Historic Family Mystery

Tanzania, 1964. When Katie Barstow, A-list actress, and her new husband, David Hill, decide to bring their Hollywood friends to the Serengeti for their honeymoon, they envision giraffes gently eating leaves from the tall acacia trees, great swarms of wildebeests crossing the Mara River, and herds of zebras storming the sandy plains. Their glamorous guests—including Katie’s best friend, Carmen Tedesco, and Terrance Dutton, the celebrated Black actor who stars alongside Katie in the highly controversial film Tender Madness—will spend their days taking photos.

Meet Hickey, an American school teacher in his late 30s, an American school teacher who burns his bridges with the school board and goes to Africa as an aid worker. Working for an agency in Nairobi, one of his jobs is to drive food and medical supplies to Southern Sudan to an aid station run by Ruth, a middle-aged woman, who acts as nurse, doctor, hospice worker, feeder of starving children, and witness. Ruth is gruff but efficient, and Hickey, who is usually drawn to youth and beauty, is struck by her devotion. Returning to Nairobi, he can’t forget what he has seen.

At only seventeen years old, Ian Kabra is head of the Cahills, the most powerful family in the world. He has presidents on speed dial, generals at his beck and call. Ian knows he's an ideal leader and the only man for the job. There's just one small problem: He's already messed up big time. A Cahill from the past calling himself the Outcast has risen to challenge Ian with an impossible test. The Outcast has re-created four of history's greatest disasters and dared Ian to stop him.

Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners - and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped.

West Yorkshire, 1904. When recently graduated Ruby May takes a nanny position looking after the children of Charles and Lilian England, a wealthy couple from a powerful dynasty of mill owners, she hopes it will be the fresh start she needs. But as she adapts to life at the isolated Hardcastle House, it becomes clear something is not quite right about the beautiful, mysterious Mrs. England.

Glasgow, 1932. When the son-in-law of one of the city’s wealthiest shipbuilders is found floating in the River Clyde with his throat cut, it falls to Inspector Jimmy Dreghorn to lead the murder case—despite sharing a troubled history with the victim’s widow, Isla Lockhart. From the flying fists and flashing blades of Glasgow’s gangland underworld, to the backstabbing upper echelons of government and big business, Dreghorn and his partner ‘Bonnie’ Archie McDaid will have to dig deep into Glasgow society to find out who wanted the man dead and why.

Clara Falkenberg, once Germany's most eligible and lauded heiress, earned the nickname "the Iron Fräulein" during World War II for her role operating her family's ironworks empire. It’s been nearly two years since the war ended, and she’s left with nothing but a false identification card and a series of burning questions about her family's past. With nowhere else to run to, she decides to return home and take refuge with her dear friend, Elisa.

Kathryn Miller Haines’ debut Iris Anderson mystery received considerable buzz for its stellar 15-year-old heroine and engrossing 1940s period details. With her father back from the war, Iris is eager to help him with his private eye business—especially since his mobility is limited thanks to a missing leg. Now with a case involving a boy she knows from school to investigate, Iris leaps into action and soon finds herself in the middle of a harrowing adventure.

After Peter Körber is stabbed to death in Berlin, his son, Andreas, leaves Denmark, where he was raised by his mother and stepfather, and travels to that once-divided city to uncover the brutal truth. In his search to know this complete stranger, Andreas hopes to come to grips with his own identity crisis, stalled academic career, and failed relationship. But what kind of man was his father? A complicated portrait begins to emerge concerning Peter's role in the German Democratic Republic before reunification.

Dalton, North Dakota. It’s September 1951: years since George and Margaret Blackledge lost their son James when he was thrown from a horse; months since his widow Lorna took off with their only grandson and married Donnie Weboy. Margaret is steadfast, resolved to find and retrieve her grandson Jimmy - the one person in this world keeping James’s memory alive - while George, a retired sheriff, is none too eager to stir up trouble. Unable to sway his wife from her mission, George takes to the road with Margaret by his side, traveling through the Dakota badlands to Gladstone, Montana.

A professor shows a colleague a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer - but why has he hidden this important work for so long? The reasons unfold in a series of stories that trace ownership of the painting back to World War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work's inspiration.

When six-year-old Alice Hilton disappears on New Year's Eve 1979 from Yew Tree Manor, suspicion immediately falls on local boy Bobby James. Bobby claims he knows nothing about it, but his family has a grievance against Alice's landowner father. Tragically the child is never found. Decades later, Willow James, an architect working on a development at Yew Tree Manor, discovers that the land surrounding the house is holding a secret.

The thrilling conclusion to 39 Clues, Part VI: Doublecross. A Cahill family member from the past is bent on revenge! Confidential until July 2016!

Andrew Gross delivers a stirring story of a Jewish family brought together in the dawn of the women's garment business and torn apart by the birth of organized crime in New York City in the 1930s. Morris, Sol, and Harry Rabishevsky grew up poor and rough in a tiny flat on the Lower East Side, until the death of their father thrust them into having to fend for themselves. Morris, the youngest, dropped out of school at 12 and apprenticed himself to a garment cutter in a clothing factory; Sol headed to accounting school; but Harry, scarred by a family tragedy, fell in with a gang of thugs as a teenager.

After the funeral of her mother, Sally, Alice Kent is approached by a man named Angus Tweedy. He claims to be her father and tells her that he served time in prison for marrying Sally bigamously. What does he hope to gain telling her this now, 30 years on? How can her adored dad Ralph not be her true father? And why did her mother betray her so badly? She had accepted Sally's many faults and her reluctance to never speak of the past. But faced with this staggering deception, Alice knows she must uncover the whole truth about her mother. Whatever the cost.

Calling all Cahills! Announcing a 39 Clues Superspecial adventure - the gang is back, and called to investigate one of their own: Sinead Starling.

Eleanor Murray will always remember her childhood on Edisto Island, where her late father, a local shrimper, shared her passion for music. Now her memories of him are all that tempers the guilt she feels over the accident that put her sister in a wheelchair and the feelings she harbors for her sister's husband. To help support her sister, Eleanor works at a Charleston investment firm during the day, but she escapes into her music, playing piano at a neighborhood bar. Until the night her enigmatic boss walks in and offers her a part-time job caring for his elderly aunt, Helena, back on Edisto.

The Ghost Ship floats silently on the water, all guns silenced, all voices quiet. In the hold, the bodies of men who are dead or dying, those who hid. The waters off the Barbary Coast are home to more privateers than any other, and now, this ship’s hull is splintered, the sails tattered and, burnt, its gold coins and bullion seized as the spoils of war. On board is the Huguenot leader of the Siege of St Rochelle, forced to flee the city in 1628, and the legendary and feared commander of the ship, kidnapped as a child from the island of Tenerife.

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 the Valiant weighs anchor, the Irish that are crammed into her hold break into song, and with the hymn, say good-bye to the island of their birth. Famine, nationalism, and sectarian strife have crippled the Emerald Isle, and those who can afford it crowd aboard leaky ships, risking death for the possibility of a better life.