new fiction

To a casual observer, Londoner Alex Hill is every inch the calm and collected executive of a global sportswear company. In reality, she's constantly frantic, with barely enough time to take out the trash. When her demanding mother, a 1960s style icon, has a bad fall and has to move in with her indefinitely, Alex realizes she needs someone more committed than a maid-what she needs is a wife. An ad in the local paper soon produces a young woman who seems both enthusiastic and capable. But something odd is definitely happening behind the scenes of Alex's new, perfectly ordered existence. Someone distinctly male is charming her mother as well as doing all the ironing. He's no one Alex would ordinarily ever notice, never mind date. But now she can't help wondering if her new "wife" could perhaps have husband potential...

In 1863, the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion—and eastern thoughts are already turning to different wars and enemies.
Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children—wary but undeterred by sobering tales of atrocities inflicted upon those who trespass against the Comanche and the Kiowa. Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family hopes to build on the dreams that carried them from the Confederate South to this new land of possibility—dreams that are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to face the unthinkable—his friends and neighbors slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his beloved Mary severely damaged and enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them—the heartsick freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again.
Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act of an inscrutable God, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond's goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that threaten to turn a man of peace, faith, and reason onto a course of terrible retribution.
A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post–Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.

Two teenage boys are missing and their disappearance may be linked to a shady fertility clinic Peter Kelly and Lily Madison visited in college as penniless students. When Pete and Lily learn that one of the missing boys looks exactly like Pete, they set out to discover what really went on at the clinic all those years ago.

In a case that will push their relationship to the breaking point, Mary Russell must help reverse the greatest failure of her legendary husband’s storied past—a painful and personal defeat that still has the power to sting…this time fatally.
For Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, returning to the Sussex coast after seven months abroad was especially sweet. There was even a mystery to solve--the unexplained disappearance of an entire colony of bees from one of Holmes’s beloved hives.
But the anticipated sweetness of their homecoming is quickly tempered by a galling memory from her husband’s past. Mary had met Damian Adler only once before, when the promising surrealist painter had been charged with--and exonerated from--murder. Now the talented and troubled young man was enlisting their help again, this time in a desperate search for his missing wife and child.
When it comes to communal behavior, Russell has often observed that there are many kinds of madness. And before this case yields its shattering solution, she’ll come into dangerous contact with a fair number of them. From suicides at Stonehenge to a bizarre religious cult, from the demimonde of the Café Royal at the heart of Bohemian London to the dark secrets of a young woman’s past on the streets of Shanghai, Russell will find herself on the trail of a killer more dangerous than any she’s ever faced--a killer Sherlock Holmes himself may be protecting for reasons near and dear to his heart.

Facing an inexorable assault on far more than his life, successful family man and bestselling novelist Cullen "Cubby" Greenwich finds himself in a desperate struggle with relentless sociopath and reclusive critic Shearman Waxx.

Upbeat cancer survivor Lydia and her pragmatic sister, Margaret, start a "Knit to Quit" group in their Blossom Street yarn store in Seattle, bringing in a delightful assortment of customers for weekly self-help sessions, including a local baker who wants a baby as much as Lydia does, a super-stressed chocolate magnate who takes the knitting class after his doctor suggests it, and a young woman who is trying to quit obsessing about a broken engagement.