At first, Jean Suttman thought she had died and gone to Heaven when she was granted the opportunity to study in Rome. But the body that's lying in the ancient subterranean Temple of Mithra-the murdered corpse of a repulsive and disliked fellow student-isn't her idea of heavenly. Now she is truly frightened, not just because small "accidents" seem to be occurring around her with disturbing regularity. It's the ever-increasing certainty that someone,...

"How can you start fresh when everything you know is a lie? After suffering a sudden traumatic loss, historical novelist Susannah Gilmore decides to uproot her life--and the lives of her two children--and leave their beloved Brooklyn for the little town of Eastwood, New Hampshire. While the trio adjusts to their new surroundings, Susannah is captivated by an unexpected find in her late parents' home: an unsigned love note addressed to her mother,...

"What should be a cozy and fun-filled weekend deep in the English countryside takes a sinister turn in Ruth Ware's suspenseful, compulsive, and darkly twisted psychological thriller. Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her "nest" of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. When a friend she hasn't seen or spoken to in years unexpectedly invites Nora (Lee?) to a weekend away in an...

"Based on the life of George Eliot, famed author of Middlemarch, this captivating account of Eliot's passions and tribulations explores the nature of love in its many guises. Dinitia Smith's spellbinding novel recounts George Eliot's honeymoon in Venice in June 1880 following her marriage to a handsome young man twenty years her junior. When she agreed to marry John Walter Cross, Eliot was recovering from the death of George Henry Lewes, her beloved...

For Annie Barnes, going home to Middle River means dealing with truths long hidden. But it is a journey she knows she must take if she is to put to rest, once and for all, her misgivings about her mother's recent death. To an outsider, Middle River is a picture-perfect New Hampshire town. But Annie grew up there, and she knows all its secrets - just like her idol, Grace Metalious, author of the infamous novel Peyton Place, which laid a small town's...

"The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love. Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage...

Florence Darrow is a low-level publishing employee who believes that she's destined to be a famous writer. When she stumbles into a job the assistant to the brilliant, enigmatic novelist known as Maud Dixon -- whose true identity is a secret -- it appears that the universe is finally providing Florence's big chance. The arrangement seems perfect. Maud Dixon (whose real name, Florence discovers, is Helen Wilcox) can be prickly, but she is full of pointed...

"PI Sunny Randall's landlord and former client, Melanie Joan Hall, is being threatened and blackmailed. But as Sunny looks in to the identity of Melanie Joan's stalker, she learns that much of the author's past is a product of her imagination, and her loyalty to her old friend is challenged as she searches for the truth. At the same time, Sunny springs into action when her aging father is threatened by a lawyer with a desire to settle an old score....