Within minutes, she and her family hastily pack up their belongings and abandon their home. Where did the family go and why? Det. Roberta Hobbs has been assigned to uncover the family's whereabouts. Hobbs is a confident, intelligent police veteran. However, each passing day brings her closer to her unresolved past. When Hobbs digs deeper into the mystery, all leads point to her own longtime ex-boyfriend - a former drug dealer turned philanthropist named Steven Vance -- as the primary suspect. This riveting dual-timeline suspense novel takes us back to 2004 -- the year Greta Carpenter first realizes something is wrong with her young son, John. Over the course of his childhood, John's learning disabilities become apparent. Greta's unfaltering advocacy on his behalf puts her at odds with the school system and strains her relationship with her husband Griffin. Eventually Greta and Griffin's marriage falls apart, and during the divorce trial, Greta reveals that she was a teenage runaway, and a local entrepreneur named Steven Vance rescued her from the streets. Vance is certainly a man of many shades - a local celebrity for his philanthropy, a cunning CEO who sits atop a questionable mini-empire, a benevolent former father figure to Greta and a lying, evasive former companion to Hobbs. It seems that only Vance has the power to make people disappear in this small town and he emerges as the most obvious suspect...but Hobbs remains uncertain of his role. While her colleagues question whether she can truly be impartial, Hobbs realizes she has a reason to suspect them as well. Nothing is obvious in this thrilling mystery...except that Hobbs must race to solve the mystery before it's too late.

    And when a professor of archaeology finds clues to the location of a Pharaoh's lost tomb in ancient hieroglyphs, he hatches a plan to find the burial site - and plunder it. But can a five-man team of smugglers and thieves uncover what the centuries have hidden? And even if they find it, can they escape with it...and with their lives?

    At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

    Controlled and calculating, his world begins to splinter when he learns - in the middle of a corporate meeting - that his father has committed suicide. Returning home to the Gulf Coast, Jack struggles with a host of unresolved feelings as he buries the man he hated most. Interwoven throughout the novel, chapters set in the 1970s depict Jack as a boy, chronicling his relationships with a storm-tossed mother and a menacing father, living in the shadows of the petrochemical plants scattered along the Gulf Coast. The novel highlights the differences between life in California at the end of the Dot-Com era and life in blue collar Texas during the 1970s, contrasting Jack as a man and as a child, and showing how the people who bring us into the world shape us forever.

    As the wait for his father stretches unforgivably into months, a local girl, whose own mother died a brutal death, captures his heart and imagination, reminding Wes that hope always floats to the surface.When buried truths come to light in the spring thaw, wounds are exposed and violence erupts, forcing Wes to embark on a search for his missing father, the truth about his mother, and a future he must claim for himself—a quest that begins back at that frozen lake.A powerful, page-turning coming-of-age story, Winter Loon captures the resilience of a boy determined to become a worthy man by confronting family demons, clawing his way out of the darkness, and forging a life from the shambles of a broken past.

    Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade that will rip apart southern France, a young woman named Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father. The book, he says, contains the secret of the true Grail, and the ring, inscribed with a labyrinth, will identify a guardian of the Grail. Now, as crusading armies gather outside the city walls of Carcassonne, it will take a tremendous sacrifice to keep the secret of the labyrinth safe.

    There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

    They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo--until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. On the way, Nuri is sustained by the knowledge that waiting for them is Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has started an apiary and is teaching fellow refugees in Yorkshire to keep bees.As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss, but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls. Above all, they must journey to find each other again.Moving, powerful, compassionate, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. It is the kind of book that reminds us of the power of storytelling.

    But lately, someone has been beating him to the punch and eliminating these vile criminals before he can apprehend them. John is learning that there is a thin line between innocent or guilty, good or evil, alive or dead. By definition, a thin line is a very narrow division between two alternatives. Some being exact opposites, while others are separated by the narrowest of threads. This novel follows this definition to the letter. In life, many situations aren't just black or white. There is usually a modicum of grey to fill in the space. Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is good? Who is evil? Perhaps everyone at one time or another lies somewhere in the middle.... A Thin Line is a tale that will immediately draw you in and keep you guessing. A suspenseful psychological thriller with twists and turns that will toy with your mind and emotions, driven by a chilling narrative that builds the tension right up until its explosive conclusion.

