List

Game warden Joe Pickett fights for his life as his daughters try to uncover who shot him and left him for dead in this riveting new novel from #1 New York Times bestseller C. J. Box.

Marybeth Pickett gets the call she has always dreaded: her husband Joe is in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head.

Joe was found in his pickup at Antler Creek Junction, a crossroads connecting three ranches. Each road leading to a dangerous family. Each family with a different bone to pick with the local game warden. Marybeth and the new sheriff assume that Joe was ambushed by one of the families, but they have no idea which one since Joe didn’t say where he was going or why.

With Joe unconscious and fighting for his life with Marybeth at his side, Sheridan, April, and Lucy split up and investigate each of families to uncover the truth of what happened to their father, before it’s too late.

Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award winner Jennifer K. Breedlove brings coastal Maine to life in Murder Will Out, a lighter, modern gothic mystery that's as atmospheric as it is heart-warming.

Come for the memories. Stay for the murder...

Little North Island, off the coast of Maine, is so beautiful it could be a postcard. Organist Willow Stone cherishes her memories of childhood summers spent on the island with her godmother Sue... even though her visits ended abruptly, and she hasn't seen or heard from her godmother in over fifteen years. Until a letter from Sue—and word of Sue’s death—brings Willow back to the picturesque island.

The islanders rarely mention Sue without also bringing up Cameron House, and the controversy around Sue’s unexpected inheritance of the sprawling mansion. When Willow overhears someone threatening the next heir to the property, she starts to question whether Sue’s death was really an accident, and can’t help but wonder whether someone on this sleepy island is willing to stop at nothing—even murder—to claim Cameron House for their own.

Through Willow’s eyes, as well as those of others on the island, a mystery unfolds that keeps drawing Willow back to Cameron House and the very real ghosts that walk its corridors.

The page-turning story of three women reporters and the way they changed the world, work, and journalism. 

She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter’s father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances of overzealous Yugoslavian diplomats, found overlooked details of world history in a dentist’s kitchen in Sarajevo. She traveled alone to Mexico. She traveled alone to Congo. She traveled alone to the American South. She married Hemingway. She married a Chinese poet-playboy-publisher, then married a British war hero. She fell in love with H. G. Wells. She gave birth and raised a child on her own. She landed on the front page of the newspaper. She wrote for the great magazines of her time—Vogue, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar. She wrote a play. She wrote a memoir. She wrote a genre-breaking travel narrative. She wrote bestsellers. She wrote and wrote and wrote. She changed the very way we think about writing and the way journalists craft stories—which sources are viable, which details are important—and the way women move and work in the world.

She was Martha Gellhorn. She was Emily “Mickey” Hahn. She was Rebecca West. Each woman was starry-eyed for success, for adventure, and helped ensure that other starry and restless women could make unforgettable lives for themselves. They fought for their lives and their work. They were praised and criticized for it all. 

In language as lively and nimble, in passages as intimate and adventurous, and with conviction as fierce and indefatigable as her subjects’ own, Julia Cooke’s Starry and Restless plays out the stories of three women across three decades and five continents. Martha, Mickey, Rebecca—journalists, authors, mothers, lovers, friends. These women didn’t just bear witness to the great changes of the twentieth century; their curiosity, grit, ambition, and stories changed the world.

By a prize-winning historian: The dramatic story of a Black man’s relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America

When most Americans think of slavery, they do not picture the colonial or revolutionary eras. Yet, in fact, one of six inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies was enslaved. The Escapes of David George: an Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution reveals a remarkable, untold experience of the American revolutionary period—a Black man’s quest for the freedom espoused by our Founders, but denied him and other enslaved people. 

In 1762, at the age of 19, David George escaped from a plantation in Virginia. Running southwest by night, fording rivers and crossing borders, he embarked on a decades-long journey in and out of captivity that spanned multiple colonies and thousands of miles. George lived among White, Black, Creek, and Natchez settlements, fled to the British Army for the promise of liberty, founded what might have been the first Black Baptist church, helped to hack a settlement for refugees out of the Nova Scotia wilderness, and died as a leader of an experimental anti-slavery community in Sierra Leone.

