Reading House

At Ballantyne and Company, a genteel but failing auction house in the heart of London, Kick Keswick has been an expert on painting, furniture, and objets d'art for over 30 years. When Ballantyne falls victim to a corporate takeover by robber baron and womanizer Owen Brace, Kick is the next target for Brace's idea of romantic merger and acquisition.

Invited to stage a Mystery Night for the annual antebellum house tour of the Historical Preservation Society of Chastain, South Carolina, Annie Laurance instead finds herself the leading lady in a flesh-and blood drama. The play's the thing when the curtain falls on grande dame Corinne Webster. While jeweled fingers point, accusing Annie of murder, the perpetrator lurks among the cast and the murder weapon is one of the props. Now it will take all of her sleuthing skills to discover the real killer.

One of the most valuable spaces for an artist is the inner life—the sacred place where, outside of the constraints of time and space, meaning is extracted from raw experience and fashioned into art. In this timely new essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo discusses the work writers do as they sift through experience and work to cultivate rich interior lives. For authors, this often involves performing triage, a constant assessment of events that helps determine what’s useful for a story and potentially enduring.

Dorothy Martin's husband, a local police inspector, is out of town. On a trip to London for a doctor's appointment, Dorothy talks to a young man who, by the time the train reaches Victoria Station, is very dead. No one seems to think anything is amiss and the man who told her he was a doctor and would take care of everything seems to have done just that. The body has disappeared. Dorothy has a mystery on her hands and, with her husband in Zimbabwe, there's nothing to do but begin an investigation.

At Annie Laurance's Death on Demand bookstore on Broward's Rock Island, South Carolina, murder suddenly isn't confined to the well-stocked shelves. Author Elliot Morgan's abrupt demise during a weekly gathering of famous mystery writers called the Sunday Night Regulars is proof positive that a bloody sword is sometimes mightier than a brilliant pen. With Annie in the unenviable position of primary police suspect, the pretty young mystery maven and her wealthy paramour, Max Darling, embark on an investigation into a classic locked-room mystery with high stakes.

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St. Therese of Lisieux, largely unknown when she died in a Carmelite convent at the age of 24, became, through her posthumously published autobiography, one of the world's most influential religious figures. No less a luminary than Andre Gide modeled one of his characters after her in his novel Strait is the Gate.

Ex-reporter Henrietta "Henrie 0" O'Dwyer Collins joins a wedding party in glorious Bermuda, only to discover that death is an uninvited guest.

Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning.

A 30-year-old death haunts Alan Nesbitt, former Chief Constable in Cornwall. Back in 1968, a beautiful 20-year-old girl was found dead on the rocks, presumably having jumped from the cliffs. All that was known about her was her age, that she had had a child six months earlier, and that she weighed about ninety pounds. Nesbitt got nowhere with the investigation, and he regrets it.

Dorothy Martin and her husband, Alan Nesbitt, recently retired from Scotland Yard, get word that she has received a small inheritance. But she must travel from her home in England to her native Indiana to claim it. The deceased has also left a letter suggesting that he's been murdered. At first, that seems absurd. He was 96-years-old and died of pneumonia. Upon further investigation, however, the two sleuths find several suspects with the means, motives, and opportunities to abet Mother Nature.

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Best-selling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life. Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is a voracious reader. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a life-long companion, reading has been Conroy’s portal to the world, both to the farthest corners of the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South.

Paris, France: 1860’s. Hundreds of houses are being razed, whole neighborhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussman has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently alter the face of old Paris, moulding it into a “modern city.” The reforms will erase generations of history - but in the midst of the tumult, one woman will take a stand. Rose Bazelet is determined to fight against the destruction of her family home until the very end; as others flee, she stakes her claim in the basement of the old house on rue Childebert, ignoring the sounds of change....

In 1919, Texas rancher J. Frank Norfleet lost everything he had in a stock market swindle. He did what many other marks did - he went home, borrowed more money from his family, and returned for another round of swindling. Only after he lost that second fortune did he reclaim control of his story. Instead of crawling back home in shame, he vowed to hunt down the five men who had conned him. Through Norfleet's ingenious reverse-swindle, Amy Reading reveals the mechanics behind the scenes of the big con.

A sequel to the New York Times best-selling novel, Masquerade, The Coil picks up several years later. Liz Sansborough, former CIA agent and now an academic, has managed to put the pieces of her life back together. But Sansborough has a dark secret, she is the daughter of the one of the most notorious Cold War assassins, The Carnivore.

Daniel Barron, a psychiatrist who trained at the Yale School of Medicine, asks an important question: What’s holding psychiatry back? Reading Our Minds takes us to a psychiatric hospital, where Barron evaluates a young woman with psychosis, and shows how his exam is limited by his own ability to ask questions and observe, and by his patient’s ability to sense, interpret, and report her experience. Barron shows why psychiatry must move beyond conversation - and how sensors, measurements, and algorithms might progress psychiatric practice.

Chase Prescott, media magnate, is nearly killed by a box of cyanide candy. Fearing for his life, he calls his former lover, retired reporter Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins. His request is simple: He'll assemble all the suspects if she will kindly point out the would-be murderer. On Chase's private island off the South Carolina coast, Henrie O meets the players in this deadly drama: Prescott's unstable young wife, his sullen stepson, and his toady of a secretary.

Normally, Annie Laurence Darling would be eagerly awaiting her trip to this year's Dixie Book Festival. But this year Annie has agreed to be the author liaison to five authors honored with the Dixie Book Festival Medallions, and she fears she is going to have her hands full. What Annie doesn't count on is the untimely death of ambitious Mint Julep Press publisher Kenneth Hazlitt.

Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, better known as "Henrie O", has experienced much sadness and loss in her life - yet nothing more tragic than the sudden death six years ago of her husband, Richard, on Kauai. Then, on a brisk March morning, a package arrives by courier that shatters her fragile peace of mind - a chilling message that claims Richard's fatal fall from a towering island cliff was no accident. It was murder. It is news that enrages the normally self-contained Henrie O, and creates a summons she cannot ignore.