Jae is born in a bathroom stall at the Seoul Express Bus Terminal. And Dongyu is born mute - unable to communicate with anyone except Jae. Both boys grow up on the streets of Seoul among runaway teenagers, con men, prostitutes, religious fanatics, and thieves. After years of navigating the streets, Jae becomes an icon for uprooted teenagers, bringing an urgent message to them and making his way to the top of the gang. Under his leadership, the group grows more aggressive and violent - and soon becomes the police's central target.

I wasn't always like this, you know - paranoid, temperamental, vindictive. I mean, sure, I've always been a bit....high strung. But, I never used to stalk my therapist patients. Or yell at them. Or hold them captive in my garage. No, all of that started after the incidents at Lonesome Woods Boarding School. And I'm not talking about the school shooter. This was something far more insidious - something....infectious. Like a cancerous disease that tore through the student body, rotting young hearts one by one.

In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A 30-something-year-old “millennial everywoman”, she has recently left her white-collar desk job - in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time - as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women - alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her.

Emma Carpenter lives in isolation with her golden retriever Laika, house-sitting an old beachfront home on the rainy Washington coast. Her only human contact is her enigmatic old neighbor, Deek, and (via text) the house’s owner, Jules. One day, she reads a poorly written—but gruesome—horror novel by the author H. G. Kane, and posts a one-star review that drags her into an online argument with none other than the author himself. Soon after, disturbing incidents start to occur at night.

Yunjae was born with a brain condition called alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotions like fear or anger. He does not have friends - the two almond-shaped neurons located deep in his brain have seen to that - but his devoted mother and grandmother aren’t fazed by his condition. Their little home above his mother’s used bookstore is decorated with colorful Post-it notes that remind him when to smile, when to say "thank you", and when to laugh. Yunjae grows up content, even happy, with his small family in this quiet, peaceful space.

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat. In 10 captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

In a Tokyo suburb, a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat—and then for his wife as well—in a netherworld beneath the city’s placid surface. As these searches intersect, he encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists. Gripping, prophetic, and suffused with comedy and menace, this is one of Haruki Murakami’s most acclaimed and beloved novels.

Behind every assassination, there is an anonymous mastermind - a plotter - working in the shadows. Plotters quietly dictate the moves of the city's most dangerous criminals, but their existence is little more than legend. Reseng is an assassin. Raised by a cantankerous killer named Old Raccoon in the crime headquarters "The Library", Reseng never questioned anything: where to go, who to kill, or why his home was filled with books that no one ever read. But one day, Reseng steps out of line on a job, toppling a set of carefully calibrated plans.

Amid a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

The two-time Newbery Honor winner Gary D. Schmidt delivers the shattering story of Joseph, a father at 13, who has never seen his daughter, Jupiter. After spending time in a juvenile facility, he's placed with a foster family on a farm in rural Maine. Here Joseph, damaged and withdrawn, meets 12-year-old Jack, who narrates the account of the troubled, passionate teen who wants to find his baby at any cost. In this riveting novel, two boys discover the true meaning of family and the sacrifices it requires.

Fifteen-year-old Jeff wakes up on New Year’s Day to find himself in the hospital—specifically, in the psychiatric ward. Despite the bandages on his wrists, he’s positive this is all some huge mistake. Jeff is perfectly fine, perfectly normal; not like the other kids in the hospital with him. But over the course of the next forty-five days, Jeff begins to understand why he ended up here—and realizes he has more in common with the other kids than he thought.

Early one morning, 26-year-old Yu-jin wakes up to a strange metallic smell and a phone call from his brother asking if everything's all right at home - he missed a call from their mother in the middle of the night. Yu-jin soon discovers her murdered body, lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs of their stylish Seoul duplex. He can't remember much about the night before; having suffered from seizures for most of his life, Yu-jin often has trouble with his memory.

Set in the early postwar years, it probes the destructive effects of war and the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. Ozamu Dazai died, a suicide, in 1948. But the influence of his book has made "people of the setting sun" a permanent part of the Japanese language, and his heroine, Kazuko, a young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, a symbol of the anomie which pervades so much of the modern world.

Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.

Sutton and Ethan Montclair's idyllic life is not as it appears. They seem made for each other, but the truth is ugly. Consumed by professional and personal betrayals and financial woes, the two both love and hate each other. As tensions mount, Sutton disappears, leaving behind a note saying not to look for her. Ethan finds himself the target of vicious gossip as friends, family, and the media speculate on what really happened to Sutton Montclair.

Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.

Unemployed at 29, Tess Monaghan is willing to take any freelance job to pay the rent—including a bit of unorthodox snooping for her rowing buddy, Darryl "Rock" Paxton. In a city where someone is murdered almost every day, attorney Michael Abramowitz's death should be just another statistic. But the slain lawyer's notoriety—and his noontime trysts with Rock's fiancée—make the case front page news...and point to Rock as the likely murderer. But trying to prove her friend's innocence could prove costly to Tess.

The morning after Irene says goodnight to her old journalist friend O'Connor, he is killed suddenly upon opening a letter bomb. As the smoke clears, a devastated Irene determines to find the mail-bomber by tracing threads of an unsolved crime from 1955 - the same cold case O'Connor had been obsessed with.

