Adult Fiction

Promise me never : a novel

Constantine, Liv, author.

Aspiring writer Savannah's scheme to meet superstar horror novelist Bennett Bryson turns out better than she ever imagined: not only does her charming and handsome literary idol offer to read her work, he is instantly smitten with her. After a whirlwind romance, Savannah says "yes" to marriage, and the two settle into Bennett's secluded upstate home. But just as Savannah thinks she has it made, cracks appear in her perfect new life. Bennett's behavior becomes dark and controlling: he criticizes Savannah's writing, dictates her permitted activities, and spends most of his time locked in his office, forbidding her from entering. And everywhere, Savannah cannot escape the shadow of Bennett's first wife, the free-spirited and passionate artist Poppy, who died in a tragic accident, but who seems still to be Savannah's rival for Bennett's affection. Then comes an enigmatic warning: Bennett is not who he seems. The women that came before Savannah have disappeared. And Savannah could be next. Isolated and unsure whom to trust, Savannah tries to piece together the mystery of the man she married, and the woman he married first. But Savannah has no idea what her husband is really hiding. And someone out there knows Savannah has secrets of her own. As these two writers will learn the hard way -- past really is prologue.....

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The altar of Pergamon

Cahn, Jonathan author

"IS IT POSSIBLE... That there exists an ancient mystery that lies behind the events of the modern world? An ancient object created over 2000 years ago and yet is altering the course of world history? The secret behind the events of our age, the past, present, and the future? Could it lie behind the greatest calamities of the modern world . . . · The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich · World War I · The Holocaust · World War II · The spread of Marxism · The rise of the Soviet Union · Nuclear war · The near end of the world · What is yet to come, even a new world order · And much, much more . . . And where is it bringing the world? Who is the dark angel? And what are the unseen forces at work and moving behind the events of the modern world? For the first time in years, Cahn reveals the mystery through a story, the spellbinding account of Ariel Herzog, a skeptic known for dismantling the claims of the supernatural, but who receives a cryptic page of a secret book. The page opens up an ancient mystery. The mystery will lead Herzog and an unlikely ally, Lara Winter, to undertake a journey that will span the globe to unlock the mystery, page by page, revelation by revelation. The journey will take them from New York City to Istanbul, to Berlin, to Eastern Europe, to Moscow, New Mexico, Havana, Jerusalem, and beyond. In each place, they will encounter a mysterious agent connected to the mystery holding the keys to unlock the next secret and piece of the puzzle. But they are not alone. They will find themselves watched, tracked, and pursued by the members of a dark organization who have guarded the mystery from ancient times. And those who draw too close to unlocking its secret do so at the risk or cost of their lives.....

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Exit party : a novel

Mandel, Emily St. John, 1979- author.

Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party's host, vanishes into thin air. As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.....

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Big & Lily : novel

Roe, Lisa, author.

For her entire life, Bridget "Big" Ackerman Petty has struggled to hold everything together. Everything seems so effortless and easy for her sister Lily, a woman blessed with a magnetic personality, a thriving business, and a husband who adores her. When Lily discovers her husband's been cheating, her "perfect" life implodes. Devastated and overwhelmed, she decides to run to Alaska to lose herself on a hardcore survival trek, and she's dragged her reluctant sister Big along. No cell service, no easy exits -- just grizzlies, outdoor plumbing, and a group of strangers who know how to read a compass. As the sisters navigate freezing rivers, unmarked trails, and more than one near-death experience, the defenses they've used to protect themselves begin to crumble, and they're forced to face everything they've spent decades resentment, regret, envy, and the terrifying possibility that the other one's life might not be as easy as it looks.....

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The sound of regret : a novel

Gowdy, Trey, 1964- author.

When a confidential informant is found murdered and then a witness is executed--with a note taunting Assistant DA Colm Truesdale stapled to his forehead--Colm vows to hunt down the killer, no matter the cost. But as he dives into the investigation, a far more dangerous threat emerges: a ghost from his past, a highly motiƯvated psychopath who has spent years spinning an invisible web designed to destroy him. Every lead Colm pursues draws him deeper into the trap, blurring the line between hunter and hunted. With his career, his freedom, and perhaps his very life hanging in the balance, Colm must outmaneuƯver a mind as ruthless as his own. Can he expose the truth before the noose tightens? Or will the prosecutor become the one in cuffs--or worse, in a body bag?....

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Agrippa

Harris, Robert, 1957- author.

He was born feet first, a dangerous way to enter the world. His mother did not survive, and the nickname, Agrippa--mother killer--stuck. But the schoolyard taunting only served to harden his resolve and hone his predilection for aggression. In time, the name lost its sting and became instead a mark of his invincibility. It came to shape his destiny. Agrippa was a mere commoner, but when he defended a bullied young boy, Octavius, he set his life on an entirely new path, for Octavius turned out to be the nephew of Caesar himself. Caesar took a liking to young Agrippa, and relied on him to protect his favored nephew. Then, Caesar was murdered in the Senate. Not only the lives of these boys, but the fate of the Republic, hung in the balance. Octavius inherited the empire in name only. To assume the mantle, he would have to fight for it. Agrippa was the brawn and Octavius was the guile. Together, they would prove to be unstoppable.....

