Family Mystery

After a late night of partying, NYU student Matt Pine returns to his dorm room to devastating news: nearly his entire family - his mom, his dad, his little brother and sister - have been found dead from an apparent gas leak while vacationing in Mexico. The local police claim it was an accident, but the FBI and State Department seem far less certain - and they won’t tell Matt why.

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides each in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter, she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. Twelve years after her disappearance, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window.

They only meant to right the wrongs. It was about getting even. Burn for burn. But the fire they lit kept raging. Reeve ended up hurt, then Rennie ended up dead. Everything will turn to ash if they don’t stop what they started. But now that Mary knows the truth about what happened to her, will she want to? Secrets drew Lillia, Kat, and Mary together. The truth might tear them apart.

Cassel always thought he was an ordinary guy, until he realized his memories were being manipulated by his brothers. Now he knows the truth - he’s the most powerful curse worker around. A touch of his hand can transform anything - or anyone - into something else. That was how Lila, the girl he loved, became a white cat. Cassel was tricked into thinking he killed her, when actually he tried to save her. Now that she’s human again, he should be overjoyed. Trouble is, Lila’s been cursed to love him. And if Lila’s love is as phony as Cassel’s made-up memories, then he can’t believe anything she says or does.

USA Today best-selling and award-winning author Barbara Freethy writes wonderfully entertaining contemporary novels. Summer Secrets is the compelling story of three sisters and the burden of the terrible secret they share.

Kacey is the new girl in Broken Falls. When she moved in with her father, she stepped into a brand-new life. A life with a stepbrother, a stepmother, and, strangest of all, an adoring younger half sister. Kacey's new life is eerily charming compared with the wild highs and lows of the old one she lived with her volatile mother. And everyone is so nice in Broken Falls - she's even been welcomed into a tight new circle of friends. Bailey and Jade invite her to do everything with them.

Some kids inherit a family business; Jo Ward inherited a badge. Once voted Most Likely to End Up in Jail, the town wild child has become sheriff - hell-bent on uncovering the truth about her father’s mysterious death. Life is quiet in rustic River Bend, but Jo longs for something beyond her small hometown and the painful memories it holds. All that keeps her sane is the support of her best friends, Melanie and Zoe.

Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book that began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses.

Grace Bradshaw knows the exact minute she will die. On death row for murdering her infant son, her last breath will be taken on February 15 at 12:01 a.m. Eleven years, five months, and 27 days separate her from the last time she heard her precious daughter's voice and the final moment she'd heard anyone call her mom. Out of appeals, she can focus on only one thing - reconnecting with her daughter and making sure she knows the truth.

Already widowed by the age of 40, Ilka Nichols Jensen, a school portrait photographer, leads a modest, regimented, and uneventful life in Copenhagen. Until unexpected news rocks her quiet existence: Her father - who walked out suddenly and inexplicably on the family more than three decades ago - has died. And he's left her something in his will: his funeral home. In Racine, Wisconsin. Clinging to this last shred of communication from the father she hasn't heard from since childhood, Ilka makes an uncharacteristically rash decision and jumps on a plane to Wisconsin.

"When I was alive, my family seemed picture-perfect. My adoptive parents adored me, and my little sister, Laurel, copied my every move. But now that my long-lost twin, Emma, has taken my place to solve my murder, we're both learning just how flawed my family really is. Laurel is shooting Emma nasty looks and sneaking around with my ex-boyfriend. And it turns out my parents are keeping a huge secret - could it be the reason I'm dead?"

Iris Marshall never wanted to be anything more than what she is—an official for the European League of (American) Football. So, why had she said yes to being a courier for the CIA? She’s not sure, especially when it lands her in an international thriller that has her on the run from a killer. And worse, the person she’s on the run with? Arrogant, bossy, playboy Hudson Bly, a football player and the last person on Earth she wants to go into hiding with.

Driven by a compulsion that challenges his self-control, the man calling himself Charles Milton prowls the rodeo circuit, hunting young women. He chooses those he believes are the most vulnerable, wandering alone and distracted, before he strikes. For years, he has been meticulous in his methods, abducting, murdering, and disposing his victims while leaving no evidence of his crimes—or their identities—behind. Indigenous women have become his target of choice, knowing law enforcement’s history of ignoring their disappearances.

The daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up thinking of herself as a "futureface" - an avatar of a mixed-race future when all races would merge into a brown singularity. But when one family mystery leads to another, Wagner's postracial ideals fray as she becomes obsessed with the specifics of her own family's racial and ethnic history. Drawn into the wild world of ancestry, she embarks upon a quest around the world - and into her own DNA - to answer the ultimate questions of who she really is and where she belongs.

Chess has always been the protector over his younger siblings, Emma loves math, and Finn does what Finn does best - acting silly and being adored. They’ve been a happy family, just the three of them and their mom. But everything changes when reports of three kidnapped children reach the Greystone kids, and they’re shocked by the startling similarities between themselves and these complete strangers. The other kids share their same first and middle names. They’re the same ages. They even have identical birthdays. Who, exactly, are these strangers?

Tilly Pages is a bookwanderer; she can travel inside books and even talk to the characters she meets there. But Tilly’s powers are put to the test when fairy tales start leaking book magic and causing havoc. On a wintry visit to Paris, Tilly and her best friend Oskar bravely bookwander into the land of fairy tales to find that characters are getting lost, stories are all mixed up, and mysterious plot holes are opening without warning. Can Tilly work out who, or what, is behind the chaos so everyone gets their happily ever after?

Beloved author Alexander McCall Smith’s seventh Isabel Dalhousie tale finds the ethical philosopher doing background checks on several candidates for the same job. In the process, Isabel learns quite a bit about herself, as well.

The remote town of Oriska, New York, hasn't been home for Sydney Lucerno for 13 years. She's escaped the creeping addictions and long-simmering anger that are as much a part of the landscape as the bitter cold. But when she gets the call that her mother is dying, every secret and fear she left behind is waiting to welcome her back.

Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.