Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are. It’s been a year since Billie Flanagan — a Berkeley mom with an enviable life — went on a solo hike in Desolation Wilderness and vanished from the trail. Her body was never found, just a shattered cellphone and a solitary hiking boot. Her husband and teenage daughter have been coping with Billie’s death the best they can: Jonathan drinks as he works on a loving memoir about his marriage; Olive grows remote, from both her father and her friends at the all-girls school she attends.

Nina once bought into the idea that her fancy liberal arts degree would lead to a fulfilling career. When that dream crashed, she turned to stealing from rich kids in LA alongside her wily Irish boyfriend, Lachlan. Nina learned from the best: Her mother was the original con artist, hustling to give her daughter a decent childhood despite their wayward life. But when her mom gets sick, Nina puts everything on the line to help her, even if it means running her most audacious, dangerous scam yet.

A smart, comic pause-resister about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer from the author of Watch Me Disappear and Pretty Things. When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for - until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune.

No visitors. No nights spent away from the apartment. No disturbing the other residents, all of whom are rich or famous or both. These are the only rules for Jules Larsen’s new job as an apartment sitter at the Bartholomew, one of Manhattan's most high-profile and mysterious buildings. As she gets to know the residents and staff of the Bartholomew, Jules finds herself drawn to fellow apartment sitter Ingrid. When Ingrid confides that the Bartholomew is not what it seems, Jules brushes it off as a harmless ghost story...until the next day, when Ingrid disappears.

Beth has always known there was something strange about her daughter, Hannah. The lack of emotion, the disturbing behavior, the apparent delight in hurting others.... Luke comes from the perfect family, with the perfect parents. But one day, he disappears without a trace, and his girlfriend, Clara, is desperate to discover what has happened to him. As Clara digs into the past, she realizes no family is truly perfect and uncovers a link between Luke's long-lost sister and a strange girl named Hannah. Now Luke's life is in danger because of the lies once told and the secrets once kept.

Coworkers Ruby and Harry are in love - but they're married to other people. They decide to tell their spouses that their marriages are over and to start a new life together. Ruby has wanted to leave her controlling husband for a while, so she tells him she's leaving and waits at the hotel where she and Harry are to meet. But Harry never shows up.

In the summer of 2006, Emma Price watched helplessly as her six-year-old son's red coat was fished out of the River Ouse. It was the tragic story of the year - a little boy, Aiden, wandered away from school during a terrible flood, fell into the river, and drowned. His body was never recovered. Ten years later Emma has finally rediscovered the joy in life...until Aiden returns.

Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: Prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband but of a man she last saw 15 years ago: Wyatt Armstrong. Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised.

"This is a very difficult letter to write. I hope you will not hate us too much.... My son broke into your home recently while you were out." In a quiet, leafy suburb in upstate New York, a teenager has been sneaking into houses - and into the owners' computers as well - learning their secrets, and maybe sharing some of them, too. Who is he, and what might he have uncovered? After two anonymous letters are received, whispers start to circulate, and suspicion mounts. And when a woman down the street is found murdered, the tension reaches the breaking point.

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

Two Truths and a Lie. The girls played it all the time in their cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. But the games ended the night Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin into the darkness. The last she - or anyone - saw of them was Vivian closing the cabin door behind her, hushing Emma with a finger pressed to her lips. Now a rising star in the NYC art scene, Emma's paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the socialite and wealthy owner of the very same Camp Nightingale.

Amy Whey is proud of her ordinary life and the simple pleasures that come with it - teaching diving lessons, baking cookies for new neighbors, helping her best friend, Charlotte, run their local book club. But Amy’s sweet, uncomplicated life begins to unravel when the mysterious and alluring Angelica Roux arrives on her doorstep one book-club night. Something wicked has come her way - a she-devil in a pricey red sports car who seems to know the terrible truth about who she is and what she once did.

After her grandmother Arlette's death, Betty is finally ready to begin her life. She had forfeited university, parties, boyfriends, summer jobs in order to care for Arlette. Now she's ready for whatever life throws at her, and, since the will included a beneficiary unknown to her who lives in the city, she heads there to find the mysterious woman. In 1920s London, Arlette is starting her new life in a time of postwar change. Beautiful and charismatic, she's drawn into a hedonistic world, but then tragedy strikes, and she flees back to her childhood home....