Piecing together archival records and David George’s own brief account of his life—the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America—Gregory O’Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation’s origins, principles, and contradictions.

Alexandria "Alix" Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books.

The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy--Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself?

This intoxicating debut spin-off of the author’s popular small-town Oregon-set Witch Way Librarian mysteries features an intriguing young woman with a unique connection to the magical realm of scent. Sometimes, she can even sniff out a killer . . .

Some people read auras—a light or color that surrounds others, revealing their character or emotions. Lise Bloom reads ribbons—of fragrance, that is. Whether she’s around old friends or new, fragrance often unfurls from them—an ability called “clairalience.”

Hoping to gain insight into her gift, Lise works at the Lucky Lotus, a New Age shop. Unfortunately, the oils the owner, Dyann, concocts, nauseate Lise and impede her sense of scent. Worse, the shop feels more like wealthy Dyann’s hobby than a spiritual place, thanks to her toxic love-torment relationship with her ex-husband, Richard.

Dyann is so pleased with her latest vengeful scheme that she shares it with Lise and gleefully remarks that when Richard finds out, he’ll kill her. For Lise, it’s the last straw. Persuaded to quit by her caring, colorful crew of housemates, Lise emails Dyann a resignation letter. But when she goes to the store the next morning, she detects a fetid odor she doesn’t recognize—and discovers a spilled bottle of Mayan ceremonial liqueur . . . beside Dyann’s dead body.  

In her rush to call the police, Lise doesn’t notice that Dyann’s half-completed reply to Lise’s resignation email is on the monitor of her desktop computer—making her the prime suspect. Now, she’ll have to follow her nose to uncoil a venomous truth. It just may lead her life in an entirely new direction—unless a killer cuts it short . . .

A groundbreaking exposé showing how the arts—alongside diet, sleep, exercise and nature—are the forgotten fifth pillar of health

From cradle to grave, engaging in the arts has remarkable effects on our health and well-being. Music supports the architectural development of children’s brains. Artistic hobbies help our brains to stay resilient against dementia. Dance and magic tricks build new neural pathways for people with brain injuries. Arts and music act just like drugs to decrease depression, stress, and pain, reducing our dependence on medication. Going to live music events, museums, exhibitions, and the theater decreases our risk of future loneliness and frailty. Engaging in the arts improves the functioning of every major organ system in the body, even helping us to live longer.

This isn’t sensationalism, it’s science: the results of decades of studies gathering data from neuroimaging, molecular biomarkers, wearable sensors, cognitive assessments, and electronic health records. From professor Daisy Fancourt, an award-winning scientist and science communicator and director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health, this book will fundamentally change the way you value and engage with the arts in your daily life and give you the tools to optimize how, when, and what arts you engage in to achieve your health goals. The arts are not a luxury in our lives. They are essential.

Who is watching Nell Masters?

Nell Masters is certain someone is following her. The hairs on the back of her neck rise when she travels to and from work, there are silent calls to her office, and a huge bouquet of flowers arrives without a card. And Nell has a reason to be looking over her shoulder, because she has a secret that she’s hiding from everyone in her life, including her new partner, Alex. But Alex also has secrets of his own.

Fourteen years earlier, when Nell went by the name Elle Nugent, she witnessed a student, Bryony Sanders, getting into a stranger’s car. When Bryony was found murdered, Elle became obsessed with finding the person responsible. She was convinced she knew who it was and her fixation with Brett Parker, the man she accused, led her down a dangerous path . . . 

Now, Nell tries to convince herself that this unnerving feeling of being watched is all in her mind. Has someone from her past discovered her new identity? Has the stalker become the stalked? Or is there something even more deadly at play?

"One of the most iconic British fictional detectives of the 21st century . . . a delight." --Daily Mail

No fingerprints. No weapon. No witnesses. Can DS Cross prove it was murder?

When a young woman is found dead - with no fingerprints, no weapon, and no witnesses -the Bristol Crime Unit is ready to close the case as suicide, especially after the coroner cites the victim's long history of drug abuse. But her mother is convinced it was murder, saying that her daughter had been clean and sober for over two years.