Still reeling from her young son's death, Jackie Sheppard retreats to a small town in the Colorado Rockies. Comforted that no one knows of her tragic past, she's thrilled to take a job at a family law firm, where she meets Tom, the local carpenter. Jackie's distrust of others hinders their relationship, but they slowly build a budding romance. However, as she begins to settle into her new life, disturbing things start happening to Jackie...

In Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories, Andrea Camilleri has selected 21 short stories, written with his trademark wit and humor, that follow Italy's famous detective through highlight cases of his career. From the title story, featuring a young Deputy Montalbano newly assigned to Vigàta, to "Montalbano Says No", in which the inspector makes a late-night call to Camilleri himself to refuse an outlandish case, this volume is an essential addition to any fan's collection and a wonderful way to introduce listeners to the internationally best-selling series.

Heloise considers it a blessing to be a person who seldom attracts attention. In her suburb, she's just a mom, the young widow with the forgettable job, who somehow never misses a soccer game. In the state capital, she's the redheaded lobbyist with a good cause and a mediocre track record. But in discreet hotel rooms throughout the area, she's the woman of your dreams - if you can afford the hourly fee. For more than a decade, Heloise believed she was safe, managing to keep up this rigidly compartmentalized life. But her secret life is under siege. One county over, another so-called suburban madam has been found dead in her car, an apparent suicide.

When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.

Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist with a thriving practice in Boulder, Colorado. His life begins to unravel when one of his female patients is found in an apparent suicide and the local paper begins printing accusations from an unnamed source of sexual impropriety between the woman and Dr. Gregory. He launches a psychological and personal quest for the truth that rapidly intensifies when more of his patients die untimely deaths, and Gregory suspects not only that the deaths are related but that another one of his patients may be somehow involved. Lacking facts but roused by suspicion and troubled by seemingly random acts of terror around him, Gregory starts to fear for the safety of the people he loves. The question of the inviolability of confidential disclosures made to Gregory by his patients - privileged information - becomes crucial as the psychologist pursues an unsettling romance with Lauren Crowder, a lovely deputy district attorney investigating one of the deaths. Bound to silence, Gregory follows the psychological tracks of someone he fears may be a cunning and disturbed killer, while turning to his enigmatic but supportive partner, Diane Estevez, for counsel, and to his tart-tongued female urologist neighbor for support. The sinister, surprising drama unfolds against Boulder's Rocky Mountain backdrop, in the arresting natural beauty of Aspen, and in the midst of a baroque Halloween costume party in downtown Boulder. Finally, in a lonely mountain lodge enshrouded in menace, the story comes to its breathtaking climax.

Once, Special Agent Smoky Barrett hunted serial killers for the FBI. She was one of the best, until a madman terrorized her family, killed her husband and daughter, and left her face scarred and her soul brutalized. Turning the tables on the killer, Smoky shot him dead, but her life was shattered forever.

A mind-bending, genre-twisting debut novel. In West Akron, there lived a reclusive elderly man who always wore mittens, even in July. He had no friends and no family; all over town, he was known only as The the Man from Primrose Lane. And on a summer day in 2008, someone murdered him.

Love hurts. FBI agent Kelly Feinman knows this is true. While she is recovering from an attack by a serial killer called the "Acid Man," her husband leaves her. Physically and emotionally scarred by the murderer, Kelly feels she will never be the same. She is cut off not only from her husband and child, but also from her fellow FBI agents, who see her as a rogue for going after the Acid Man alone.

It was his first big murder case - and one of the bloodiest and most violent crimes LAPD detective Danny McGuire would ever encounter. Andrew Jakes, an elderly multimillionaire art dealer, had been brutally murdered in his Hollywood home, his lifeless body tied to his naked young wife. Raped and beaten, the lovely Angela Jakes had barely survived the attack herself. Gazing into her deep, soulful eyes, Danny swore that he'd find the psychopath behind this barbarous act.

Jane Campbell avoids confrontation at all costs. Given the choice, she'll always let her husband, Leon, a best-selling thriller author, fight their battles. She'd prefer to focus on the good things in life: precious days with her two young children, a steady and loving marriage, their mischievously playful cat Bonita, and her fulfilling job as a creative-writing teacher. In Jane's eyes, life is altogether sweeter than any individual bump in the road. But when Leon suffers a brutal attack, Jane has to finally face reality.

He’s the Man With No Name and the owner of No Alibis, a mystery bookshop in Belfast. But when a detective agency next door goes bust, the agency’s clients start calling into his shop asking him to solve their cases. It’s not as if there’s any danger involved. It’s an easy way to sell books to his gullible customers and Alison, the beautiful girl in the jewellery shop across the road, will surely be impressed. Except she’s not – because she can see the bigger picture.

The hunt for a serial killer unearths an unsolved cold case from over 60 years ago. Young girls are being abducted and murdered in the Northeast. Out of favour detective constable Ian Bradshaw struggles to find any leads - and fears that the only thing this investigation will unravel is himself. Journalist Tom Carney is suspended by his London tabloid and returns to his home village in County Durham. Helen Norton is the reporter who replaced Tom on the local newspaper. Together they are drawn into a case that will change their lives forever.