From the moment Darla asks to know more about her mysterious aunt, she is offered nothing but half-truths, distortions, and evasions. As Darla grows into her teen years, her life is oddly yet profoundly affected by this woman she has never known. She can't help but notice that Rebecca seems to exist only in dark corners of conversations and that no one ever wants to talk about her - with Darla. Squalor, New Mexico is a coming-of-age story shrouded in family mystery. As the plot takes twists and turns, secrets are revealed not only to Darla but to the "secret keepers" as well. Darla learns that families are only as strong as the truths they hold and as weak as the secrets they keep.

    Driven by the soulful voices of forty-two-year-old Ezekiel Cooper and his mother, Lillian, The Lost Saints of Tennessee journeys from the 1940s to 1980s as it follows Zeke’s evolution from anointed son, to honorable sibling, to unhinged middle-aged man.After Zeke loses his twin brother in a mysterious drowning and his wife to divorce, only ghosts remain in his hometown of Clayton, Tennessee. Zeke makes the decision to leave town in a final attempt to escape his pain, throwing his two treasured possessions—a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and his dead brother’s ancient dog—into his truck, and heads east. He leaves behind two young daughters and his estranged mother, who reveals her own conflicting view of the Cooper family story in a vulnerable but spirited voice stricken by guilt over old sins and clinging to the hope that her family isn’t beyond repair.When Zeke finds refuge with cousins in Virginia horse country, divine acts in the form of severe weather, illness, and a new romance collide, leading Zeke to a crossroads where he must decide the fate of his family.

    Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.Embarking on a seven-year quest for the truth, Rommelmann traced the roots of Amanda’s fury and desperation through thousands of pages of records, withheld documents, meetings with lawyers and convicts, and interviews with friends and family who felt shocked, confused, and emotionally swindled by a woman whose entire life was now defined by an unspeakable crime. At the heart of that crime: a tempestuous marriage, a family on the fast track to self-destruction, and a myriad of secrets and lies as dark and turbulent as the Willamette River. “In To the Bridge, Nancy Rommelmann takes what many consider the most unforgivable of crimes—a mother set on murdering her own children—and delivers something thoughtful and provocative: a deeply reported, sensitively told, all-too-relevant tragedy of addiction and codependency, toxic masculinity, and capricious justice. You won’t be able to look away—nor should any of us.” —Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery “How do you understand the not understandable and forgive the unforgivable? So asks one of the characters in this clear-eyed investigation into something we all turn away from. To the Bridge is a tour de force of both journalism and compassion, in the lineage of such masterpieces as In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. Word by word, sentence by sentence, Rommelmann’s writing is that good. And so is her heart.” —Nick Flynn, PEN/Martha Albrand Award–winning author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

    Her father, Ngoc, is desperate and with help from a young Australian volunteer overcomes his years of reluctance and writes a letter to his father, a retired American army officer. Ngoc’s letter shocks Peter Trutch. Torn between his sense of honor toward this unknown son and his contentedly pleasant life in Seattle with his devoted wife Catherine, he hurls himself into his past and back to a country and memories that he had left behind forty years earlier. Lien is sold to a brothel in Cambodia and, in his frantic search for her, Trutch confronts not only his past but a seedy, corrupt world where bad cops, pimps and the destitute, clash with courageous international prevention workers and a few honest officials. Along with Trutch, the reader will be outraged at the worldwide plague of sex trafficking.

    They are planning a wedding and have bought a new home. The last thing the two of them need right now is a new cat.But their recently purchased house seems to come complete with a stray orange feline--a cat with a vibrant personality and a talent for mousing. So Shawn soon finds himself with a regular companion. Little does he realize that this cat will shortly become more important to him than he can possibly imagine.As Shawn's personal life begins to shift in ways he never saw coming, Kitty remains a constant source of stability and comfort. Shawn gave Kitty a home, and now Kitty gives Shawn the love he needs to heal.A touching and inspiring story of heartfelt companionship, The Kitty offers an uplifting perspective on what it means to find true friendship in this world. Anyone who has ever shared a meaningful connection with a pet will fall head over heels in love with Kitty and Shawn.As Shawn discovers, sometimes we don't even realize we need to be rescued--until we are.