DS Cross is determined to defy his bosses and re-open the case, even if it costs him his career. Soon he is mired in a labyrinth of potential suspects - but can he solve the case before his superiors shut it down for good?

Anti-science, anti-vaccine, anti-reason beliefs seem to be triumphing over common sense today. How did we get here? The Great Shadow brings a huge missing piece to this puzzle—the experience of actually being ill. What did it feel like to be a woman or man struggling with illness in ancient times, in the Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, or in 1920? And how did that shape our thoughts and convictions?

The Great Shadow uses extensive historical research and first-person accounts to tell a vivid story about sickness and our responses to it, from very ancient times until the last decade. In the process of writing, historian Susan Wise Bauer reveals just how many of our current fads and causes are rooted in the moment-by-moment experience of sickness—from the search for a balanced lifestyle to plug-in air fresheners and bare hardwood floors. We can’t simply shout facts at people who refuse vaccinations, believe that immigrants carry diseases, or insist that God will look out for them during a pandemic. We have to enter with imagination, historical perspective, and empathy into their world. The Great Shadow does just that with page-turning flair.

An electrifying new voice in crime fiction: Allison LaMothe’s debut is a gritty, fast-paced mystery about a reporter running down two huge stories at once

“Allison LaMothe is a wildly talented writer with an exacting eye for detail and her tenacious tabloid reporter, Parker Snow, is gutsy, whip-smart, and the perfect tour guide through pre-Giuliani New York City." —Julia Dahl, author of I Dreamed of Falling

New York City, 1992—Meet Parker Snow, the most tenacious reporter for a tabloid paper that thrives on juicy gossip over hard-hitting news, the New York Street. She also has a big black mark on her record from her last street crime story—and a habit of taking a few too many pills to erase the memory.

Since the fall of the USSR, a new crop of Russian criminals have been arriving in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. It's now Parker's job to cover them. But her old beat keeps calling to her, especially when she learns of a murdered woman whose case the cops want to ignore.

Trying to run down two stories at once—a simmering mafia turf war, and a homicide that leads to two more with no clear link between them—Parker must also fight the pull of her pills and the arrogant men who get in her way at every turn. Despite it all, she's determined to find truth and redemption for herself, the victims, and a city in chaos—if her demons don't get to her first.

A former public defender takes us behind the closed doors of America's criminal courts, revealing how the institutions that claim to protect us are doing the exact opposite—and offering a blueprint for finally fixing it.

“A searing, compassionate, and utterly necessary book that pulls back the curtain with the clarity of a lawyer and the heart of someone who’s seen the criminal legal system’s devastating consequences up close.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

As Americans, we are told a rose-tinted story about our criminal courts—that these are the hallowed halls of justice, that the purpose of our legal process is to find the truth, and that those who enforce the law are both equitable and heroic. But what if the reality is purposefully obscured to hide something rotten at the system’s core?

In The Price of Mercy, attorney and former public defender Emily Galvin Almanza weaves hard data and unforgettable stories, dark humor and compelling evidence to tell us the truth about what’s really going on behind the closed doors of America’s criminal courts. She shows us how jails actually increase future crime, the dirty tricks police use to make millions in overtime pay, how a man could spend decades in prison because scientists mistook dog hair for his own, the perverse incentives that push prosecutors to seek convictions even when they themselves don’t want to, and how judges may decide cases differently after lunch.

We’ll learn what’s working, too: how public defenders can improve public health and even economic mobility, and how planting more trees can reduce a neighborhood’s murder rates. But a lone defender winning a case won’t change the system. Galvin Almanza argues that we need an engaged public to confront the stark reality of our crime-generating, poverty-entrenching, health-destroying legal apparatus and rebuild it into something that can save our collective present and prevent our future from being torn apart.

Provocative and eye-opening, The Price of Mercy lifts the curtain on the way our laws really operate and presents a path forward for true transformation of the American criminal court system. Justice, and the law itself, is not some static thing. It is something enacted together, decision by decision, in acts of inhumanity or mercy.

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

When the last fare of the night turns up dead in her backseat, a Sri Lankan American taxi driver works off the clock to clear her name in this mystery novel by debut author Yosha Gunasekera.

