What do you do when the only skill you ever learned was how to kill, when you’re among the best of the best, but they tell you you can’t do that anymore? What do you do when they send you home from Afghanistan and tell you to get a job, like everybody else?

But you’re not like everybody else.

After eight years as a trooper in the SAS, fighting the secret, untold wars in the deserts and the jungles of the world, Harry Bauer has been kicked out for attempting to assassinate Mohammed Ben Amini, the Butcher of Al-Landy. He’s been sent home, to New York, where he was raised an orphan ‘til he was old enough to split and join the special forces.

On March 15, 1987, police in Anchorage, Alaska, arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman’s brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted.

After an intense investigation, the police focused on a principal suspect: twenty-three-year-old Kirby Anthoney, a troubled drifter who had turned to his uncle, Nancy’s husband John, for help and a place to stay. Little did John know that the nephew he took in was a murderous sociopath.

These shocking, tragic events stunned Anchorage residents and motivated the Major Crimes Unit of the city’s police department to get everything right. Feeling the heat, Kirby bolted for the Canadian border.

It starts as a prank—a way for teenage counselors to blow off steam after a long summer at Camp Horseshoe on the Oregon coast. Jo-Beth Chancellor wants to give Monica O’Neal a little scare. Monica has it coming, and no one will get hurt—so what could go wrong? Everything.

Twenty years later, Lucas Dalton, a senior detective with the sheriff’s department, is investigating human remains discovered in a cavern on the former campgrounds. Lucas knows the spot well. His preacher father ran the camp, and Lucas worked there that infamous summer when two girls went missing. No one knows what happened, though with a dangerous convict on the loose, gossip was rife that they were kidnapped, or worse.

Now seven former female counselors are coming back to the small Oregon town—among them, Bernadette Alsace, the woman Lucas never forgot.

Annapurna I is the name given to the 8,100-meter mountain that ranks among the most forbidding in the Himalayan chain. Dangerous not just for its extreme height but for a long and treacherous approach, its summit proved unreachable until 1950, when a group of French mountaineers made a mad dash for its peak. They became the first men to accomplish the feat, doing so without oxygen tanks or any of the modern equipment that contemporary climbers use. The adventure nearly cost them their lives.

Maurice Herzog dictated this firsthand account of the remarkable trek from a hospital bed as he recovered from injuries sustained during the climb. An instant bestseller, it remains one of the most famous mountaineering books of all time, and an enduring testament to the power of the human spirit.

Once upon a time, a wealthy merchant had three daughters. When his business failed, he moved his daughters to the countryside. The youngest daughter, Beauty, is fascinated by the thorny stems of a mysterious plant that overwhelms their neglected cottage. She tends the plant until it blossoms with the most beautiful flowers the sisters have ever seen—roses.

Admiring the roses, an old woman tells Beauty, “Roses are for love.” And she speaks of a sorcerers’ battle many years ago that left a beast in an enchanted palace, and a curse concerning a family of three sisters . . .