    John the Baptist's bones inscribed in ancient Greek. A dark secret carried from the foot of the crucifixion. Can science solve the world's greatest mystery?

    Her book practically writes itself. She marries her gorgeous agent. Her name is on all of the best seller lists. Billionaire author Jay McCallister takes an interest in her meteoric rise to fame and invites her into his world of alien-believing celebrities. Her life changes forever when he tells her that they were both created inside of a laboratory. These authors are embedding an alien genetic code within the pages of their novels that originated from Nazi Germany because... The time has come. They are here.

    Not out here. We never have. In Iain Reid’s second haunting, philosophical puzzle of a novel, set in the near-future, Junior and Henrietta live a comfortable, solitary life on their farm, far from the city lights, but in close quarters with each other. One day, a stranger from the city arrives with alarming news: Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm...very far away. The most unusual part? Arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Henrietta won't have a chance to miss him, because she won't be left alone—not even for a moment. Henrietta will have company. Familiar company. Told in Reid’s sharp and evocative style, Foe examines the nature of domestic relationships, self-determination, and what it means to be (or not to be) a person. An eerily entrancing page-turner, it churns with unease and suspense from the first words to its shocking finale.

    A young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, has traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, hoping that life abroad will salve the wounds left by the loss of her beloved brother. Soon after arriving in this elegant East European city, however, she helps an elderly couple into a taxi and realizes too late that she has accidentally kept one of their bags. Inside she finds an ornately carved wooden box engraved with a name: Stoyan Lazarov. Raising the hinged lid, she discovers that she is holding an urn filled with human ashes. As Alexandra sets out to locate the family and return this precious item, she will first have to uncover the secrets of a talented musician who was shattered by oppression and she will find out all too quickly that this knowledge is fraught with its own danger. Kostova's new novel is a tale of immense scope that delves into the horrors of a century and traverses the culture and landscape of this mysterious country. Suspenseful and beautifully written, it explores the power of stories, the pull of the past, and the hope and meaning that can sometimes be found in the aftermath of loss.

    The son of infamous London criminal Mathew “Tommy Gun” Spork, he has turned his back on his family’s mobster history and aims to live a quiet life. That orderly existence is suddenly upended when Joe activates a particularly unusual clockwork mechanism. His client, Edie Banister, is more than the kindly old lady she appears to be—she’s a retired international secret agent. And the device? It’s a 1950s doomsday machine. Having triggered it, Joe now faces the wrath of both the British government and a diabolical South Asian dictator who is also Edie’s old arch-nemesis. On the upside, Joe’s got a girl: a bold receptionist named Polly whose smarts, savvy and sex appeal may be just what he needs. With Joe’s once-quiet world suddenly overrun by mad monks, psychopathic serial killers, scientific geniuses and threats to the future of conscious life in the universe, he realizes that the only way to survive is to muster the courage to fight, help Edie complete a mission she abandoned years ago and pick up his father’s old gun...

    Unfortunately, their newfound shot at happiness is not without collateral damage.There’s Jessica’s ex-husband. He pretends for all the world that he’s resilient and strong. If only for the sake of their teenage son, profoundly vulnerable in his own way. James’s ex has taken a different road. Bitter, vengeful, and threatening, she wants only the worst for the happy couple. And then there’s the couple themselves: Are they truly as in love as they seem?When James enters into an extraordinarily profitable, if shady, transaction with a beautiful art dealer, Jessica and James’s seemingly perfect marriage takes a dark and tragic turn.Amid suspicions, tested loyalties, revenge, and guilt, no one escapes unscathed from sins committed in the name of love.