"Bound: A reluctant con artist and a professor with too many secrets are bound by an arcane text--in more ways than one. Veronica 'Vero' Mercer grew up with grifters for parents, and she knows her way around a con. When grad school bills pile up and her friends are in trouble, she turns her art history skills into a forgery side hustle. It's supposed to be a short term deal, but her work draws the attention of Dr. Viktor Ashworth, a reserved, very British professor. Instead of turning her in, Ashworth kidnaps her--politely--and makes an unusual offer: forge a mysterious ancient manuscript for him. Soon Vero finds herself spending long nights with Viktor, bent over rare vellum samples and obscure inks. But as the con grows riskier, Vero has to wonder: what does Viktor really want, and why can't she stay away? Unbound: A five-thousand-year-old woman who has outlived empires. A doctor who has spent his life fighting death. They fates collide in a blood game of vengeance. Lilit of Nineveh has spent millennia in control. As a powerful revenant, she enforces one rule above all: protect mortals. Disciplined and focused, she has never made the same mistake twice, and she has learned that attachments can only lead to ruin. Enter Roman Martin. An overworked and relentlessly kind ER physician, he is the one mortal Lilit cannot quit. Any relationship between them is against everything Lilit has fought for. Still, she keeps coming back to him. Until someone starts hunting Lilit, and Roman is caught in the crossfire. When everything comes crashing down, Lilit must choose between the world she has sworn to protect and the man she was never meant to love"--

"Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County, investigates a series of eccentric small-town crises in fifteen holiday-inspired stories. An old dog mysteriously escapes the animal shelter night after night. A deputy deploys an unexpected diversion during a hostage standoff. The baby Jesus vanishes from a nativity scene. And Walt faces one of his most challenging assignments yet: caring for a 150-year-old sourdough starter, while apprehending a seven-year-old suspect with the diction of a 1930s gumshoe"--

Includes an essay on the textual history of the three novels, a newly prepared chronology of Straub life and career by volume editor Emma Straub, and helpful notes.

"A brilliant new short story from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Madeline Miller--her first work of fiction since the publication of Circe--that vibrantly reimagines the powerful and forgotten myth of Mestra. A cursed father, a gifted daughter. Mestra, daughter of the King of Thessaly, is gifted a unique ability by Poseidon: metamorphosis into any being she can imagine. Her father, on the other hand, is cursed. As punishment for disrespecting the goddess Demeter, he is in possession of an unnatural, insatiable hunger. Devoted Mestra suggests using her new gift to help her father. But if his hunger is bottomless, how much will he take from her? Soon she must decide: will she keep helping her father survive, or finally break free? A jewel-like tale of human fallibility, Mestra confirms Madeline Miller as our high priestess of mythology"--

"In this sister volume to Elphie, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wicked Gregory Maguire shares the eagerly awaited origin story of Galinda, the pink-clad, effervescent, and popular favorite character. Who was Glinda the Good Witch before she floated down in her bubble to greet Dorothy? Who was Glinda before she became Elphaba Thropp's magnetic and popular roommate at Shiz University? Well, before then, she was Galinda. With a 'ga.' The youngest of four children in a high-born family down on their luck, Galinda is both pampered and ignored. Her natural grace promises to elevate her in the district dance competitions--but these efforts distract her from seeing the growing resentments of local merchants who disapprove of her family's business strategies. Enmired in the self-satisfactions and unnamed timidities of childhood, Galinda finds in herself neither canniness nor the need to cultivate it. However, as her father deftly pivots around the snares and nets laid for him by his competitors, Galinda begins to dance toward a life that might lift her above her proud, if hardscrabble, childhood. Galinda reveals the girl behind the bubbly, shallow cliché--offering fans of Wicked their first richer glimpse into the life of a beloved and iconic character"--