Siriwathi Perera doesn’t quite know where she’s going in life. She never expected to be a taxicab driver in New York City, struggling to make ends meet and still living with her parents at twenty-eight. The true-crime podcasts that keep Siri company as she drives don’t do much to make up for the legal career she imagined for herself, or the brother she’s grieving.

When public defender Amaya Fernando gets into her cab, they make a quick connection through their shared Sri Lankan roots. Siri, whose social circle is limited to her grade-school best friend, Alex, thinks things might finally be looking up with this new potential friendship. But she’s suddenly dropped into her own true crime when she discovers her next passenger murdered in the backseat, and she has to call Amaya sooner than she’d expected.

Pinned as the obvious and only suspect, and desperate to clear her name, Siri chases down leads across the boroughs of New York City with Amaya’s help. But with her court date looming, they have just five days to find out who really killed the midnight passenger—or Siri’s life will be over before she can even truly live it.

An energetic and impassioned work of popular science about scientists who have had to fight for their revolutionary ideas to be accepted—from Darwin to Pasteur to modern day Nobel Prize winners.

For two decades, Matt Kaplan has covered science for the Economist. He’s seen breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the behavior of the research community, and how support can be withheld for those who don’t conform or have the right connections. In this passionately argued and entertaining book, Kaplan narrates the history of the 19th century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who realized that Childbed fever—a devastating infection that only struck women who had recently given birth—was spread by doctors not washing their hands. Semmelweis was met with overwhelming hostility by those offended at the notion that doctors were at fault, and is a prime example of how the scientific community often fights new ideas, even when the facts are staring them in the face.

In entertaining prose, Kaplan reveals scientific cases past and present to make his case. Some are familiar, like Galileo being threatened with torture and Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó being fired when on the brink of discovering how to wield mRNA–a finding that proved pivotal for the creation of the Covid-19 vaccine. Others less so, like researchers silenced for raising safety concerns about new drugs, and biologists ridiculed for revealing major flaws in the way rodent research is conducted. Kaplan shows how the scientific community can work faster and better by making reasonably small changes to the forces that shape it.

One of our best writers, Lauren Groff returns with a fierce new story collection, her first since the award-winning and bestselling Florida.

Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region - from New England to Florida to California - these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme- the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us.

Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

Precise, surprising and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated fracture points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and survival. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.

Two Japanese American men hired to investigate an art theft discover something much more sinister in turn-of-the-century California—from the Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author of Clark and Division.

Pasadena, 1903: Eighteen-year-old Ryunosuke “Ryui” Wada staggers off the boat from Yokohama, Japan, ready to reinvent himself after the untimely deaths of his parents. Though battling loneliness and culture shock, Ryui does his best to settle into his work as an art dealer’s apprentice while adjusting to his new home. From his enigmatic photographer roommate, Jack, to the beautiful seamstress living downstairs, Ryui finds himself surrounded by colorful characters and unbelievable opportunities and is soon utterly swept up in all “Crown City” has to offer.

But tensions are seething under Pasadena’s bustling prosperity. Ryui is the victim of an anti-Japanese attack, and a painting is stolen from the studio of Toshio Aoki, Pasadena’s most successful Japanese artist, who then hires Ryui and Jack to investigate. It’s not long before their sleuthing leads them into real danger. Ryui is a naive young man in a foreign country—has he bitten off more than he can chew?

In this fish-out-of-water mystery, studded with cameos by real historical figures, Edgar Award–winner Naomi Hirahara brings to life a little-known slice of California history.

Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Beloved Toni Morrison investigates Black characters in the American literary canon and the way they shaped the nation’s collective unconscious.

In a dazzling series of lectures from her tenure as a professor at Princeton University, Toni Morrison interrogates America’s most famous works and authors, drawing a direct line from the Black bodies that built the nation to the Black characters that many of the country’s canonical white writers imagined in their work. Morrison sees these fictions as a form of creation and projection, arguing that they helped manufacture American racialidentity—these “Africanist” presences are “the shadow that makes light possible,” as Morrison writes, and the reflections of their authors’ own deepest fears, insecurities, and longings.

