One winter evening, bestselling crime author Elín S. Jónsdóttir goes missing. There are no clues to her disappearance and it is up to young detective Helgi to crack the case before its leaked to the press. As Helgi interviews the people closest to her --- a publisher, an accountant, a retired judge --- he realizes that Elín’s life wasn’t what it seemed. In fact, her past is even stranger than the fiction she wrote. As the case of the missing crime writer becomes more mysterious by the hour, Helgi must uncover the secrets of the writer's very unexpected life.
Debut sensation Tessa Calloway is on a whirlwind book tour for her instant bestseller, All This Could Be Yours. In a different city every night, Tessa receives standing ovations from adoring fans while her husband Henry and their two children cheer her on from their brand-new dream house. But there's a chilling problem with Tessa's triumphant book tour --- she soon discovers she is being stalked by someone who's obsessed not only with sabotaging her career, but also with destroying her perfect family back home. Tessa fears the fallout from an impossible decision she once made --- what felt like a genuine deal with the devil --- appears to be coming due. And she’s realizing that every high-stakes bargain comes with a high-stakes price. If Tessa can't untangle who's threatening to expose her darkest secrets, she'll lose her career, her family --- and possibly her life.
By the end of 1943, nearly all of Europe’s Jewish population had fled, been deported, captured or killed by Hitler. Only Hungary, and its almost 900,000 Jews, remained free from Hitler’s subjugation. That changed in March 1944, after Hitler conquered Hungary and declared his plan for mass extermination of the Jewish people. Theresa Weissbach, a professor at the University of Michigan, hasn’t heard from her parents in Budapest for over a year. Her best friend, Julia Powers, recently awarded a Distinguished Service Medal for her OSS service in occupied Holland, joins with her to locate and rescue Theresa’s family. Their skills and connections in the complex networks of public and secret diplomacy enable Julia, Theresa and others to take enormous risks in an effort to save thousands of innocent lives.
Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing 18 pounds and measuring 27 inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken in by his devout Amish grandparents who disapprove of all the attention and hide him away from the English world. But it’s hard to hide forever when you’re nearly eight feet tall. At 17, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach. What happens next transforms not only Gabriel’s life but the lives of everyone he meets.
The concept of evil is universal, ancient and ever present today. The biblical book of Genesis clearly defines it when Cain kills his brother Abel out of jealousy. Evil is a choice to make another suffer. As long as human beings have walked, evil has been close by. CONFRONTING EVIL by Bill O'Reilly and Josh Hammer recounts the deeds of the worst people in history: Genghis Khan. The Roman Emperor Caligula. Henry VIII. The collective evil of the 19th-century slave traders and the 20th-century robber barons. Stalin. Hitler. Mao. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Putin. The Mexican drug cartels. Collectively, these warlords, tyrants, businessmen and criminals are directly responsible for the death and misery of hundreds of millions of people.
In THE ELEMENTS, acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne has created an epic saga that weaves together four interconnected narratives, each representing a different perspective on crime: the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator and the victim. The narrative follows a mother on the run from her past, a young soccer star facing a trial, a successful surgeon grappling with childhood trauma and a father on a transformative journey with his son. Each is somehow connected to the next, and as the story unfolds, their lives intersect in unimaginable ways. The story resonates on a deeply emotional level, challenging readers to confront their own conceptions of guilt and innocence at every step. Amid the wildly engrossing storytelling, the book ultimately asks: What would you do when faced with the unthinkable?
Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home. Decades later, Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child her mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of family and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and her own fractured history. What did they give up when they sent him away? What kind of life has he been given? And how did it change their own lives?
Zelda Fitzgerald is bored. Although she’s newly married to the hottest writer in America, Zelda is at loose ends while Scott works on his next novel, The Beautiful and the Damned. Meanwhile, Atlanta journalist Morris Markey has arrived in New York and is lost in every way possible. When notorious man-about-town Joseph Elwell is found shot through the head, the fortunes of the two southerners collide when they realize they were both among the last to see him alive. Zelda encountered Elwell at the scandalous Midnight Frolic revue on the night of his death, and Markey saw him just hours before with a ravishing mystery woman dressed in green. Markey has his story. Zelda has her next adventure. Zelda sweeps Markey into her New York, the heady, gaudy Jazz Age of excess and abandon, as the lost generation takes its first giddy steps.
Manhattan is filled with galleries and deep-pocketed collectors who can make an artist's career with a wave of a hand. But one man toils in obscurity, his brilliance unrecognized while lesser talents bask in the glory he believes should be his. Come tomorrow, he vows, the city will be buzzing about his work. Indeed, before dawn, Lt. Eve Dallas is speeding toward the home of the two gallery owners whose doorway has been turned into a horrifying crime scene overnight. A lifeless young woman has been elaborately costumed and precisely posed to resemble the model of a long-ago Dutch master, and Dallas plunges into her investigation.
While working the night shift at a San Francisco news agency, Bayla Jeevan has a shocking out-of-body experience. Her consciousness is transported deep into an Indian forest, where she witnesses a noxious liquid spreading through the soil. At the same time, she receives a message from her father, presumed dead for 15 years, warning her of imminent danger. Halfway around the world, agrochemical corporation ZedChem --- led by billionaire Krakun Zed --- tests its latest innovation, a product heralded as the solution to topsoil erosion. But the data reveals something else entirely. As Bayla sets out looking for answers, she learns more about her past --- and her family's connections to a secret organization with ancient roots and to Zed himself. Will Bayla be able to stop the corporation from ruining global agriculture and devastating human existence forever?
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Coming Soon
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August's Books on Screen roundup includes the films The Thursday Murder Club, My Oxford Year and Night Always Comes on Netflix, the Providence Falls trilogy on Hallmark, The Map That Leads to You on Prime Video, and She Rides Shotgun in theaters; the conclusion of "And Just Like That..." on HBO Max and "The Institute" on MGM+; the series premieres of "Outlander: Blood of My Blood" on STARZ and "The Terminal List: Dark Wolf" on Prime Video; the season premieres of "The Marlow Murder Club" on PBS "Masterpiece" and "My Life with the Walter Boys" on Netflix; and the DVD/Blu-ray releases of The King of Kings and How to Train Your Dragon.