A novel on an unusual household in our day and age, three generations of women living together in Boston. They are a lawyer who owns the house, her ailing mother--the mother had no time for the lawyer before she fell ill--and the lawyer's daughter, unemployed and on drugs.

"Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in Biological Science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, preoccupies her thoughts. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan's office despite herself. Surrounded by an ex, a best friend, a boyfriend, and a husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges, and obsessions. The six are...

"On the heels of a difficult break-up and a devastating diagnosis, Shakespearian scholar Lizzie Delford decides to take one last lavish vacation on Elba, the sun-kissed island off the Italian coast, with her best friend and his movie-star boyfriend. Once settled into a luxurious seaside resort, Lizzie has to make big decisions about her future, and she needs the one thing she may be running out of: time. She leaves the yacht-owners and celebrities...

"In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident -- which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two people who thought they were deep into the winter of their lives. Richard Bowmaster -- a 60-year-old human rights scholar -- hits the car of Evelyn Ortega -- a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala -- in the middle of a snowstorm in Brooklyn. What at first seems just a small inconvenience takes an unforeseen...

"I should imagine this was murder, too, because it would be very difficult to build yourself into a heap of sandbags and then die…" In the blackout conditions of a wintry London night, amateur sleuth Agnes Kinghof and a young air-raid warden have stumbled upon a corpse stowed in the walls of their street's bomb shelter. As the police begin their investigation, the night is interrupted once again when Agnes' upstairs neighbour, Mrs. Sibley is terrorised...

Precocious Lois. Pretty Carly May. At twelve years old, they were kidnapped, driven across the country, and held in an Adirondack hunting lodge for two months. These two girls who previously did not know each other shared an experience that would shape all their days to come. Now Lois teaches British literature at a small college in upstate New York. Carly May is an actress in Los Angeles. When a movie script apparently based on their experience surfaces,...

Struggling with uncertainties about her NYPD detective boyfriend's marriage proposal, college professor Alison Bergeron witnesses the murder of an unpopular blogger and subsequently realizes that the case is more complicated than it appears.

"From NPR correspondent Mary Louise Kelly comes a heart-pounding story about fear, family secrets, and one woman's hunt for answers about the murder of her parents. Caroline Cashion, a professor of French literature at Georgetown University, is stunned when an MRI reveals that she has a bullet lodged near the base of her skull. It makes no sense: she has never been shot. She has no entry wound. No scar. When she confronts her parents, they initially...