With profound erudition and wit, Morrison breaks wide open the American conception of race with energetic, enlivening readings of the nation’s canon, revealing that our liberation from these diminishing notions comes through language. “How,” Morrison wonders, “could one speak of profit, of economy, of labor, or progress, of suffragism, or Christianity, of the frontier, of the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands . . . of practically anything a new nation concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse or defining its edges, the presence of Africans and/or their descendants?”

To read these lectures, collected here for the first time, is to encounter Morrison, not just the writer but also the teacher, in the most penetrating and subversive way yet. With a foreword by her son Ford Morrison and an introduction by her Princeton comparative literature colleague Claudia Brodsky, Language as Liberation is a revelatory collection that promises to redefine the American canon.

A woman receives an unexpected gift from the man she loved and lost—a year of books, one for every month—launching a reading-inspired journey to live, dream, and love again in this glimmering and heart-stopping novel.

Twelve books. Twelve months. One chance to heal her heart…

When Tilly Nightingale receives a call telling her there’s a birthday gift from her husband waiting for her at her local bookshop, it couldn’t come as more of a shock. Partly because she can’t remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. But mainly because Joe died five months ago....

When she goes to pick up the present, Alfie, the bookshop owner with kind eyes, explains the gift—twelve carefully chosen books with handwritten letters from Joe, one for each month, to help her turn the page on her first year without him.

At first Tilly can’t imagine sinking into a fictional world, but Joe’s tender words convince her to try, and something remarkable happens—Tilly becomes immersed in the pages, and a new chapter begins to unfold in her own life. Monthly trips to the bookstore—and heartfelt conversations with Alfie—give Tilly the comfort she craves and the courage to set out on a series of reading-inspired adventures that take her around the world. But as she begins to share her journey with others, her story—like a book—becomes more than her own.

A mysterious art academy in the woods, a deck of ancient tarot cards, a centuries-old secret

On a hot August morning in 1972, the body of Abel Montague, a student at St. Luke’s Institute of the Arts, is found hanging from a tree in the forest. An ancient Hanged Man tarot card is found in the back pocket of his pants and his body has been positioned into the exact pose illustrated on the card.

When Detective Lola Germany arrives at St. Luke’s—a former monastery that once housed a secret order of monks who carried out witch trials and executions—she believes they are dealing with a ritualistic murder. While interviewing school administrators and Abel’s classmates, Lola discovers Abel’s live-in girlfriend, Pearl, seems shaken but also might be hiding something—along with her group of friends who call themselves witches.

When more students are found dead, each body arranged like a tarot card, Lola realizes she is trapped in a web of power and ambition that spans centuries. Soon the lines between past and present, spiritual and tangible, begin to blur, and the only way to survive is to seek answers from places she never imagined.

From the author of the national bestseller The Dark Queens, an incandescent work of true crime and feminist history about Elizabeth Bathory, the woman alleged to be the world's most prolific female serial killer.

There have long been whispers, coming from the castle; from the village square; from the dark woods. The great lady-a countess, from one of Europe's oldest families-is a vicious killer. Some even say she bathes in the blood of her victims. When the king's men force their way into her manor house, she has blood on her hands, caught in the act of murdering yet another of her maids. She is walled up in a tower and never seen again, except in the uppermost barred window, where she broods over the countryside, cursing all those who dared speak up against her.

Told and retold in many languages, the legend of the Blood Countess has consumed cultural imaginations around the world. But despite claims that Elizabeth Bathory tortured and killed as many as 650 girls, some have wondered if the Countess was herself a victim- of one of the most successful disinformation campaigns known to history. So, was Elizabeth Bathory a monster, a victim, or a bit of both? With the breathlessness of a whodunit, drawing upon new archival evidence and questioning old assumptions, Shelley Puhak traces the Countess's downfall, bringing to life an assertive woman leader in a world sliding into anti-scientific, reactionary darkness-a world where nothing is ever as it seems. In this exhilarating narrative, Puhak renders a vivid portrait of history's most dangerous woman and her tumultuous time, revealing just how far we will go to destroy a woman in power.