"Dr. Ian Greyson does not condone violence. He does not condone biting directly into a KitKat bar. And he certainly doesn't condone calling one of his patients a vampire. And yet in chocolate-town Hershey, Pennsylvania, that is exactly what happens. Ian absorbs misery for a living. He treats denture-throwing widows and calico cat smugglers at his strip-mall therapy practice, spending most of his days wondering which supernatural deity he betrayed enough to end up here. But one day, in the Walmart beside his office, a child wielding a lollipop tells him one of his patients is a vampire. It's absurd--a joke, a byproduct of a child's overactive imagination--until a body shows up drained of blood. And his newest patient is Hershey's favorite suspect. Years after a jury acquitted Alexandra Abrams of heinous crimes, public imagination has made her a monster again. Her eerie, ethereal presence does little to help. Ian is seduced by her ability to soothe the ache he has mistaken for a personality. But he quit forensic psychiatry because he was too attracted to the dangerous. Is he defending a wrongfully accused monster, or simply obsessed with one? And if not her, which one of his patients is a vampire?" --

Missy Cooke's parents divorced when she was young. While her mother did her best to make ends meet, her father devoted his life to work and his new family. Missy only knew him from afar. He was distant and aloof. But when he came to visit, his light shone bright. He was Silicon Valley tech titan Marty Cooke. Now an adult, with tech world aspirations of her own, Missy's life is a constant negotiation between her own desires and the towering expectations of her father. Then a devastating diagnosis forces Marty to step down from his tech empire, ipryy, and he doesn't choose a seasoned executive to take his place. He chooses Missy. From the glittering galas of the French Riviera to the hidden realities of ipryy's global operations, Missy's journey of self-discovery becomas a battle for the soul of the company. Can she forge her own path and prove her worth, or will she crumble under the weight of her father's shadow?

"Nineteen-year-old Boyd Sopal has the family farm in his blood and a future tied to his inherited line of work but lately a neighbor with a vendetta against the Sopals has been cutting fences and spraying orange dust, impacting Sopal's organic operation. As Boyd is drawn into the crosshairs of the feud between his father and the neighbor, the arrival of an itinerant family across the road further complicates his loyalties. Drawn to the enigmatic daughter, Maggie, Boyd finds himself caught in a dangerous collision of worlds. When a violent confrontation between Maggie's protective brother and volatile father ends in a desperate act of bloodshed, Boyd is forced to make a harrowing choice. To protect the woman he loves and her traumatized brother, he consigns a dark secret to the fast-moving currents of the Black River. But the river is an unpredictable witness. As the past threatens to surface, Boyd and Maggie must navigate a landscape of guilt, racial tension, and family legacy. From the rural farming district to the remote wilderness of the Upper Peninsula and the furthest reaches of Northern Ontario, they are pursued by the shadows of what they've done and the terrifying possibility that some secrets can never be truly washed away." --

"Lydia Millet's vibrant, fast-moving double novel Fair Ones follows two Brooklyn women in their forties reeling from the sudden and baffling death of their friend Clair. Fair, Mara's account, opens in the wake of initial shock as she and Jen come to grips with the enigma of Clare's killing. Ones, told from Jen's point of view, picks up a year later as she and Mara wrestle with new relationships and old secrets. In this dialogue-driven, funny-sad fiction of companionship and solitude, Millet dazzles with dry wit and sharp prose. The narrator's inner and outer conversations, and their ongoing entanglement with the memory of Clair, explore the ways we create and define ourselves through others. Fair Ones is a love song to the intricate annoyances of families both chosen and unchosen--and to the banality, bombast, and humble beauties of midlife friendships"--

"Lucy Reid is a sex columnist whose views on relationships aren't exactly optimistic. She empowers her readers to embrace their sexuality and challenge the idea that you need a partner to be happy--until her editor points out that her audience is mostly coupled up... and maybe it's time for something (or someone) new. To buy herself time, Lucy impulsively claims that she's started a new relationship she can write about. Enter Marshall Oakley. Marshall is the new senior news writer at Lucy's company. When they meet at a work event, he reveals that his ex of nine years is getting married, and he needs a plus-one to keep his family off his back. They agree to fake date until after the wedding--Lucy can write about finding 'the one' before proving relationships don't solve everything when they 'break up,' and Marshall gets a no-strings date to show off to his friends, family, and his ex. But as they spend more time together, the lines blur and each begins to reevaluate their views on love. As fear gives way to misunderstandings, can they find the courage to rewrite their story with a happily ever after?"--

