A brutal murder has taken place. The God-fearing citizens of the sleepy midwestern town are convinced evil has taken root.
A young married couple, Charlie and Delia Mull are left to pick up the pieces of shattered lives after the unspeakable tragedy.
Townsfolk whisper from church pews that pretty Delia Mull has brought the misfortune upon herself - a cursed family legacy. Others believe the horrific crime is merely another sign of a violent and godless age.
A mysterious woman has rented the house six doors down. Betty Malcomb is the new teacher hired at the high school. Locals are suspicious of the reclusive outsider. Why has she traveled to their peeling little town? What reasons would make her stay?
Located in the remote Kansas prairie sits the state penitentiary. Imprisoned in a concrete cell, a lone madman silently awaits his opportunity to complete his unholy calling.
Max Wendt has a family . . . but it's sliding sideways, and he has been complicit in its faltering. His wife and his daughter have pulled away from him amid his frequent absences, leaving him to bridge the distance between what he remembers and the way things are now.
Max Wendt has a job . . . but it carries him away from home most of the time, and its dynamics are quickly changing. There's a surprising new hire on his pipeline crew, strife among coworkers, and a boss whose proclivities put everything in peril.
Max Wendt has a friend . . . but this odd man Max meets during his travels perplexes him, prods him, pushes him, and annoys him. He sees something in Max that Max can't see in himself, and he's holding tight to his own pain.
Max Wendt has a problem . . . More than one, in fact, and those problems are flying at him with increasing velocity. Can someone who has spent his life going with the flow arrest his own destructive inertia, rebuild his relationships, and find a better way?
A political thriller about sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era, one victim's battle to survive and overcome trauma, and the cable news machine that feeds off titillating scandal coverage and inflammatory confrontation, Final Table draws upon Dan Schorr's firsthand experience as a New York City sex crimes prosecutor and sexual misconduct investigator to tackle the worlds of political and media dysfunction.
Former White House staffer Maggie Raster is struggling to build her own consulting firm and overcome a recent sexual assault by an ex-boss. Kyler Dawson, a broke former poker champion, desperately needs to gain entry into a controversial but potentially very lucrative international poker tournament. The host nation faces widespread condemnation for the recent murder of a prominent female US journalist, and a pending presidential executive order threatens to prohibit him and others from participating.
Told by a tart-tongued young woman with a love of Bruce Springsteen, Lies in Bone is at once a mystery and coming-of-age tale fueled by dark secrets involving love, murder, and the truths worth lying for.
On Halloween 1963, eleven-year-old Chuck Coolidge and his brother Danny are lost in a toxic smog covering the steel town of Slippery Elm, Pennsylvania. When the smog lifts, half the town is sick and twenty people are dead. And Danny is missing.
Now, over twenty years later, Chuck's teenage daughter Frank plots escape from this "busted and disgusted" town. When a murdered child is found in the river, investigators link the crime to the disappearance of Danny in '63, and Frank's life is turned upside down. In the face of her worst fears, she must uncover her family's dark past if she wants to keep her sister Boots from the hands of The State. Led to discover the unimaginable truth about Danny's disappearance, Lies in Bone culminates in a shocking eleventh-hour reveal and an emotionally charged finale.
The Fehler sisters wanted to be more than bug girls but growing up in a fourth- generation family pest control business in rural Missouri, their path was fixed. The family talked about Fehler Family Exterminating at every meal, even when their mom said to separate the business from the family, an impossible task. They tried to escape work with trips to their trailer camp on the Mississippi River, but the sisters did more fighting than fishing. If only there was a son to lead rural Missouri insect control and guide the way through a crumbling patriarchy.
After Robbie Fehler’s sudden death, the surprising details of succession in his will are revealed. He’s left the company to a distant cousin, assuming the women of the family aren’t capable. As the mother’s long-term affair surfaces and her apocalypse prepper training intensifies, she wants to trade responsibility for romance.
On a beautiful summer morning at the Jersey Shore, 4-year-old Sarah Carpenter wanders toward the ocean and never returns. The police think she drowned, but her babysitter Amy claims Sarah was abducted. The only other witness, 17-year-old Donnie Marcino, didn’t see a thing. A narcoleptic since birth, he was fast asleep.
Twenty years later Sarah’s disappearance still haunts Donnie, as does his lingering bond with Amy. When she calls from the hospital after a failed suicide attempt, Donnie returns to his hometown, but how can he help Amy, and help himself, without changing the past? In The Revolving Heart, love and redemption collide as the adult Donnie struggles to atone for his youthful mistakes.
Kassie O’Callaghan’s meticulous plans to divorce her emotionally abusive husband, Mike, and move in with Chris, a younger man she met five years ago on a solo vacation in Venice, are disrupted when she finds out Mike has chronic kidney disease—something he’s concealed from her for years. Once again, she postpones her path to freedom—at least, until she pokes around his pajama drawer and discovers his illness is the least of his deceits.
But Kassie is no angel, either. As she struggles to justify her own indiscretions, the secret lives she and Mike have led collide head-on, revealing a tangled web of sex, lies, and DNA. Still, mindful of her vows, Kassie commits to helping her husband find an organ donor. In the process, she uncovers a life-changing secret. Problem is, if she reveals it, her own immorality will be exposed, which means she has an impossible decision to make: Whose life will she save—her husband’s or her own?
