As children wage mock battles in the playground of Woodside Elementary School, two students, a little girl and boy, seem to vanish, last seen heading toward the woods behind the school. Hours pass and then only one of them, Adam, a nine-year-old boy with autism, is found alive, the sole witness to the girl’s murder. Barely verbal on the best of days, Adam has retreated into a silent world that Cara, his mother, knows only too well. With her community in shock and her son unable to help with the police investigation, Cara tries to decode the puzzling events.
When another child goes missing,
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In what is certain to be one of the most talked-about fiction debuts of the year, Yasmin Crowther paints a magnificent portrait of betrayal and retribution set against a backdrop of Iran’s tumultuous history, dramatic landscapes, and cultural beauty. The story begins on a blustery day in London, when Maryam Mazar’s dark secrets and troubled past surface violently with tragic consequences for her pregnant daughter, Sara. Burdened by guilt, Maryam leaves her comfortable English home for the remote village in Iran where she was raised and disowned by her father. When Sara decides to follow her, she learns the price that her mother had to pay for her freedom and of the love she left behind.
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Three wounds in a perfectly straight line was the bloody signature that marked victims from every corner of France who had been murdered at regular intervals over the course of thirty years. Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, is deeply and personally familiar with the case, and though others were always framed and convicted for these crimes, including his own brother, the Commissaire knows the true identity of the killer—and knows that the murderer died in 1987. All the more disturbing, then, is Adamsberg’s discovery one morning of a fresh murder with exactly the same profile. Stunned into action—and himself a suspect—Adamsberg must confront the mysterious return of an old,
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Hick is the story of Luli McMullen—feisty, precocious, and out on her own at 13. Luli is running away from Nebraska to Las Vegas, where she plans to escape her disturbing present and even less hopeful future by finding herself a sugar daddy. That Luli finds trouble on the road almost immediately is no surprise. What is a surprise is that regardless of circumstances, Luli refuses to be a victim, even at her tender age. On her perilous journey west, she learns the truth of American rootlessness and discovers both the power and the peril of her own sexual curiosity.
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Young Tessa is diminutive, far too small for farm work and the object of ridicule by both her own family and the other children in their isolated Kansas community. When a mysterious, entrancing librarian comes to town, full of fabulous stories, earthy wisdom and potions for the lovelorn, she takes Tessa under her wing, teaching her to read, which opens up for Tessa a whole new world of possibility and hope. But even as she blooms, Tessa’s father begins sexually abusing her. And she learns that her mentor, Mary, carries a dark secret. Tessa runs off, following Mary’s footsteps, to join the circus as a trapeze artist,
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Devils in the Sugar Shop is the story of a group of women friends in Omaha who are struggling with various romantic troubles and who are all about to convene for a pre-Valentine’s Tupperware-like home party for “marital aids.” The evening, meant to be a lark, changes how they each view their lives and relationships—and not just their romances but also their friendships and relationships with their children. With his characteristic touch, Schaffert places an unusual cast in unusual circumstances and creates a comic tale that is similar to Tales of the City, or even a cross between “Sex and the City”
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