The Weird Sisters


Eleanor Brown - 2011
     The Andreas family is one of readers. Their father, a renowned Shakespeare professor who speaks almost entirely in verse, has named his three daughters after famous Shakespearean women. When the sisters return to their childhood home, ostensibly to care for their ailing mother, but really to lick their wounds and bury their secrets, they are horrified to find the others there. See, we love each other. We just don't happen to like each other very much. But the sisters soon discover that everything they've been running from-one another, their small hometown, and themselves-might offer more than they ever expected.

Velvet, Leather & Lace: A Man's Gotta Do\Calling the Shots\Baring It All


Suzanne Forster - 2005
    And the whole world will be watching!

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things


Jon McGregor - 2002
    In a tour de force that could be described as Altmanesque, we are invited into the private lives of the residents of a quiet urban street in England over the course of a single day. In delicate, intricately observed closeup, we witness the hopes, fears, and unspoken despairs of a diverse community: the man with painfully scarred hands who tried in vain to save his wife from a burning house and who must now care for his young daughter alone; a group of young clubgoers just home from an all-night rave, sweetly high and mulling over vague dreams; the nervous young man at number 18 who collects weird urban junk and is haunted by the specter of unrequited love. The tranquillity of the street is shattered at day's end when a terrible accident occurs. This tragedy and an utterly surprising twist provide the momentum for the book. But it is the author's exquisite rendering of the ordinary, the everyday, that gives this novel its freshness, its sense of beauty, wonder, and hope. Rarely does a writer appear with so much music and poetry -- so much vision -- that he can make the world seem new.

In the Night Room


Peter Straub - 2004
    One day, she is drawn helplessly into the parking lot of a warehouse. She knows somehow that her daughter, Holly, is being held in the building, and she has an overwhelming need to rescue her. But what Willy knows is impossible, for her daughter is dead. On the same day, author Timothy Underhill, who has been struggling with a new book about a troubled young woman, is confronted with the ghost of his nine-year-old sister, April. Soon after, he begins to receive eerie, fragmented e-mails that he finally realizes are from people he knew in his youth-people now dead. Like his sister, they want urgently to tell him something. When Willy and Timothy meet, the frightening parallels between Willy's tragic loss and the story in Tim's manuscript suggest that they must join forces to confront the evils surrounding them.

Wreckage


Emily Bleeker - 2015
    On the surface, she looks like a brave survivor of a plane crash. But she’s been lying to her family, her friends, and the whole world since rescue helicopters scooped her and her fellow survivor, Dave Hall, off a deserted island in the South Pacific. Missing for almost two years, the castaways are thrust into the spotlight after their rescue, becoming media darlings overnight. But they can’t tell the real story—so they lie.The public is fascinated by the castaways’ saga, but Lillian and Dave must return to their lives and their spouses. Genevieve Randall—a hard-nosed journalist and host of a news program—isn’t buying it. She suspects Lillian’s and Dave’s explanations about the other crash survivors aren’t true. And now, Genevieve’s determined to get the real story, no matter how many lives it destroys.In this intriguing tale of survival, secrets, and redemption, two everyday people thrown together by tragedy must finally face the truth…even if it tears them apart.

Leaving Time


Jodi Picoult - 2014
    Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish.

Gifts of War


Mackenzie Ford - 2008
    Hal promises to find his enemy’s English girlfriend, Sam, and let her know her fiancé is alive and thinking of her. Several weeks later, Hal—now injured—is discharged from the army and goes to Stratford on Avon to fulfill his promise. But things take an unexpected turn when he meets the woman in the photo and falls in love with her himself. As their romance blossoms, Sam shares with Hal her most private confidence: Her newborn son is of German lineage, information that threatens her reputation and her job as a schoolteacher. Fearful that he will lose Sam, Hal holds tight to the secret–and the photograph–that brought them together. The scene shifts to London, where Hal becomes involved with military intelligence and is introduced to Sam’s sisters and a different kind of secrecy. Against the broader landscape of England in wartime, Gifts of War captures the era and the fates of men and women caught in the sweep of history. A vivid tale of romance, adventure, and intrigue, the novel is a remarkable narrative that explores what made War World I so tragic, so revolutionary, and so exciting. It also announces a gifted new novelist.

Million-Dollar Marriage Merger


Charlene Sands - 2010
    But even an obligatory marriage could not diminish the hunger vintner Tony Carlino still felt for Rena Montgomery. Foolishly, he'd walked away from her once before…and she had never forgiven him. As far as she was concerned, no one would be toasting this arrangement anytime soon.She had married Tony only for the safety his name—and money—would give her, her winery…and her unborn child. Never could she allow herself to reveal the desire she felt for her new husband. For their marriage was meant to be only about business. Neither dared speak one word about love.

Double Dare


Tawny Weber - 2007
    But they were so wrong....And Audra was in the mood to prove it. How? By takingtheir dare. The challenge? To seduce the very next manthrough the club door--regardless of who he was...What the classy chick at the bar saw in his suspect wasanybody's guess. But undercover cop Jesse Martinezwould make it his business to find out. Because no guy--unless he was dead from the neck down--would missthe chance to investigate the curvy brunette, too....

