Adult

Detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, are entering a new chapter of life as parents to their six-month-old baby. Their family is hidden away in the sanctuary town of Haven's Rock where they can live safe and private lives. But when they encounter hikers too close to the borders of Haven's Rock, they realize they're in danger of being exposed. When they find one of the hikers dead the next day, they realize that their paranoia was justified, but they're no closer to finding out who these people were and what they were doing in the vicinity of Haven's Rock. Only by tracing the hikers' movements, as well as examining the recent behavior of their closest neighbors, the workers of a secretive mining camp, will they be able to figure out where the threat is coming from and shut it down.

There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady --- a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families --- is a vicious killer. When the king's men force their way into her manor house, she is caught murdering yet another of her maids. She is walled up in a tower and never seen again, except in the uppermost barred window, where she curses all those who dared speak up against her. Told and retold in many languages, the legend of the Blood Countess has consumed cultural imaginations around the world. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim --- of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both?

In a drought-stricken Igbo village, young Ekwe grows up haunted by owls, myths, and the boundaries of a world too small to contain his restless spirit. After touching a forbidden leaf that his father warns will trap him in astral planes, he is swept into a journey that will carry him across Nigeria and into the heart of a nation’s unraveling. Taken in by Danjuma, a gentle Fulani cowherd with a sprawling family and an instinct for danger, Ekwe enters a world of cattle herding, migration and precarious survival. As insurgents tear through northern towns and tribal wars erupt in the Middle Belt, Danjuma leads his family on an epic pastoral flight southward. But violence follows them like a shadow, and the owls --- symbols of myth, menace and prophecy --- perch over every new beginning. 

In postwar Paris, over the course of one fateful day, a boy’s crush on his nanny ignites into a destructive passion that burns into his memory and reveals to him the disquieting world of adult secrets. In 1950s New York City, a naïve caretaker struggles to protect her charge, a married woman paralyzed by her recent stroke, as new bruises appear each day on her body. In the 1970s, a fragile cousin wanders into the Royal family’s chaotic jazz-filled townhouse, where music, sex and ruin intertwine. And at the heart of these stories is Rainey Royal herself, coming of age in Greenwich Village, inventing herself as an artist through the tumult of the ’70s and ’80s.

Hannah “Cookie” Cooke, an interior decorator with a sideline making miniature reproductions of crime scenes for the local police department, lands her dream job when New Preston’s wealthiest couple hires her to renovate their historic New England home. But things go spectacularly wrong when her client, Chuck --- with whom she is having an affair --- is murdered at the housewarming party. The detective on the case commissions one of Cookie’s miniatures to help solve the baffling murder. While grappling with her own complicated role in Chuck’s life --- and the thorny layers of her own envies, resentments and ambitions --- Cookie delves into the strange details of his death. In untangling the mystery, Cookie reveals an ugly truth about New Preston’s elite that might prove deadly.

It’s December 24, 1979, just before closing at Baker-Taylor’s discount department store, and Fran (née Baker) is surveying her domain. Her husband, Fred, is charming customers in the front of the store. The older Taylor kids are on register, while the younger ones’ chaos is contained to the stockroom. All is right in the world as the new decade approaches. With four healthy children and financial stability their own parents could have only dreamed of, Fred and Fran are the picture of the American Dream --- with a successful chain of family-owned stores built on years of hard work and long hours. Underneath the surface, however, the business is changing at a breakneck pace, and each member of the family is struggling to keep up.

Aria Stokes works as a bookseller at a local shop and has taken a leap of faith in love by indulging her attraction to bookstore regular Jasper. As a Valentine’s Day surprise, Jasper gets the two of them tickets to an exclusive, after-dark tour of the Daedalus Library --- the grandiose establishment famed for its immersive genre-based reading rooms and, more notoriously, its rumored hauntings. But when the automatic-door entry malfunctions, and Aria, Jasper and the five other people in their tour group become trapped in the library, they are forced to venture through the storied rooms and hidden passageways of the Daedalus in search of escape…and Aria quite literally has nowhere to hide from the shadows of her past. Then the group learns there’s a murderer in their midst.

Have you ever tried to pass the time by imagining the lives of the strangers standing next to you? Ilona Bannister’s FIVE introduces readers to five seemingly random people waiting for a train. But these are not just any five people. From the beginning, we know that one of them is going to die soon. The next train to London will arrive in five minutes, killing one of them. But before this happens, you will learn their stories. Readers might fall in love with the beautiful young man who is on the verge of gambling his life away. They may pity the cantankerous old woman who has fallen to the ground yet is refusing help. Perhaps readers will look away from the child throwing a tantrum. Or judge his mother, who surely must be to blame. And some will be curiously compelled by the successful and damaged businessman orbiting them all.

It all starts when Petra and her little sister, Patch, hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost. Is it imaginary? Is it real? Then it all starts again 30 years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom. What to do? She phones her sister. In a chiarascuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, GLYPH asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making.

Miss Alice Lockey, the daughter of a tenant farmer, has raised herself to the lofty status of lady’s maid at Alderwick Park. Though her mother has advised her to work only until marriage, Alice thus far has resisted the temptations of matrimony among the neighboring widowers and pig farmers. But when a visiting servant, a valet named Charlie Wells, catches her eye, Alice begins to understand the constraints of her position. In a ploy to spend time with the object of her affection, Alice attempts to arrange a romance between Lady Jemima Alderwick and Charlie’s employer, one Baronet Sir Nigel Wynstowe. If only they would fall in love, then Alice and Charlie might live together as man and wife!