    While she and her sister Cassie are cleaning out their childhood home on the coast of Maine, they stir up painful memories and resentments over family possessions. A legendary collection of historically significant letters is missing from the artifacts they unearth, supporting a decades-old suspicion that their aunt or estranged cousin has stolen them.Threatened by the loss of the old house and its extraordinary seaside landscape, Gina finds her heart swinging wildly between Maine and California, creating conflict with her husband, Paul. To learn what the Maine house means to her, she approaches it objectively, as an architect, bringing it to life on paper. Her family’s story unfolds room by room: the darkroom from which her gentle but passive father, Ron, ran his photography business, the kitchen where her volatile mother, Eleanor, toiled under the weight of dashed dreams. As children, Gina and Cassie warily navigated rooms permeated with toxic secrets hobbling Eleanor and Ron’s marriage.As Gina deconstructs the house, startling truths are revealed, changing family history and allowing Gina and Cassie to begin healing family wounds. Gina has the chance to search the recesses of her heart, too, discovering within her a vitalizing compassion and an awakened understanding of what makes a house a home.Catherine Armsden's fascination with architecture was ignited during her childhood growing up among the weather-beaten houses of coastal Maine. Educated in New England, she moved to San Francisco in 1983 with her husband, Lewis Butler, where they co-founded Butler Armsden Architects.Dream House is her debut novel.

    The issue hits hardest for English ex-pat guitarist JP Kinkaid; with his history of heroin addiction and deportation, his estranged wife, and his long-term relationship with a girl he met when she was a teenager, JP has the most to lose. Dealing with his multiple sclerosis doesn’t make things any easier.When he sits down with Dillon, JP’s main concern is to preserve both his own privacy and that of Bree Godwin, his fiercely protective longtime girlfriend. But it’s obvious from the first question that Dillon is digging deep. And he’s not planning to stop until he hits rock bottom.Dillon’s looking for trouble, the kind of trouble that garners publicity and sells books. What he finds is the kind of trouble someone will go to any length to cover up, and that includes murder.Opening night at Madison Square Garden encores with a corpse in JP’s dressing room, leaving Blacklight in the middle of a media frenzy---and Bree as homicide lieutenant Patrick Ormand’s prime suspect.Rock & Roll Never Forgets, the first JP Kinkaid mystery, offers an all-access pass to how musicians work, live, and love.

    It took a desperate call from his mother to force him home to see his ailing father. As soon as he returned, Jess found himself embroiled in two suspicious deaths, emotional turmoil with his family, and a supernatural secret that involved them all—winding up in an unmarked grave in the middle of the Coachella Desert. In a tale that spreads from the California Desert to the jungles of Mexico and set in a town that time has practically forgotten, Descending Son is rooted in the sins of Jess’s past and a future that threatens his life. Sure, Jess can go home again, but there’s a heavy price to pay.

    She finds more comfort playing make-believe in the woods near her house in Roma, Kentucky, than with her classmates, who find her strange and awkward. When she happens upon a dead body hidden in the woods one day, she decides not to tell anyone about her discovery—a choice that begins to haunt her.Susanna Mitchell has always been a good girl, the dutiful daughter and wife. While her older sister Ronnie trolled bars for men and often drove home at sunrise, Susanna kept a neat house, a respectable job, a young daughter. But when Ronnie goes missing, and Susanna realizes that she’s the only person in Roma who truly cares about her sister’s fate, she starts to question her quiet life and its value.The Next Time You See Me is the story of how one woman’s disappearance exposes the ambitions, prejudices, and anxieties of a small southern town and its residents, who are all connected, sometimes in unexpected ways. Emily; Susannah; Tony, a failed baseball star-turned-detective, aspiring to be the county’s first black sheriff; and Wyatt, a fifty-five-year-old factory worker tormented by a past he can’t change and by a love he doesn’t think he deserves. Their stories converge in a violent climax that reveals not just the mystery of what happened to Ronnie but all of their secret selves.

    Jilted by her fiance, Geneva watches her seemingly idyllic life suddenly fall apart. Bereft and desolate, she packs up her nine cats and leaves her home in Washington, DC to return to her native hills of West Virginia where she plans rest and heal from her heartbreak. When Geneva's ambition, and machinations run up against rugged mountain ways, she finds herself flung from one perilous adventure, romance, crazy circumstance, and heartbreak to another. After facing illness, disaster in the wilderness and an encounter with an old mountain man who teaches her that her soul needs more than men, courtship, and adventure, Geneva finally finds what she's been missing. Ultimately, Geneva realizes she must face herself before she is free to truly love and be loved.