On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend. One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the Dark Place, the dense forest is the writer’s favorite place for long walks and it’s on one such walk that she stumbles upon a mysterious note that simply reads, “DIG HERE.”

Brecken Hill in upstate New York is an expensive place to live. You have to be rich to have a house there, and Fred and Sheila Merton certainly are rich. But even all their money can't protect them when a killer comes to call. The Mertons are brutally murdered after a fraught Easter dinner with their three adult kids. Who, of course, are devastated.

A smart, comic pause-resister about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer from the author of Watch Me Disappear and Pretty Things. When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for - until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune.

When it happens to you, you will be surprised. That thing they say about how you knew all the time, but just weren't facing it? That might be the case, but nevertheless, there you will be. Molly Ringwald mines the complexities of modern relationships in this gripping and nuanced collection of interlinked stories. Writing with a deep compassion for human imperfection, Ringwald follows a Los Angeles family and their friends and neighbors while they negotiate the hazardous terrain of everyday life - revealing the deceptions, heartbreak, and vulnerability familiar to us all.

Liz McGinnis never imagined herself living in a luxurious gated community like The Palms. Ever since she and her family moved in, she's felt like an outsider amongst the Stepford-like wives and their obnoxiously spoiled children. Still, she's determined to make it work - if not for herself, then for her husband, Phil, who landed them this lavish home in the first place, and for her daughter, Danielle, who's about to enter high school.

Successful journalist Erin Kelly has electrified readers and critics alike with her debut novel The Poison Tree. In this scintillating work, Karen and her daughter Alice have established a safe, happy life free from the madness of Karen’s past. But when Karen’s former lover Rex is released from prison, her old associations intrude upon the present - and threaten everything she holds dear.

Madeline, Avery, and Nikki are strangers to each other, but they have one thing in common. They each wake up one morning to discover their life savings have vanished, along with their trusted financial manager - leaving them with nothing but co-ownership of a ramshackle beachfront house. Throwing their lots in together, they take on the challenge of restoring the historic property. But just as they begin to reinvent themselves and discover the power of friendship, secrets threaten to tear down their trust.

When Katie Garrett gets the news that she’s received an inheritance from the grandmother she hardly knew, it couldn’t have come at a better time. She flees Boston and travels to rural Texas. There, she’s greeted by her distant cousin Scarlett. Friendly and flamboyant, Scarlett couldn’t be more different from sensible Katie. And as they begin the task of sorting through their grandmother’s possessions, they discover letters and photographs that uncover the hidden truths about their shared history, and the long-forgotten tragedy of the New London school explosion of 1937 that binds them.

On the eve of their 40th wedding anniversary, the Seagraves are among the most envied couples in their community, and still deeply in love - until the night Lydia Seagrave picks up a gun and shoots her husband. Confronting a tangle of family lies in the wake of this shocking tragedy are the three Seagrave sisters.

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to 14. As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart.

In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in her best-selling memoir, Some Girls. In her 30s, Jillian's most radical act is learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs.

Nursing the faded scars of a long-held trauma, Emily Page and her husband, awaiting the arrival of their first child, move from New York City to the uber-wealthy Clairmont, Texas. There, Emily is swept into a world of opulent privilege and shifting loyalties. But the secrets she keeps follow her south, and with them comes the danger that her new friends can't protect her from, and her new enemies will not hesitate to use to destroy her once and for all.

Award-winning poet Marisa de los Santos crafts an irresistibly touching debut novel. Love Walked In is a contemporary tale, steeped in nostalgic, cinematic charm, of love in all its forms. Unapologetically idealistic about love, Cornelia Brown appears to catch the break of a lifetime when the dashing Martin Grace, her own personal Cary Grant, comes strolling into her life. But it is Martin's connection to 11-year-old Clare Hobbes that touches Cornelia's heart in ways she never imagined.

In this lively tale by RITA and Christy Award finalist Susan May Warren, 28-year-old PJ Sugar wants to shed her reputation for being nothing but trouble. But her efforts to be the favorite daughter, best friend, perfect aunt, fetching beauty, and hometown hero - all at once - trigger both laughter and tears.

In a remote, heavily wooded area near the Berkshires of Massachusetts, Rachel Lorant died on her birthday. But she didn't die alone. That night, her four sorority sisters make a solemn, trembling pledge. They will never reveal what has just happened in those woods - ever. Instead, they will take their terrible secret to their graves.

