It's '86, the era of Pop Rocks, Jelly shoes, and big hair bands. Rachael O'Brien's freshman plan seems simple: Attend a southern college away from her hometown of Canton, Ohio, earn a degree, party, and meet cute guys-hopefully acing the latter two. But being threatened by a jealous She-Devil, avoiding the advances of a 30-something redneck, and discovering an art fraud scheme mess with her "to do" list.

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Seventeen-year-old Molly Fisk does not go outside. She's ruled by anxiety and only feels safe in the tiny tourist-town museum she and her mother run and call home. Yearning to live free but unable to overcome deep wounds from her past, she stays hidden away. Then the chance arrival of a woman Molly knew six years ago changes everything.

Little girls are vanishing from Deadwood, South Dakota. Fearing her daughter might be next, single mom Violet Parker is desperate to find the monster behind the abductions. With her savings dwindling and just three weeks left to sell her first house or lose her realtor job, Violet is ecstatic when a handsome jeweler hires her to sell his century-old Victorian masterpiece - until she sees the dilapidated dwelling. Now if she could just convince her only buyer to stop rejecting vintage homes as if they're haunted.

As director of the Ballantyne Foundation on Sea Pine Island, SC, Elliott Lisbon scratches her detective itch by performing discreet inquiries for Foundation donors. Usually nothing serious until Jane Hatting, Ballantyne board chair, is accused of murder. The Ballantyne's reputation tanks, Jane's headed to a jail cell, and Elliott's sexy ex is the new lieutenant in town. Armed with moxie and her Mini Coop, Elliott uncovers a trail of blackmail schemes, gambling debts, illicit affairs, and investment scams. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more treacherous her investigation.

Benjamin Benjamin has lost virtually everything - his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. With few options, Ben enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving taught in the basement of a local church. There Ben is instructed in the art of inserting catheters and avoiding liability and how to keep physical and emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned to 19-year-old Trev, he discovers that the endless mnemonics and service plan checklists have done little to prepare him.

Not much happens in Adams Grove, Virginia, where the worst crime to hit the small town in a decade was hunters bagging too many deer. So when word gets out about a break-in over at Pearl Clemmons’s place, the townsfolk go on high alert, locking their doors and firing up the rumor mill. Pearl’s granddaughter Jill certainly has enough on her plate, what with tending to Pearl’s estate and coming face-to-face with sexier-than-sin Garrett Malloy. Also known as: The Man Who Broke Her Heart.

A girl's gotta eat—and so do her three cats. Recently divorced art history grad student Hanna Harvey has just fibbed her way into a job as the assistant to dangerously drool-worthy art gallery owner Mark Abernathy. For Hanna, working in the field she desperately loves provides the perfect opportunity to begin putting her life back together. Soon her cheese budget is in the black and her feline life partners are no longer eyeing her like a can of Fancy Feast. But when her boss's lady friends start turning up dead, Hanna finds herself in the crosshairs of a murder investigation.

Emotionally guarded Daphne Amos always believed she’d found a kindred spirit in her fiancé, Heath. Both very private people, they’ve kept their pasts hidden from the world, and each other, until Heath’s escalating nightmares begin to put an undeniable strain on their relationship. Determined to give their impending marriage the best chance of succeeding, Heath insists that Daphne join him on a seven-day retreat with Dr. Matthew Cerny, a psychologist celebrated for getting to the root of repressed memories.

Meredith May recalls the first time a honeybee crawled on her arm. She was five years old, her parents had recently split, and suddenly, she found herself in the care of her grandfather, an eccentric beekeeper who made honey in a rusty old military bus in the yard. That first close encounter was at once terrifying and exhilarating for May, and in that moment, she discovered that everything she needed to know about life and family was right before her eyes, in the secret world of bees.

They say living well is the best revenge. But sometimes, spreading the misery seems a whole lot more satisfying. That’s interior designer Dani Porter’s justification for buying the vacant lot next to her ex-fiancé’s house…the house they were supposed to live in together, before he cheated on her with their Realtor. Dani plans to build a vacation rental that will a) mess with his view and his peace of mind and b) prove that Dani is not someone to be stepped on. Welcome to project Spite House.

It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer, a 40-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man, lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. Before a gig in Miami, he learns that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him.

She's my roommate. I know how she takes her tea, how she organizes her closet. I know when she goes to bed each night, what she eats for breakfast, the passcode on her phone. I know she calls her mother on Mondays, takes barre on Thursdays, and meets her friends for drinks on Fridays. But more important than any of that...I know what she did.

Celeste English and Ronnie Frazier are sisters, but they couldn't be more different. Celeste is a doctor's wife, living a perfect and elegant façade. But secretly, her marriage is falling apart and her need to control people around her threatens to destroy them all. Ronnie is an actress, living in New York. But she has no money, she has no home, and her life is held together by "chewing gum, paper clips, and spit." When their father dies, the sisters inherit a house in Prosper, North Carolina.