    When the rain finally comes, it’s a miracle. For a moment, the scrubland flourishes and the remote swimming hole fills. Returning home from an afternoon swim, fourteen-year-old Tommy and sixteen-year-old Billy McBride discover a scene of heartbreaking carnage: their dogs dead in the yard, their hardworking father and mother shot to death, and their precocious younger sister unconscious and severely bleeding from a wound to her gut. The boys believe the killer is their former Aboriginal stockman, and, desperate to save Mary, they rush her to John Sullivan, the wealthiest landowner in the region and their father’s former employer, who promises to take care of them.Eager for retribution, the distraught brothers fall sway to Sullivan, who persuades them to join his posse led by the Queensland Native Police, an infamous arm of British colonial power whose sole purpose is the “dispersal” of indigenous Australians to “protect” settler rights. The group is led by the intimidating inspector Edmund Noone, a dangerous and pragmatic officer whose intellect and ruthlessness both fascinates and unnerves the watchful Tommy. Riding for days across the barren outback, the group is determined to find the perpetrators they insist are guilty, for reasons neither of the brothers truly understands. It is a harsh and horrifying journey that will have a devastating impact on Tommy, tormenting him for the rest of his life—and hold enduring consequences for a young country struggling to come into its own.Set in a period of Australian and British history as raw and relevant as that of the wild frontier of nineteenth-century America, Only Killers and Thieves is an unforgettable story of family, guilt, empire, race, manhood, and faith that combines the insightfulness of Philipp Meyer’s The Son with the atmospheric beauty of Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist and the raw storytelling power of Ian McGuire’s The North Water.

    The only person Max can trust is his new-found love, beautiful Karis Deen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Except Karis herself holds a dangerous secret that could not only destroy Max, but could change the entire balance of world power.

    "We're all just one bad decision away from disaster." At fourteen, Robin Fisher is doing her best to ignore her insurance salesman father’s credo, cataloging his tales of calamity under Bad Things that Happen to Other People. But life in 1970s Golden, California, doesn’t prove so golden after her father deserts the family, setting in motion a series of events that results in Robin accidentally setting fire to an abandoned party house. As Robin struggles to keep an eye on her fixation with Bic lighters and her newly independent mother’s own growing pains, she is drawn into the orbit of Carol “Jesus Freak” Closter, a vulnerable yet charismatic classmate whose friendship will challenge Robin in ways she could never have imagined. When Carol finally crosses a line, it’s Robin who must make a dangerous decision of her own. Sharply comic and deeply moving, Please Proceed to the Nearest Exit illuminates those unforgettable moments in life when everything changes, whether we want it to or not.

    A scintillating novel of betrayal and conspiracy. Picasso Lane is twelve years old when her father, Oliver, is murdered at their summer beach house. Her mother, Diana, is the primary suspect—until the police discover his second wife, and then his third. The women say they have never met—but Picasso knows otherwise. Picasso remembers the morning beautiful Jewels showed up at their house, carrying the same purse as her mother, and a family portrait featuring her father with two strange boys. Picasso remembers lifting the phone, listening to late night calls with Bert, a woman heavily pregnant with Oliver's fourth child. As the police circle and a detective named Kyle Kennedy becomes a regular fixture in their home, Picasso tries to make sense of her father's death, the depth of his deceit, and the secrets that bind these three women. Cunningly paced and plotted, I Love You More is a riveting novel of misplaced loyalty, jealousy, and revenge.

    When another boy vanishes, parents begin to worry about their children. When bodies turn up in the local river, cut to pieces, stuffed inside industrial-strength black trash bags, the town begins to shut down.The day that Brandon Grey is last seen walking home from school by teachers, two young boys are starting a street hockey game. A man stops at the end of their block, takes a picture of them, and drives off. All they catch is the model and color of the car he’s driving.Jake and Colin, fueled by their ambition to form a detective club, decide to go searching for the car that haunts them. They soon take it upon themselves to find Brandon Grey. As tensions in town rise, and so does the body count, they find themselves deep in a mystery they never bargained for, closer to the serial killer than they could have ever imagined.