He warned me he was dangerous, but I refused to listen.

Why should I?

He’s just a stranger I met on my flight to Rome after running out on my wedding.

A handsome stranger.

A mysterious, alluring stranger with an Italian accent so toe-curling it should be illegal.

Dante is everything my cheating ex-fiancé isn’t.
Which is why I make a proposition I never would have in my former life.

It was just supposed to be a fling to celebrate my newfound freedom.
It wasn’t supposed to make me question everything.

Maybe I should have dug deeper into who he was.
Maybe I should have asked more questions.
Maybe I should have realized the truth that was staring at me through his familiar eyes.

What truths lie in the black void between the stars?

It’s late September 2019 when a young astronomer working at the Haleakala Space Observatory in Maui, Hawaii, accidentally spots a black dot in the night sky that is occulting the stars that lie behind it. The Earth-sized black sphere is in our solar system and is calculated to be closely trailing Earth by only seventy-five million miles…on the same ecliptic plane.

NASA launches an unmanned probe to Earth’s nearest neighbor, given the name ILK-87b. The images coming back from the black planet both shock and amaze those inside the halls of NASA. Curiosity, fear, and dread, overcome insiders as infrastructure is detected on the black mass. Scientists are confounded since infrared telescopes are not detecting a heat signature. After a secret meeting of the G8 world leaders, an international manned-mission is scheduled.

The Santas are striking, and it’s costing me my job.

Good thing I’m marketable, even to the wrong guy.

My best friend’s twin from high school is in need of someone with my talents to pull off the big opening at his ski resort in Vail.

The handsome playboy with more one-night stands than the local motel happens to be my childhood sweetheart.

In his mind, I’m the one that got away. Right, buddy.

If I recall it right, it was him that ran like his ass was on fire while I nursed a broken heart.

He’s looking for a Christmas miracle to make his billion-dollar investment shine like the top of a tree, and he’s staring right at me.

A job is a job though, and I’m determined to show up and show off on this one.

For DI John Tunny having enemies is an occupational hazard though he knows the one adversary that can never be defeated is time.
When young Stevie Foster is spirited away, he knows that they have to find him and find him fast.
Though Tunny has been in the job long enough to know that happy endings are never guaranteed and when a body is found dumped in local wetland he feels the weight of his failings, another scar hacked into his soul.
Yet this is only the start of a nightmare that will thrust John Tunny into the twisted world of a merciless killer whose brutality is incomprehensible.
For Tunny hating someone capable of such atrocities is a not an issue, in fact, the fury he feels drives him deeper into the abyss as he tries to track the monstrous killer before he can strike again. Though as he delves deeper into the horror he slowly comes to realise that his ironclad convictions could well be built on shifting sand.

Graham, Lord Blakemore, was believed to be lost at sea as a boy. While his mother, Lady Agatha, has never given up hope of finding her son again, others—eager for the title and the wealth that accompanies it—have been conspiring to have him declared dead against Lady Agatha’s wishes. Her only ally in the house is her late husband’s ward, Miss Beatrice Marlowe. But when a dark-haired stranger arrives on their doorstep claiming to be the lost heir to Castle Black, the plots and schemes of those who would have the castle for themselves take a dark and even more sinister turn. An orphan when she came into the care of the late Lord Blakemore, Castle Black is the only home Beatrice has ever known. Its occupants are her family.

I met him in college, and I fell in love.
It was a beautiful love, pure and perfect.
Max quickly became everything I could have ever wanted.
He was the jock, the popular guy, and I was just Belle.
But he made me so much more.
He gave me everything I could have ever wanted in life.
But one night, one accident. It changed everything.
The man I loved. The man I thought I knew…disappeared.
I can’t tell you the exact moment he fell out of love with me. But he did.
I wish I could tell you there was hope.
That I hung on. That I fought.
I wish I could tell you that we fixed it.
That happily ever after was just out of our grips.
It wasn’t. I ran. In the dead of the night, I packed my things and I left him.

Two childhood rivals reconnect during jury duty—and are forced to navigate their complex feelings for one another—in this heartwarming novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber.

Caroline Lomax is eager to exercise her civic duty and report for jury duty. However, when she sees a familiar face on her first day, she is near certain that she has come face to face with Ted Thomasson, the thorn in her side throughout high school—and the last person she’d want as a fellow juror.

Ted still seems to relish in making Caroline squirm, but he shocks Caroline when he declares that he’s always harbored feelings for her. Just as she attempts to make sense of it all, they’re both selected for the same case . . . and as things intensify in and out of the courtroom, it becomes clear that Caroline has an enormous decision to make.

