Adult

THE NEW COUNTESS is the final novel in Fay Weldon's trilogy that began with HABITS OF THE HOUSE and continued with LONG LIVE THE KING. The bestselling novelist and award-winning writer of the pilot episode of the original "Upstairs Downstairs" lifts the curtain on British society, upstairs and downstairs, under one roof.

A half million dollars in drug proceeds, guarded by three men with automatic weapons. For Wallace Stroby's determined heroine, professional thief Crissa Stone, and her team, stealing it was the easy part. But when the split goes awry in a blaze of gunfire, Crissa finds herself on the run with a duffel bag of stolen cash, bound by a promise to deliver part of the take to the needy family of one of her slain partners.

“I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead…” writes the heroine of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a quite ordinary, unnamed middle-aged woman who awakens to find she is the last living human being. Surmising her solitude is the result of a too successful military experiment, she begins the terrifying work of not only survival, but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple and moving talk — of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s name — and a disturbing meditation on 20th century history.

Somebody has murdered the angel Gabriel. Worse, the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing, putting Heaven on the brink of a truly cosmic crisis. But the twisty plot that unfolds from the murder investigation leads to something much bigger: a con job one billion years in the making. Angels and gunsels, dames with eyes like fire, and a grand maguffin, SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT is a murder mystery for the cosmos.

Earth Liberation Front is a loosely knit organization comprised of environmental activists who take a "by any means necessary" approach to defending the planet. Flynn Moss, Thorn’s newly discovered son, has naively fallen in with an ELF cell in Miami that has concocted a non-violent plan to shut down the largest nuclear power plant in the state. But unbeknownst to some in the group, there are other members who would like to cause a radioactive catastrophe rivaling Chernobyl or Fukushima.

While John Quincannon follows a danger-laden trail to unmask the murderous perpetrators of a Wells, Fargo robbery, his partner, Sabina Carpenter, works her wiles on friends and relatives of a vanished debutante until the pieces of her puzzle start falling into place. But it’s an oddly disguised gent appearing out of nowhere who provides the final clue to both cases --- the shrewd “crackbrain” who believes himself to be Sherlock Holmes.

REPORT FROM THE INTERIOR is Paul Auster’s follow-up to last year’s WINTER JOURNAL, a memoir in which, at age 64, he looked back on joyous as well as painful memories of his life. In his latest book, he writes about the salient events of his childhood, analyzes films that affected him in middle school, and shares letters he wrote in his late teens and early 20s to Lydia Davis, who would become his first wife.

Former CIA agent Lemuel Gunn works as a private investigator from his mobile home. Into his life comes Ornella Neppi, who’s making a hash out of her uncle’s bail bonds business. The source of her troubles, Emilio Gava, was arrested for buying cocaine. He’s jumped bail, and now she’s about to pay the price for it. Curiously, no photographs of Gava seem to exist. Once Gunn begins his search, it becomes unclear whether Gava even existed in the first place.