It’s the end of summer, 2001. Erin O’Connor has everything she’s ever dreamed of: good friends, a high-powered career at a boutique Manhattan firm, and a husband she adores. They have plans for their life together: careers, children, and maybe even a house in the country. But life has other plans. Daniel works on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center.
Erin is drinking margaritas on a beach in Mallorca, helping her best friend get over a breakup, when she hears a plane has crashed into Daniel’s building. On a television at the smoky hotel bar, she watches his building collapse. She makes her way home with the help of a stranger named Alec, and once there, she haunts Ground Zero, nearby hospitals, and trauma centers, plastering walls and fences with missing-person flyers. But there’s no trace of Daniel.
A strange unchartered world awaits Monte Scott, a young and inexperienced vocational rehabilitation counselor assigned to work at a residential school for the blind. From the first moments, his life is challenged and changed by confrontation with students, teachers and events in ways previously unimaginable. Presumptions of "sightless, pitiable, invalid children" awaken to questions of misconception and prejudice.
Will he survive or be summarily cast out as three others from his agency have been? And with a dark, secretive past weighing on his shoulders and haunting every step, does he really care?
An amusing young romance intersects with an underground freedom movement in a Soviet-style system that promised egalitarian utopia but devolved into a police state.
Izzy, an attractive college senior, belongs to an underground freedom movement organizing against a repressive, yet poorly run, Marxist regime. She is challenged by the idea of recruiting Tom, an unlikely choice as a rising young star in the Party. But Izzy heard Tom may have hidden depths and could get inside information as an underground mole. He’s also nice looking.
Will their amusing and cautious interactions and gradual revelations develop into a deeper relationship of shared beliefs? Will increasing friction between the two marginally competent Party leaders finally provide an opportunity for the underground to take action? Will Tom be reunited with his capitalist parents whom he denounced as a child, and who are in a massive Gulag prison camp?
"Worlds" depicts four generations of the Logan family from Ireland in 1870 to New York City in 1998. In a mosaic of episodes arranged by theme, "Worlds" portrays a family through poetic shards of narrative. Through the lens of the Seven Deadly Sins/Lively Virtues, "Worlds" examines these representatives of four generations of Logans.
1) Seamus Logan: a broken-hearted lover who flees his home in 1870 County Mayo, Ireland for Connemara and New York. Seamus eventually makes his way to Philadelphia where he founds a new family and a construction dynasty.
2) Reverend Sarsfield Logan, S.J.: a Jesuit priest who teaches French at Xavier High School in Manhattan’s Chelsea section. In 1910, Esther, a firebrand striker from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, raises Sarsfield’s consciousness and tempts his heart.
"Magnificent. An enthralling and heartbreaking journey." -Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times #1 bestselling author of Empty Mansions
Lady Be Good transports us to the glittering, sumptuous era of 1920s New York to follow the life of aspiring actress Dorothy Hale as she comes of age. Breaking societal rules imposed on women, "Peck's Bad Girl of Pittsburgh Society" leaves behind her privileged world for the bright lights of Broadway to chase her dream. From convent school debutante runaway to Ziegfeld showgirl to Hollywood star, Hale transforms herself into one of the most adored figures in the highest echelons of society. Yet behind the public façade the darling of the press contends with heart-rending loss, gossip and betrayal, and a tempestuous friendship with Luce.
Surrounded by her fabulous circle of friends-Gertrude Stein, Fred Astaire, Cole Porter, James Roosevelt, Elsa Maxwell, and other iconic figures-Dorothy finds her way to the other side of heartbreak and prepares for a White House wedding. Then, suddenly, at age thirty-three, at the height of happiness and peak of her fame, she falls to her death. Her life story is revised and written into history by the tabloids and the famed and fêted-leading to this novel's stunning conclusion.
Cat's Whisker is the story of Samuel Baron, an engineer, inventor, and successful entrepreneur. Trained as a scientist, Baron nonetheless nurtures a lifelong fascination with mysticism and spirituality, investigating themes as varied and interesting as meditation, jiu-jitsu, biology, anthropology, tai chi, BDSM-and the search for the perfect cocktail. His life is a quest-ultimately a successful one-for a view of the cosmos where science and spirituality don't just peacefully coexist but are instead intimately bound up as co-equal aspects of an integrated and inspiring reality.
This book is my memory. So begins a story chronicled in the tattered journal of Mary Cross, kept in an old accounting book that was a gift from her father when she left home at age sixteen. It is a chronicle of experiences, struggles, and breakthroughs of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia, traumatized by the most vivid of visions and voices. But were these episodes, fugues, or “spells,” as her ex Gregory used to call them, something else entirely? Mary's journey toward truth and overcoming her symptoms takes her far away, where she learns the rest of the story her visions and voices had always told her, from a past she did not know. With a childlike perception of danger and wonder that is evocative of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, luminous with passion and mystery as Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon, Wm. Anthony Connolly's newest novel is a resonant journey into what is real, and what is imagined, and why it matters.
Clay is a coming of age story that also chronicles a coming to awareness at a time of social, racial, and environmental unease. Twelve-year-old Luke and an older boy, Jimmy, become involved with a longstanding but threatened Black community located near their predominantly white enclave at the edges of New York City in the 1970s. The overt threats come from developers (including Jimmy’s father) and from a nearby toxic landfill—and Luke gradually learns how much these menaces are intertwined and how they are linked to his family and community. Over one eventful summer that moves toward crisis and confrontation, Luke learns deeper truths about his seemingly idyllic town and the wider world beyond it.