In a small Southern town where loyalty to family and to “your people” carries the weight of a sacred oath, defying those unspoken rules can be a deadly proposition. After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn’t being pushed around, he is being completely ignored. Even his beloved woods, his playground as a child and his sanctuary as he grew older, seem to be closing in on him, suffocating him.

Then Thomas Elgin moves in across the road, and Boady’s life begins to twist and turn. Coming to know the Elgins — a black family settling into a community where notions of “us” and “them” carry the weight of history — forces Boady to rethink his understanding of the world he’s taken for granted.

In a sleepy rural town in South Carolina, Dylan and Maggie Styles are a young couple in love, preparing eagerly for the birth of their first son. But events take a tragic turn in the delivery room, and their child is delivered stillborn. When Maggie hemorrhages and slips into a coma, Dylan slips into what can only be described as a walking coma, holding vigil at his beloved wife’s bedside.

Usually tough and self-reliant, an outdoorsman and a farmer, Dylan finds that everything he has known is suddenly thrown into doubt. Refusing to give up on Maggie’s recovery, a devastated Dylan takes a job as an English professor in order to pay for Maggie’s medical bills. Dylan connects with his students despite himself and offers hope to others amid his own disappointment and grief. As Dylan waits for some change in Maggie’s condition, he reflects on his life and hers.

Nicky Wells has two passions—her career as a hard-hitting TV news correspondent, and her fiancé, British aristocrat Charles Devereaux. Though Nicky has faced war zones, she is unable to face Charles’s tragic death. Then, three years later—while covering the protests in Tiananmen Square—she lets herself be seduced into a romantic interlude with a longtime friend, photographic journalist Cleeland Donovan. Now Nicky wonders if she’s ready to face a new future . . . until she spots a man who looks eerily like Charles.

Rushing headlong into a mystery that will take her from New York to London, Rome, and Madrid, Nicky finds herself unraveling evidence of Charles’s disturbing double life—and questioning everything she thought she knew about him, and herself.

Some places seem too beautiful to be touched by horror. Summit Lake, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is that kind of place, with charming stilt houses dotted along the pristine water. But two weeks ago, Becca Eckersley, a first-year law student, was brutally murdered in one of those houses. The daughter of a powerful attorney, Becca was hard-working, accomplished, and ambitious. Now, while the town reels with grief and shocked residents gather to share their theories, the police are baffled.

At first, investigative reporter Kelsey Castle thinks of the assignment as a fluff piece. But the savagery of the crime, and the determined efforts to keep the case quiet, all hint at something far more than a random attack by a stranger. As Kelsey digs deeper, pushing on despite danger and warnings, she feels a growing connection to the dead girl. And the more she learns about Becca’s friendships, her love life—and the secrets she was keeping—the more convinced she becomes that learning the truth about Becca could be the key to overcoming her own dark past…

As a spirit of nationalism inspired by Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership begins to sweep through China, the river gunship San Pablo is ordered to patrol the region and to protect US citizens. Jack Holman is a machinist aboard the San Pablo, who has joined the navy in order to avoid jail time. Because he is so fiercely independent, Jake remains a relative loner and is uncomfortable with navy protocol and discipline.

Holman’s independent mind chafes against military hierarchy and also ensures that he does not share his shipmates’ disdain for the Chinese. Instead, Holman is fascinated with the culture and the people that surround him and develops emotional bonds that prove quite thorny when the circumstances become more tumultuous and more dire.

We all have treasured possessions—a favorite pair of shoes, a much-beloved chair, an ever-expanding record collection. But sometimes, this emotional attachment to our belongings can spiral out of control and culminate into a condition called compulsive hoarding. From hobbyists and collectors to pack rats and compulsive shoppers—it is close to impossible for hoarders to relinquish their precious objects, even if it means that stuff takes over their lives and their homes.

According to psychologist Dr. Robin Zasio, our fascination with hoarding stems from the fact that most of us fall somewhere on the hoarding continuum. Even though it may not regularly interfere with our everyday lives, to some degree or another, many of us hoard.

Three essential works that redefined the art of journalism by “one of our sharpest and most trustworthy cultural observers” (The New York Times).

In these masterpieces of razor-sharp reportage, the National Book Award–winning and New York Times–bestselling author proves herself one of the premier essayists of the twentieth century, “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review).

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: America in the 1960s—a pivotal era of social change and generational divide. Here is Joan Didion on the “misplaced children” of Haight-Ashbury as well as John Wayne in Hollywood; folk singer Joan Baez and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes; the extremes of both Death Valley and Las Vegas. Named to Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books, this is “a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country” (The New York Times Book Review).