"1961. The world is on the brink of nuclear war. Empires are crumbling. And in Barcelona, chaos is unleashed when a rogue officer of the East German Stasi attempts to blackmail a pair of struggling arms dealers. The secret--thirty tons of stolen gold hidden in an icebound wilderness at the end of the world. Mike Fowler is a former Navy salvage diver and OSS assassin. Anton Voss is an expatriate German scientist whose past grows darker the closer anyone looks. Once they might have been enemies, yet the two share an inseparable bond: They have saved each other's lives. But all of that is put at risk when Mike discovers Anton standing over a midnight visitor with a gun in his hand. Now they're on the run, allied with gangsters, pursued by the CIA, Israeli intelligence, and a shadowy cabal bent on creating an invisible empire. The trail leads from the rain-soaked docks of Marseilles to the futuristic towers of Caracas and the ruins of a secret island laboratory in Argentine Patagonia. The only way for Mike Fowler to save his oldest friends, and the woman he loves, is to unlock a decades-old mystery buried in his partner's Nazi past . . . before it destroys them all."--Book jacket.

From American Girl and New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis comes the next chapter of Samantha Parkington's story--now an adult searching for justice after her legacy is stolen in New York City in 1920. It's 1920, and 25-year-old Samantha Parkington is working hard to educate women in New York about suffrage and encourage them to vote in their first presidential election that fall. But when Samantha's large inheritance, including her childhood Mount Bedford home, is stolen in a shocking scheme, she goes from socialite to shop girl overnight and experiences a very different side of New York City living in a boarding house. Searching for clues regarding the theft of her inheritance, she infiltrates the business of a notorious criminal in New York City. Determined as ever, Samantha will do whatever it takes to find answers and save her family's legacy.

The biggest and best collection of American flash fiction ever assembled reveals the very big imaginative possibilities of very short stories Featuring 100 genre-spanning and form-bending stories, spanning 160+ years; includes literary fiction, speculative fiction, noir, satire, surrealism, humor, horror, parables, fables, and more. This landmark Library of America anthology presents the best of a century and a half of American storytelling and literary innovation--in 100 bite-sized pieces, from 100 wildly diverse and distinguished authors. Celebrating the artful brevities of flash fiction from Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Zora Neale Hurston to Donald Barthelme, Lydia Davis, and Diane Williams, it recovers some of the little-understood history of the very short story before "flash fiction" was invented, and it gathers the brilliant work of a score of emerging contemporary writers, too. Here are: Winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Award (Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Tim O'Brien) Hard-boiled crime writers (Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis) Speculative fiction writers (H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, Damon Knight, Sofia Samatar) Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, Langston Hughes) Surrealists; prose poets; memoirists; experimental writers; and many more, all of them with stories that reveal worlds and startle the imagination in the space of a few pages. Introduced by acclaimed writer, critic, and anthologist David L. Ulin, who explores the origins and creative range of the form, the collection also includes notes on the stories and contributors, and an index.

"The Chapmans do Christmas the way they do everything: impeccably, expensively, and with the unshakable belief that good lighting can conceal bad blood. Their annual Christmas card may look picture-perfect, but behind the polite smiles there's a storm brewing. This year, at their grand lakefront cottage on Mackinac Island, a snowstorm traps generations of Chapmans--and their schemes--under one roof. Chris Chapman is on the verge of losing everything: his father's trust, his role at the helm of the family business, and his wife's respect. Kat Chapman is already fed up with hosting her critical, stuck-up in-laws and their impossibly inflexible holiday traditions. Her solution? Invite her working-class parents--born and bred Islanders--for Christmas, much to the horror of the Chapmans, whose rule that 'We do not share Christmas with other people' is about to be broken. As the snow piles up, so do the grievances: their children--fiercely liberal Leah and conservative golden-boy Chip--are locked in a battle of wits, Chris's vaguely corrupt brother Cormac and his calculating trophy wife are stirring the pot, and Kat's mother is holding onto a secret that could upend the entire game"--

