Adult

Recently returned from his last case in Ireland, elite forensic psychologist and criminal profiler Dr. Alexander Gregory receives a call from the French police he can't ignore. It's Paris Fashion Week, and some of the world's most beautiful women are turning up dead --- each killed in a frenzy, their faces slashed as the world's press looks on. Amid the carnage, one victim survives --- but she's too traumatized to speak. Without her testimony, the police are powerless to stop the killer before he strikes again. Can Gregory unlock the secrets buried in her mind before it's too late?

Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can’t refuse: to chaperone a man in a vegetative state --- one with proprietary AI implanted in his head --- from California to the East Coast. Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he’s trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can’t remember. Using a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls “Bernie” from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.

When Josie King left Las Vegas in the '90s, she never looked back. The daughter of gambling mogul Roy King, she’s been living a quiet life in LA as an accountant and a single mom when she finds herself summoned back to Sin City. Now, 15 years later, her father has died unexpectedly, and Josie’s siblings are already gathered for the reading of his will...only to discover that in order to inherit they must spend three years working together at the notorious family casino. Josie’s pride won’t let her walk away from the family empire again, so she agrees to take charge of the casino’s finances. She quickly discovers that while Roy King was once the most powerful man in Vegas, times have changed. Las Vegas is more dangerous than ever, but Josie knows that to save the family business she’ll have to wade in deeper.

Steven Hammer was once a literary star. Now, his career is floundering, his marriage to a high-powered woman is crumbling, and the only bright spot in his life is Astrid, the Norwegian au pair who cares for their children --- and reveres his neglected novels. But what begins as a secret infatuation soon spirals into a scandal that makes them both infamous. As a headline-grabbing trial captivates the world with a salacious story of sex, power and betrayal, Steven must confront the wreckage he’s created --- and the deeper insecurities that fueled it. Is Astrid an innocent young woman caught up in a case beyond her control, or a calculating femme fatale? And how far will he go, driven by desperation and obsession, for her professed love?

When Lili Lowe gets caught having an affair with her married boss, an admired local politician, she finds herself at the epicenter of a scandal that could dismantle her life as she knows it. She turns, as many women would, to her mother. But Lydia Lowe is not the kind of mother to offer gentle words of consolation. Instead she devises a strategy that doesn’t just manage the fallout, it actively exploits it, and Lili goes from making coffee and booking meetings to making headlines and booking talk shows. Lili’s three sisters --- Stevie, Iris and Katie --- have differing reactions to being in the spotlight...and it doesn’t take long for the craziness surrounding the Lowes to spiral out of control. Money and celebrity, the Lowes discover, come at a price --- sometimes, the louder one’s voice (especially a woman’s), the more others will seek to silence it.

Ever since her father broke her heart when she was nine, Julia Heimdahl has tried to be good company for bad men: a jovial drinking companion, an easygoing, witty non-complainer, one of the boys. Now a literary novelist in late middle age and late mid-career, she is at a moment of crisis, although she doesn’t know it yet. The novel takes place over the course of a weekend-long book festival at Baldwin College, which happens to be Julia’s alma mater, where she has come to promote her recently published memoir. She’s been placed on a panel with a fellow memoirist named Ellis Blackwell, a man so outrageously flirtatious and fawningly flattering, Julia is almost too disarmed to recognize how dangerous he is. 

When the Signal arrives, the world changes overnight. Planes are grounded, satellites fail and speculation abounds. But for Alex, the Signal feels deeply personal. Decades ago, Alex and a girl named Ana both vanished for 36 hours while on vacation. When they returned, dazed but unharmed, the six-year-olds’ account of their experience had all the hallmarks of an alien abduction. The long months of child stardom forged a seemingly unbreakable bond between them --- until the mystery behind their disappearance began to tear them apart. Now, Alex is drawn back to the one person who might have answers. As the former best friends tentatively reunite, what starts as a quest to confront the reality of their original experience becomes a larger reckoning with friendship, faith, family and truth itself --- what it means to see the stories we tell ourselves for what they really are.

Janey Carter has a lot to be grateful for --- a home by the sea in the Scottish isles, a job that she loves, two kids who have successfully launched and a network of kind and supportive friends. And then, out of the blue, her 30-year-old daughter Essie announces she’s moving back home. Janey loves Essie dearly, but she was never the easiest to live with,. Yes, Essie Carter has just lost her job, can’t afford her rent in Edinburgh, and isn’t wild about moving back to the remote island community where she was raised. No sooner is Essie back under her mother’s roof than an unusual opportunity pops up: the shabby and unloved Seaside Cottages next door come up for sale. Mother and daughter slowly bond over the shared challenge, which delivers some much-needed revelations for Essie, and offers Janey a surprise second chance at love as well.

Giovanni Mason worked hard to become the first Black head concierge at Chicago’s exclusive and glamorous Ivory Hotel. But when Giovanni reunites with her former best friend, makeup influencer Natalie Moore, things get heated as a mending of fences morphs into a public argument in the hotel restaurant, and Giovanni loses her cool. Hours later, Natalie is missing. Evidence piles against Giovanni --- a ransacked, blood-spattered hotel room, fresh bruises on her body and a troubling gap in her memory from the last 12 hours. Detective Redding Stark is the only one unconvinced of Giovanni’s guilt. She sees disturbing parallels to a series of disappearances targeting Black women and believes Natalie’s case is part of something bigger. Together, she and Giovanni are pulled into a dangerous web of privilege, power and betrayal inside the walls of the Ivory Hotel.

Winifred Starbuck wants only one thing: to join her parents on their final merchant voyage --- from Nantucket Island to bustling San Francisco, then across the glittering Pacific to the distant ports of China. Yet renowned trade captains Nell and Peter Starbuck have forbidden their daughter from coming aboard on the adventure of a lifetime. So Winnie does what any strong-willed 18-year-old would do: she stows away. Once the ship sets sail, Winnie is plunged into turbulent waters, treachery and the thrill of life on the high seas. As she drifts farther from shore, and closer to fabled Canton port, she uncovers a long-buried secret --- one that reveals the truth behind her parents’ desperate fear. And as she continues to chart her own course, she’ll have to plumb the depths of her courage to take on a world far bigger --- and more dangerous --- than she ever imagined.