Two cousins, Rory and Arden, lie unconscious in a hospital burn unit. The fire, which broke out in their shared college dorm room, killed another student, and the police want answers. Tension between Rory and Arden's parents was already at an all-time high before the fire, owing to a recent financial crisis and the decline of the family business. As the parents huddle anxiously in the waiting room, carefully avoiding the subject of their own unraveling relationships, disturbing truths come to light.

In her career as a photojournalist, free-spirited Jessie Ryder has seen the world through her camera lens. But she's never traveled far enough to escape a painful moment that has haunted her for the past 16 years: the day she gave her baby daughter away. Now, facing a life-altering crisis, she's decided to fix the broken pieces of her heart and seek out Lila, even if it means she has to upset the world of Lila's adoptive mother...her very own sister, Luz.

Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are. It’s been a year since Billie Flanagan — a Berkeley mom with an enviable life — went on a solo hike in Desolation Wilderness and vanished from the trail. Her body was never found, just a shattered cellphone and a solitary hiking boot. Her husband and teenage daughter have been coping with Billie’s death the best they can: Jonathan drinks as he works on a loving memoir about his marriage; Olive grows remote, from both her father and her friends at the all-girls school she attends.

A smart, comic pause-resister about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer from the author of Watch Me Disappear and Pretty Things. When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for - until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune.

Nina once bought into the idea that her fancy liberal arts degree would lead to a fulfilling career. When that dream crashed, she turned to stealing from rich kids in LA alongside her wily Irish boyfriend, Lachlan. Nina learned from the best: Her mother was the original con artist, hustling to give her daughter a decent childhood despite their wayward life. But when her mom gets sick, Nina puts everything on the line to help her, even if it means running her most audacious, dangerous scam yet.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence existence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Thoreau-like utopia.

How do you know whether a real-world situation calls for a storybook hero? Is there such a thing as a knight in shining armor, or does every good deed come with unintended consequences? With chilling insight, five bestselling crime writers explore what it means to rise to the occasion—and the space between intentions and results.

Olivia Bender designs exquisite home interiors that satisfy the most demanding clients. But her own deepest desire can’t be fulfilled by marble counters or the perfect rug. She desperately wants to be a mother. Fertility treatments and IVF keep failing. And just when she feels she’s at her lowest point, the police deliver shocking news to Olivia and her husband, Park. DNA results show that the prime suspect in a murder investigation is Park’s son. Olivia is relieved, knowing this is a mistake. Despite their desire, the Benders don’t have any children. Then comes the confession.

Alex Vogel has always been a high achiever who lived her life by the book - star student and athlete in high school, prelaw whiz in college, Harvard Law School degree. Accepting a dream offer at the prestigious Manhattan law firm of Klasko & Fitch, she promises her sweet and supportive longtime boyfriend that the job won’t change her. Yet Alex is seduced by the firm’s money and energy....

This Is Where We Live tells the story of Claudia and Jeremy, a young married couple (she’s an aspiring filmmaker, he’s an indie musician) who are on the verge of making it. Her first film was a sensation at Sundance and is about to have its theatrical release; he’s assembled a new band and is a few songs shy of an album. But a series of seismic events deal a crushing blow to their dreams.

Beth Montgomery seems to have the perfect life: a beautiful house in the hills above Los Angeles, a handsome, ambitious husband, and plans of starting a family. So it doesn't occur to her to worry when the news breaks of a quadruple homicide across town, a botched drug deal that leaves an undercover officer among the dead. Beth certainly would never think to tie the murders to the sudden reappearance in her life of wild, sexy Cassie Ogilvy, the estranged best friend she hasn't seen since they were college roommates.

When a rifle range accident leaves Dean Howell disfigured and in a vegetative state, his wife Sarah finds her dreary life in Pine Cone, Alabama made even worse. After long and tedious days on the assembly line, she returns home to care for her corpselike husband while enduring her loathsome and hateful mother-in-law, Jo. Jo blames the entire town for her son’s mishap, and when she gives a strange piece of jewelry to the man she believes most responsible, a series of gruesome deaths is set in motion.

Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a motorless motorhome that her father won in a poker game. Failing out of school, picking up shifts at a local diner, she’s left fending for herself in a town where she’s never quite felt at home. When she “borrows” her neighbor’s car to perform at an open mic night, she realizes her life could be much bigger than where she came from. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and leaves for good, setting off on a journey to find a life that’s all hers.