By the Light of the Moon


Dean Koontz - 2002
    Reviewers hail his boundless originality, his art, his unparalleled ability to create highly textured, riveting drama, at once viscerally familiar and utterly unique. Author of one #1 New York Times bestseller after another, Koontz is at the pinnacle of his powers, spinning mysteries and miracles, enthralling tales that speak directly to today’s readers, balm for the heart and fire for the mind. In this stunning new novel, he delivers a tour de force of dark suspense and brilliant revelation that has all the Koontz trademarks: adventure, chills, riddles, humor, heartbreak, an unforgettable cast of characters, and a climax that will leave you clamoring for more.Dylan O’Connor is a gifted young artist just trying to do the right thing in life. He’s on his way to an arts festival in Santa Fe when he stops to get a room for himself and his twenty-year-old autistic brother, Shep. But in a nightmarish instant, Dylan is attacked by a mysterious “doctor,” injected with a strange substance, and told that he is now a carrier of something that will either kill him...or transform his life in the most remarkable way. Then he is told that he must flee--before the doctor’s enemies hunt him down for the secret circulating through his body. No one can help him, the doctor says, not even the police.Stunned, disbelieving, Dylan is turned loose to run for his life...and straight into an adventure that will turn the next twenty-four hours into an odyssey of terror, mystery--and wondrous discovery. It is a journey that begins when Dylan and Shep’s path intersects with that of Jillian Jackson. Before that evening Jilly was a beautiful comedian whose biggest worry was whether she would ever find a decent man. Now she too is a carrier. And even as Dylan tries to convince her that they’ll be safer sticking together, cold-eyed men in a threatening pack of black Suburbans approach, only seconds before Jilly’s classic Coupe DeVille explodes into thin air. Now the three are on the run together, but with no idea whom they’re running from--or why. Meanwhile Shep has begun exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior. And whatever it is that’s coursing through their bodies seems to have plunged them into one waking nightmare after another. Seized by sinister premonitions, they find themselves inexplicably drawn to crime scenes--just minutes before the crimes take place. What this unfathomable power is, how they can use it to stop the evil erupting all around them, and why they have been chosen are only parts of a puzzle that reaches back into the tragic past and the dark secrets they all share: secrets of madness, pain, and untimely death. Perhaps the answer lies in the eerie, enigmatic messages that Shep, with precious time running out, begins to repeat, about an entity who does his work “by the light of the moon.”By the Light of the Moon is a novel of heart-stopping suspense and transcendent beauty, of how evil can destroy us and love can redeem us--a masterwork of the imagination in which the surprises come page after page and the spell of sublime storytelling triumphs throughout.From the Hardcover edition.

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow


Rita Leganski - 2013
    No one knows Bonaventure's silence is filled with resonance - a miraculous gift of rarified hearing that encompasses the Universe of Every Single Sound. Growing up in the big house on Christopher Street in Bayou Cymbaline, Bonaventure can hear flowers grow, a thousand shades of blue, and the miniature tempests that rage inside raindrops. He can also hear the gentle voice of his father, William Arrow, shot dead before Bonaventure was born by a mysterious stranger known only as the Wanderer.Bonaventure's remarkable gift of listening promises salvation to the souls who love him: his beautiful young mother, Dancy, haunted by the death of her husband; his Grand-mere Letice, plagued by grief and long-buried guilt she locks away in a chapel; and his father, William, whose roaming spirit must fix the wreckage of the past. With the help of Trinidad Prefontaine, a Creole housekeeper endowed with her own special gifts, Bonaventure will find the key to long-buried mysteries and soothe a chorus of family secrets clamoring to be healed.

Reamde


Neal Stephenson - 2011
    Smuggling backpack loads of high-grade marijuana across the border into Northern Idaho, he quickly amassed an enormous and illegal fortune. With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy game in which opposing factions battle for power and treasure in a vast cyber realm. Like many serious gamers, he began routinely purchasing virtual gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers—young professional players in Asia who accumulated virtual weapons and armor to sell to busy American and European buyers.For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Corporation 9592, with its own super successful online role-playing game, T’Rain. But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidently triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.In this edgy, 21st century tale, Neal Stephenson, one of the most ambitious and prophetic writers of our time, returns to the terrain of his cyberpunk masterpieces Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, leading readers through the looking glass and into the dark heart of imagination.

Pandora's Box


Natale Stenzel - 2008
    When a young woman on the brink of bankruptcy inherits a small cornerstone, the contents are sure to solve all of her problems - at least the ones the cunning hunk inside the stone doesn't create himself!

Demon


Tosca Lee - 2007
    The fallen angel chronicles a life of heavenly bliss and rebellion, human creation and salvation, and God's relentless pursuit of mankind.

Dark Dreamer


Jennifer Fulton - 2005
    Seeking inspiration and a fresh start, she abandons life in Manhattan for an old Victorian house in Maine. But Dark Harbor Cottage is a far cry from the tranquil writing environment she envisioned.