An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she's a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall--until she's summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother's death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic,...

Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl into believing her baby was the anti-Christ. When the girl came to her senses and called the police, the Angels committed suicide and mother and baby disappeared. Now, true crime author Amanda Bailey is looking to revive her career by writing a book on the case. The Alperton baby has turned eighteen; finding them will be the true-crime scoop of the year. But rival...

Brynn Cornell has to be stuck in a nightmare. Just last week, she was riding high as cohost of the popular morning show Sunup. She's America's Ray of Sunshine--the girl-next-door beauty who drives up TV ratings while never exuding anything but her trademark positivity and poise. All it took was one huge on-air mistake to expose her snarky side to the world and make it all come crumbling down. Now she's back in her hometown of Adelaide Springs, Colorado,...

Investigative crime journalist Signe Gates's life became a nightmare the day she was kidnapped and drugged. After forty-eight missing hours she woke to a blur of unsettling memories and a warning from her unknown abductors: tell anyone what happened and they'll die. Two years later she is haunted by what she knows she did. When an informant tells her two men recently found dead in Yosemite are connected to her missing hours, she has no choice but...

When a young nanny is found dead in mysterious circumstances, new mom, Tash, is intrigued. She has been searching for a story to launch her career as a freelance journalist. But she has also been searching for something else--new friends to help her navigate motherhood. She sees them at her son's new playgroup. The other mothers. A group of sleek, sophisticated women who live in a neighborhood of tree-lined avenues and stunning houses. The sort of...

Sal Cannon's relationship is crumbling, and her career in journalism hits a low point after it's revealed that her profile of a playwright is full of inaccuracies. When she reads a short story by Martin Keller-- a much older author she met at a literary event years ago-- she discovers the story is about her and the moment they met. When Sal learns the story is excerpted from his unpublished novel, she reaches out to the story's editor, and learns...

Manhattan, 1923. Scandalous flapper Dot King is found dead in her Midtown apartment, a bottle of chloroform beside her and a fortune in jewels missing. Dot's headline-making murder grips the city. It also draws a clutch of lovers, parasites, and justiceseekers into one of the city's most mesmerizing mysteries. Among them: Daily News crime reporter Julia Harpman, chasing the story while navigating a male-dominated industry; righteous NYPD detective...

Nineteen-year-old William "Shoe" Shumacher, a cub crime reporter at the Seattle Daily Star, has just arrived from Kansas City, Mo. After following a tip from Det. Ernie Blunt, Shoe hits it big with his first story: an account of former boxer Frankie Ray's murder at the Pom Pom Club, where members of Seattle's elite illegally drink and gamble. The Pom Pom's owner, well-connected gangster George Miller, is accused of shooting Frankie over a debt, but...

Colette 'Coco' Weber has relocated to her Catalina Island home, where, twenty years before, she was the sole survivor of a deadly home invasion. All Coco wants is to see her aunt Gwen, get as far away from her ex as possible, and get back to her craft--writing obituaries. Thankfully, her college best friend, Maddy, owns the local paper and has a job sure to keep Coco busy, considering the number of elderly folks who are dying on the island. But as...

In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is 'the last great civil rights fight.' Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word ("stupid") and encouraged to report parents who...