-ago summer by the lake.

In a time not so far from our own, society is run by a global AI system. The Shepherd Organization oversees every medical school in the country save one in New Orleans, the renegade Hippocrates, which still insists on human-led medicine. It is the last choice school for an ambitious young New Yorker named Pok. But after his father --- himself a physician --- dies under mysterious circumstances that seem connected to “the shepherds” and their megalomaniacal young CEO, Pok finds himself on a quest for answers that leads right to Hippocrates. Once enrolled, he stumbles upon a further mystery: a strange illness is plaguing newcomers to New Orleans who grew up under shepherd rule. What is causing this fatal anomaly? And how does it relate to the mystery of Pok’s father’s death and his own mysterious past?