When Claire's grandfather and his army buddies converge in the Arizona desert to find new wives, it's her thankless job to keep them out of trouble with the opposite sex. But when she finds a human leg bone and partners with a reluctant geotechnician to dig up secrets from the past, trouble finds her. If she doesn't stop digging, she could wind up dead.

As director of the Ballantyne Foundation on Sea Pine Island, SC, Elliott Lisbon scratches her detective itch by performing discreet inquiries for Foundation donors. Usually nothing serious until Jane Hatting, Ballantyne board chair, is accused of murder. The Ballantyne's reputation tanks, Jane's headed to a jail cell, and Elliott's sexy ex is the new lieutenant in town. Armed with moxie and her Mini Coop, Elliott uncovers a trail of blackmail schemes, gambling debts, illicit affairs, and investment scams. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more treacherous her investigation.

Everything about 15-year-old Cat's new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena's orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts - first drink, first cigarette, first kiss - while Marlena's habits harden and calcify.

Benjamin Benjamin has lost virtually everything - his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. With few options, Ben enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving taught in the basement of a local church. There Ben is instructed in the art of inserting catheters and avoiding liability and how to keep physical and emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned to 19-year-old Trev, he discovers that the endless mnemonics and service plan checklists have done little to prepare him.

To the dismay of her high-society mother, Cissy, Dallas heiress Andy Kendricks wants no part of the Junior League life - opting instead for a job as a website designer and a passel of unpedigreed pals. Now her good friend, Molly O'Brien, is in bad trouble, accused of killing her boss at the local restaurant Jugs. Though no proper deb would ever set foot in such a sleazy dive, Andy's soon slipping into skintight hot pants and a stuffed triple D bra to gain employment there and somehow help clear Molly's name.

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.

Nora Lopez is 17 during the infamous New York summer of 1977, when the city is besieged by arson, a massive blackout, and a serial killer named Son of Sam who shoots young women on the streets. Nora's family life isn't going so well either: her bullying brother, Hector, is growing more threatening by the day, her mother is helpless and falling behind on the rent, and her father calls only on holidays. All Nora wants is to turn 17 and be on her own.

Angela is being held in a police interrogation room. Her ex's wife has gone missing, and Detective Novak is sure Angela knows something, despite her claim that she's not involved. At Novak's prodding, Angela tells a story going back 10 years, explaining how she met and fell in love with her high school friend HP. But as her past unfolds, she reveals a disconcerting love triangle and a dark, tangled web of betrayals. Is Angela a scorned ex-lover with criminal intent? Or a pawn in someone else's revenge scheme?

Everyone knows a guy like Jared: the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who's often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon. Jared does smoke and drink too much, and he does make the best cookies in town, and his mom is a mess, but he's also a kid who has an immense capacity for compassion and an impulse to watch over people more than twice his age, and he can't rely on anyone for consistent love and support, except for his flatulent pit bull, Baby Killer (he calls her Baby) - and now she's dead.

Annie McIntyre has a love/hate relationship with Garnett, Texas. Recently graduated from college and home waitressing, lacking not in ambition but certainly in direction, Annie is lured into the family business—a private investigation firm—by her supposed-to-be-retired grandfather, Leroy, despite the rest of the clan's misgivings.

Gayle was the beauty who believed that a man could make her life complete. Patricia was the intellectual who thought that rising to the top of her career would make her happy. And then there is Marcus Carter, who has been linked to both Gayle and Pat since the tragedy that occurred when they were all children. Can either one save him from himself? Can friends survive a love that comes between them? Each of them gets what she wants, but no one counts on the price they have to pay.

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.

Mackinac Island is a peaceful summer resort town where everyone coasts through the streets on bicycles. But after someone sends a prominent local on her final ride, it's up to one resourceful visitor to get things running again.

In Savannah Espinoza's small New Mexico hometown, kids either flee after graduation or they're trapped there forever. Vanni never planned to get stuck - but that was before her father was diagnosed with Huntington's disease, leaving her and her mother to care for him. Now she doesn't have much of a plan at all: living at home, working as a performing mermaid at a second-rate water park, distracting herself with one boy after another. That changes the day she meets Leigh.

Kevin Pearce - baseball star, honor student, the pride of Brighton - was 15 when he left town in the back of his uncle's cab. He and his buddy, Bobby Scales, had just committed heinous violence for what they thought were the best of reasons. Kevin didn't want a pass, but he was getting it anyway. Bobby would stay and face the music; Kevin's future would remain as bright as ever. At least that was the way things were supposed to work, except in Brighton things never work the way they're supposed to.

Olivia Kaspen has just discovered that her ex-boyfriend Caleb Drake has lost his memory. With an already lousy reputation for taking advantage of situations, Olivia must decide how far she is willing to go to get Caleb back.