In the cloisters of Golgotha House, a mere binocular's-squint away from Buckshaw, a nun lies dead. When her fellow sisters prepare her corpse for burial, they discover that their companion has been living a shocking lie for years. The truth about her past, and the dark reasons she harbored for escaping it, are impossible to fathom. Charged with cracking this mystery is the firm of Arthur W. Dogger & Associates (Discreet investigations) -- consisting, of course, of the inimitable young Flavia de Luce and her faithful partner-in-detection Dogger. Working under the eye of a glowering Mother Superior, Flavia and Dogger must uncover a decades-old crime and a secret that lies an ocean away -- along with a trail of deception that lies closer to home.

"When eighteen-year-old Christian Shaw is found dead in a park, the city of Edinburgh is stunned--and the shock only deepens when police charge her best friends, Eliza Lawson and Isobel Smyth, with the murder. As social media explodes in a tizzy of theories and headlines scream for justice, rumors of bullying are overshadowed by something more wicked and frightening: whispers of dark rituals, feverish obsession, and a teenage pact gone wrong. When the trial begins, everyone in Edinburgh clamors for a front-row ticket to the show: to look upon the murderous Eliza and Isobel with their own eyes. Everyone, that is, but Matthew Phillips, a respected heart surgeon picked for the jury. But, as the trial unfolds--and the girls' lawyers offer a surprising and unsettling defense--the reluctant Matthew finds himself questioning everything: the motives, the evidence, even his own judgement. Then he begins to have strange visions of terrifying things--hallucinations he tells himself. After all, witchcraft isn't real . . . or is it? Who is telling the truth? Who can be trusted? And what really happened to Christian Shaw?"--

2010. Jennie is working as a runner in the Diamond District when a friend's sudden death leaves her with a cryptic note: "Not Safe." Her search for answers leads her to an antique jewelry box, a clue to a century-old mystery and the legend of the Midnight Diamond--a rare blue gem rumored to bring ruin to all who possess it. As Jennie is pulled deeper into a world of secrets and danger, she realizes she is not just chasing a lost treasure; she is uncovering a story that was meant to stay buried. 1910. On an ocean liner bound for New York, heiress Marcella Porter returns home after being disgraced by scandal in London. Her path collides with a charismatic nobleman and the magnificent Midnight Diamond, which she unknowingly smuggles into the city. Mesmerized by its brilliance, Marcella feels an irresistible pull toward the diamond, and when the glittering façade of her charmed life begins to crack, Marcella must decide whether the Midnight Diamond is her salvation--or her doom. Can Jennie break the centuries-old curse before it brings more ruin? Inspired by history's most captivating gemstone, The Cursed Diamond is a thrilling mystery about fate, obsession, and the deadly costs of ambition.

From beloved horror maven Alma Katsu comes a terrifying reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray for the internet age. Beauty doesn't fade. It feeds. Dorothy Wagner has spent her whole life wanting nothing more than to be seen. But after failing to make her mark as an influencer, she takes a job working for a brilliant coder whose company is focused on cutting-edge deepfake technology. And there, in secret, is where she creates her salvation. Isabella. An impossibly gorgeous girl who takes social media by storm. Dorothy's artistry is brilliant, and Isabella seems so real that she garners millions of followers. But everybody knows overnight success doesn't just happen. And when someone gets a little too close to the truth, a violent confrontation sends Dorothy on the run, forcing her to confront what she's willing to sacrifice to keep her secrets. A modern reimagining of a classic tale, Alma Katsu's Incarnate is an illuminating, haunting tale of algorithmic worship and beauty that can kill.

