Family Life Thriller

The Grayson twins are moving to a new town. Again. Although it's a drag to be constantly mistaken for each other, in truth, during those first days at a new school, there's nothing better than having a twin brother there with you. But on day one of sixth grade, Ray stays home sick, and Jay is on his own. No big deal.

Drinking cost Helen her marriage and custody of her seven-year-old son, Ollie. Once an aspiring art photographer, she now makes ends meet by taking portraits of schoolchildren and working for a caterer. Recovering from her addiction, she spends lonely evenings checking out profiles on an online dating site. Weekend visits with her son are awkward. He's drifting away from her fast.

Six days ago, Joe Lynch was a happily married man, a devoted father, and a respected teacher living in a well-to-do London suburb. But that was before he spotted his wife’s car entering a hotel parking garage. Before he saw her in a heated argument with her best friend’s husband. Before Joe confronted the other man in an altercation where he left him for dead, bleeding and unconscious.

When Vivien Walker left her home in the Mississippi Delta, she swore never to go back, as generations of the women in her family had. But in the spring, nine years to the day since she'd left, that's exactly what happens - Vivien returns, fleeing from a broken marriage and her lost dreams for children. What she hopes to find is solace with "Bootsie", her dear grandmother who raised her, a Walker woman with a knack for making everything all right. But instead she finds that her grandmother has died and that her estranged mother is drifting further away from her memories.

It's been years since Zoe Fairchild has been to the small Devon village of her birth, but the wounds she suffered there still ache. When she learns that her old friend and grandmother's caretaker has gone missing, Zoe and her fifteen-year-old daughter return to England to help. Zoe dreads seeing her estranged mother, who left when Zoe was seven to travel the world. As the four generations of women reunite, the emotional pain of the past is awakened. And to complicate matters further, Zoe must also confront the ex-boyfriend she betrayed many years before.

With Chosen, debut novelist Chandra Hoffman has earned immediate comparisons to Jodi Picoult and Anna Quindlen. This riveting tale features a young caseworker embroiled in the aftermath of an extortion attempt between adoptive and birth parents.Suspenseful and adroitly colored with the many shades of the human condition, this is a novel listeners will not soon forget.

Tony has always looked out for his younger brother, Nick. So when he's called to a hospital bed where Nick is lying battered and bruised after a violent sexual assault, his protective instincts flare, and a white-hot rage begins to build. As a small-town New England lawyer, Tony's wife, Julia, has cases involving kids all the time. When Detective Rice gets assigned to this one, Julia feels they're in good hands. Especially because she senses that Rice, too, understands how things can quickly get complicated. Very complicated.

Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. And then, in one terrible moment, his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There’s just one person left in the world who understands him and what he still dares to hope for. But to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.

Unbeknownst to mortals, a power struggle is unfolding in a world of shadows and danger. After centuries of stability, the balance among the Faery Courts has altered, and Irial, ruler of the Dark Court, is battling to hold his rebellious and newly vulnerable fey together. If he fails, bloodshed and brutality will follow.

Joey Green has returned to Beaufort, South Carolina, with its palmettos and shrimp boats, to look after his ailing father, who is succumbing to dementia, while his overstressed mother takes a break. Marshall Green’s short-term memory has all but evaporated, but his oldest memories are more vivid than ever. His mind keeps slipping backward in time, retreating into growing up in Beaufort as a boy. At first, this seems like a blessing of sorts, but Joey grows increasingly anxious as his father’s hallucinatory arguments with figures from his youth begin to hint at deadly secrets.

In his three novellas, In Short Measures, Strong Conspirators, and Sally Forth, Michael Ruhlman delves deeply into the nuanced complexity of romantic and sexual love - and the inevitable evolution of the heart over the span of years and decades. Each novella asks questions about the nature of love in terms of loyalty and fidelity - what are one's obligations toward one's spouse, one's family, and one's heart?

James Culdee, a career US Navy noncom who has served his country with distinction for 20 years, is suddenly and unfairly forced into a disgraceful retirement. Devastated, Culdee retreats into alcoholism until he is rescued by his daughter, Miranda, a charter boat skipper whose sloop, the Seamark, has been stolen. When Miranda learns that the Seamark has been sighted in the dangerous and primitive Flyaway Islands of the Philippines, father and daughter sail off in pursuit, on a voyage that will carry them across the Pacific.

It is 1929. At home, economic depression and dust storms ravage America, and abroad the goose step of Nazism is intensifying. Widespread fear of the "other" has reached a fever pitch. Against this tumultuous backdrop, two families share the spotlight in this sweeping saga: the Himelbaums of Poland and the Browns of Iowa. All Harry Himelbaum wants is to live somewhere happy and to send for the wife and child he must deny having.

When her best friend Meg drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything - so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg's college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there's a lot that Meg never told her. About her old roommates, the sort of people Cody never would have met in her dead-end small town in Washington.

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the incident. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the 21st century.

Dr. Margo Dunlop is at a crossroads. Her adoptive mom just passed away, and Margo misses her so much she can't begin to empty the house - or, it seems, get her brother on the phone. Not to mention she's newly single, secretly pregnant, and worried about her best friend's dangerous relationship. In an effort to cheer herself up she goes in search of her birth mother. Instead she finds Nikki, her mother's sister. Aunt Nikki isn't what Margo expects, and she brings upsetting news: Margo's mother is dead.

Be careful what you wish for.... John and Naomi are grieving the death of their four-year-old son from a rare genetic disorder. They desperately want another child, but they realize the odds of their next child contracting the same disease are high. Then they hear about geneticist Dr Leo Dettore. He has methods that can spare them the heartache of ever losing another child to any disease. At his clinic is where their nightmare begins.

Strange things are happening behind the bright pink facade of Bayside’s premier laundromat, Joyful Suds; home to Joy Moody and her twin daughters. For much of their lives, Joy has been lying to Cassie and Andie. What started as a colorful tale to explain how the twins came to live with her grew over the years and was always something she meant to set straight. Joy really did think she had more time. Worse still, Joy is struggling to define the truth from the lies.

The marshals are looking for the perfect girl to join a mother, father, and son on the run from the nation's most notorious criminals. After all, the bad guys are searching for a family with one kid, not two, and adding a streetwise girl who knows a little something about hiding things may be just what the marshals need. Nicki swears she can keep the Trevor family safe, but to do so she'll have to dodge hit men, cyberbullies, and the specter of standardized testing, all while maintaining her marshal-mandated B-minus average.

One Friday night, Emma, Anna, and Mariah, three best friends, are out doing something they shouldn't. Then a cell phone rings. One girl's mother wants to know why they aren't where they said they'd be. They make up a story so they won't get into trouble at home. It seems like the easy way out. What happens next challenges their friendship, their community, their relationship with their families, and their sense of themselves. What happens next shows the harm one lie can do.