Family Life Thriller

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK When a father goes missing, his family’s desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another in this thrilling page-turner, a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the...

When Callie rents a beach cottage in Whitstable, she doesn't expect for its owner to be glamorous influencer Vanessa Lowe. Vanessa has it all. A beautiful home, a loyal husband, three perfect children, and a growing number of adoring online fans. Callie has long admired her world from afar. But when Vanessa invites her in, the closer Callie looks, the more she suspects that there's more to Vanessa than meets the eye. So when Vanessa's son disappears, Callie must question everything she knows.

It’s the new normal at the Garber household in Connecticut: Glen, a contractor, has seen his business shaken by the housing crisis, and now his wife, Sheila, is taking a business course at night to increase her chances of landing a good-paying job. But she should have been home by now. Waiting for Sheila’s return, with their eight-year-old daughter sleeping soundly, Glen soon finds his worst fears confirmed: Sheila and two others have been killed in a car accident. Adding to the tragedy, the police claim Sheila was responsible. Glen knows it’s impossible.

Suzette knows her clever and manipulative seven-year-old daughter doesn’t love her. She can see the hatred and jealousy in her eyes. And as Hanna’s subtle acts of cruelty threaten to tear her and her husband apart, Suzette fears her very life may be in grave danger....

Linda Martin understands what is to be lonely: her parents died when she was young, and she was raised in an orphanage. When she is hired as a governess to the orphaned young Philippe, Comte de Valmy, Linda finds a kindred spirit in the lonely little boy. But Philippe is the heir to a vast estate in Savoy, and his dangerously handsome uncle may be willing to kill to ensure that Philippe never inherits it.

When Diya Burman's best friend, Angie, dies unexpectedly, it feels like her own life is falling apart. Grief costs her friends, family and even her job. But that's ok, because now she's got a new job: working at Slough & Sons, a family firm that deals in cleaning up after the recently deceased. Old love letters. Porcelain dolls. Hoarded trinkets. Clearing away the remnants of other people's lives, Diya begins to see things. Horrible things. Things that get harder and harder to write off as merely her grieving imagination.

With his marriage on the rocks and his life in shambles, washed-up true-crime writer Lucas Graham is desperate for a comeback, one more shot at the best-selling success he once enjoyed. His chance comes when he's promised exclusive access to death row inmate Jeffrey Halcomb, the notorious cult leader and mass murderer who's ready to break his silence after 30 years, and who contacted Lucas personally from his maximum-security cell.

To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose; it is summer in Scotland Street (as it always is) and for the habitués of Edinburgh's favourite street, some extraordinary adventures lie in waiting. For the impossibly vain Bruce Anderson - he of the clove-scented hair gel - it may finally be time to settle down, and surely it can only be a question of picking the lucky winner from the hordes of his admirers. The Duke of Johannesburg is keen to take his flight of fancy, a microlite seaplane, from the drawing board to the skies.

The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a worksite cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. In searching for it, he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption.

In the course of her everyday work, career-driven assistant district attorney Nina Frost prosecutes child molesters and works determinedly to ensure that a legal system with too many loopholes keeps these criminals behind bars. But when her own five-year-old son, Nathaniel, is traumatized by a sexual assault, Nina and her husband, Caleb, a quiet and methodical stone mason, are shattered, ripped apart by an enraging sense of helplessness in the face of a futile justice system that Nina knows all too well.

Some places are too good to be true. Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map. In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things. After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother's home in Wink, New Mexico. And the closer Mona gets to her mother's past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different....

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles.

Flo lives an eccentric life - she travels with a popular circus in which the main acts star orphaned children with secret shape-shifting abilities. Once Flo turns 16, she must perform, but she's not ready. While practicing jumping a flaming hurdle in a clearing beside the circus, she spots a dark figure in the trees and fears he saw her shift. The news sends the circus into a panic.

For Tess Kendrick, a junior at the elite Hardwicke School in Washington, DC, fixing runs in the family. But Tess has another legacy, too, one that involves power and the making of political dynasties. When Tess is asked to run a classmate's campaign for student council, she agrees. But when the candidates are children of politicians, even a high school election can involve life-shattering secrets. Meanwhile, Tess' guardian has also taken on an impossible case, as a terrorist attack calls into doubt who can - and cannot - be trusted on Capitol Hill.

Jenna Fischer's Hollywood journey began at the age of 22 when she moved to Los Angeles from her hometown of St. Louis. She was determined, confident, and ready to work hard. So, what could go wrong? Uh, basically everything. The path to being a professional actor was so much more vast and competitive than she’d imagined. It would be eight long years before she landed her iconic role on The Office, nearly a decade of frustration, rejection, and doubt. If only she’d had a handbook for the aspiring actor. Or, better yet, someone to show her the way. Jenna wants to be that person for you.

Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too. A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most and how an innocent baby finally saved her.

. With the rise of the Berlin Wall, 12-year-old Gerta finds her family divided overnight. She, her mother, and her brother, Fritz, live on the eastern side, controlled by the Soviets. Her father and middle brother, who had gone west in search of work, cannot return home. Gerta knows it is dangerous to watch the wall, to think forbidden thoughts of freedom, yet she can't help herself. She sees the East German soldiers with their guns trained on their own citizens; she, her family, her neighbors, and her friends are prisoners in their own city.

One unbearable mistake at the edge of the forest. In a moment of crisis, Ellis Abbey leaves her daughter, Viola, unattended - for just a few minutes. But when she returns, Viola is gone. A breaking point in an already fractured marriage, Viola’s abduction causes Ellis to disappear as well - into grief, guilt, and addiction. Convinced she can only do more harm to her family, Ellis leaves her husband and young sons, burying her desperate ache for her children deeper with every step into the mountain wildernesses she treks alone.

Young Jude Brighton has been missing for three days, and while the search for him is in full swing in the small town of Deer Valley, Oregon, the locals are starting to lose hope. They're well aware that the first 48 hours are critical and after that, the odds usually point to a worst-case scenario. And despite Stevie Clark's youth, he knows that, too; he's seen the cop shows. He knows what each ticking moment may mean for Jude, his cousin and best friend.

As the Great War continues to take its toll, headstrong 21-year-old Emily Bryce is determined to contribute to the war effort. She is convinced by a cheeky and handsome Australian pilot that she can do more, and it is not long before she falls in love with him and accepts his proposal of marriage. When he is sent back to the front, Emily volunteers as a “land girl,” tending to the neglected grounds of a large Devonshire estate. It’s here that Emily discovers the long-forgotten journals of a medicine woman who devoted her life to her herbal garden.