It's time to pay the Piper. Our world cracked open like an egg. Power burst out, and with it, nine monstrous Banes ready to destroy everything. The powerful Core fae finally slayed them all, but each Bane left a Plague to punish us. And that's not the only thing they left behind. I'm half Bane, half fae and wholly hated. Survival means enduring every vicious glare and cursed outbreak. Until one day, a Plague descends upon my city that means certain death. Then he comes. The Pied Piper. He rids my city of the Plague, but it comes at a cost. One hundred and thirty people are taken as payment. Including me. I don't know what he's going to do to us, but I know I have to get home. My family's lives depend on it. But the Piper won't let me go, and something wicked stirs between us. The sweet scent in my veins beckons him, while the seductive lure of his magic sinks under my skin. I have to escape before it's too late. Because if I don't, it's not just my heart at risk... But the entire world.

The brand-new Miss Marple mystery from Lucy Foley, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List and The Midnight Feast. High in the Swiss Alps, accessible only by a single, winding railway, stands the luxurious Grand Alpine Hotel. With glorious mountain views and exclusive access to powdery slopes, it draws guests from far and wide. The notorious actress. The high-flying politician. The society wife. The reckless friend. The shrewd doctor. But not everyone is here for a winter holiday. Beneath the champagne and furs, dark histories simmer; old grudges emerge like cracks in the ice. And someone is watching from the shadows. A polite, unassuming woman with an extraordinary mind: Miss Marple. When a body is found and a blizzard cuts off all escape, only Miss Marple can connect the clues before the killer strikes again. Because it isn't a question of who has a motive, but who's next.

"He vowed to never fall in love...but some vows are meant to be broken. Famed goalkeeper Noah Wilson doesn't do relationships or complications. The only thing the grumpy single dad wants is to do his job and spend more time with his daughter. Unfortunately, his bachelor status has made it impossible to find the right nanny for her. With the World Cup looming and a string of fired nannies in his wake, he has no choice but to hire the last person he wants close to his orbit. Carina is too stubborn and far too appealing for her own good, but she's also a natural with his daughter. And the way his heart skips a beat whenever she's around? That's nothing more than a coincidence. He's sure of it. Carina Vu has a problem. She's worked multiple jobs and saved up for years to fulfill her childhood dream of visiting Antarctica, but just when she's close, an unexpected emergency wipes her account clean. Now, she's back to square one. The clock is ticking, and she needs another job ASAP. Her best (and only) option is to nanny for Noah, the brooding athlete whom she's convinced hates her. But the more time she spends with him and his adorable daughter, the more cracks she sees in his gruff exterior. And the man underneath all that grumpiness? He's enough to make her rethink everything-including what (and who) it is that she actually wants"-- Provided by publisher.

Explores a fantasy archipelago where magic, true names, dragons, and human destiny are deeply intertwined. Follows the journeys of wizards, rulers, and ordinary people as they confront power, identity, mortality, and social change across multiple novels and stories. Examines themes of balance, responsibility, gender, and transformation within one of the foundational works of modern fantasy literature.

"A single waltz changed everything. But now they must try to recapture that magic for a lifetime in New York Times bestseller Mary Balogh's newest book in the Ravenswood series. The youngest Ware daughter, Stephanie, has always harbored secret affection for the best friend of her brother. In her eyes, Bertrand Lamarr, the Viscount Watford, is perfect. For many years, she thought herself not perfect at all. When he surprised her by asking her to save a waltz for him, she panicked--and refused him in the unkindest words. Stephanie's guilt over her behavior is such that she now dreads seeing him as she inevitably must at the Christmas family reunion she is attending. She wants to hide from him, but what she doesn't know is that Bertrand has always admired from afar and is determined to overcome her apparent dislike of him and win his waltz. For he believes there is magic between them, and they will discover it can conquer all their regrets and fears if they can but share one dance together"--