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The shadow friends : a thriller

Gerritsen, Tess, author.

A harrowing and emotional thriller where ghosts of the Cold War return with a vengeance and cannot be outrun. When a renowned disease expert and Russian defector dies mysteriously during a global affairs conference in Purity, Maine, the tight-knit band of former spies in the Martini Club once again sees their quiet coastal retirement interrupted by international intrigue. And when a waitress at the conference hotel is found murdered, Ingrid Slocum sees chilling links to a disastrous mission that nearly killed her three decades ago. Desperate to uncover the truth, Ingrid's drawn back into the game by a magnetic ex-CIA colleague and former lover who was with her on the long-ago doomed mission. He convinces her to join him, and together they head to Amsterdam to track down her would-be killer. Ingrid's frantic husband Lloyd and Maggie Bird are close behind, but a clandestine network of assassins is intent on stopping them. Forced to question every allegiance, the Martini Club must rely on the skills they tried to leave behind. Because in this game of revenge and deception, the past never dies. It just hides in the shadows.....

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The secret dinner

Montes, Raphael. 1990- author.

Four childhood friends, eager for a taste of city life, swap rural Brazil for an apartment in Copacabana, Rio. But they have no idea of the fate that awaits them there... Dante, Piglet, Miguel, and Hugo are your average students trying to make ends meet with part-time jobs, excited about the bright future at their fingertips. So when their rent skyrockets, they struggle to keep their new lives and big dreams afloat. They need to make money however they can. In order to keep their apartment, the friends adopt an unorthodox plan and are soon sucked into a dark world of secret dinner parties catering to the twisted fantasies of Rio's elite. What starts as a joke quickly spirals out of their control. As the four friends fall deeper into this dark underworld and earn more money, the stakes get higher and the consequences deadlier, revealing the twisted depths that lurk within each of them and threatening not only their friendship but also their lives.....

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Pressure depth

Clancy, Tom, 1947-2013, creator.

Jack Ryan Jr. is on Guam for a project for Hendley Associates. It's a perfectly ordinary insurance matter, but trouble finds the Ryans wherever they go. It's no surprise when Jack's involvement with a US Navy dive team working off the coast uncovers a threat to international security. For years, rumors persisted that the Soviets had placed a device for tracking American submarines on the sea floor. By now, the technology should be outdated. But the Americans are still interested in recovering it. It seems like a routine mission until they make a shocking discovery: the defensive network they thought they were looking for is a weapon unlike anything they have ever seen. That explains the arrival of a Chinese special operations team who seem determined to get their hands on the aging tech, even if they have to kill to do it. They're sure they can handle the Americans. But they don't know Jack.....

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Paper ghosts : a novel

Allen, Sarah Addison, author.

Every family has its secrets...The Wester women live inside theirs. For generations, Wester House has stood as a monument to influence and mystery in a small North Carolina town, and the Wester women have held the community enthralled. People respect them, many fear them, but no one truly understands them. How do they possess such an intimate, unsettling knowledge of those around them? Why is no one ever allowed inside the house? And why is Willamena Wester finally reaching out to the granddaughter she once pushed away? The Westers have always balanced their need for control with their desire for love, but when that balance is off, disaster happens. To truly understand, you have to meet Willamena fifty years before. As a love-struck young woman trapped in a stifling, picture-perfect life, she makes a fateful choice that changes her life forever. Now Willamena's granddaughter, Bailey, is coming back to a town she tried to outrun, only to realize that the grandmother she feared was actually her fiercest protector. In a world of hidden truths, can a legacy of unhappiness be unmade? And what does it take to finally break a curse? Bailey is about to learn that even the oldest hauntings can be healed by a new spark of hope.....

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The Munich affair

Patterson, James, 1947- author.

In 1931, Hitler committed his first murder. This is the story of that murder... A determined detective, Thomas Bauer, obsessively pursues Hitler―putting Bauer’s Jewish wife and children in grave danger. A courageous journalist, Fritz Gerlich, writes story after story detailing the murder―making Gerlich a target for Hitler’s Gestapo. An American professor, Eleanor Robbins, picks up the trail of evidence from present-day Neo-Nazis guarding the Führer’s long-held secrets to the death. ....

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Hollow bones : a novel

Picoult, Jodi, 1966- author

On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only two months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn’t have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters. Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics, and airplane crashes. She and her husband, Jesse—a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis—have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew. ....

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The thoroughbreds

Hilderbrand, Elin, author

September at Tiffin Academy is always a heady time, especially for the senior class--"sixth-formers," in Tiffinspeak--a season of college applications and intense pressure, of partying hard and last hurrahs. As the chapel bells ring in the students and staff, everyone has something to look forward to, but in the midst of the anticipation and excitement, nagging questions and dark secrets lurk beneath the surface... Are Charley and East, Tiffin's "It Couple," on the rocks? What sparked the rift between football star Dub and his best friend, Hakeem? Will Pippa Sacks, posh day student, topple the delicate social hierarchy--or wreak even worse havoc? Can Head of School Audre Robinson save her job--and Tiffin--after a disastrous financial mistake? And what was in that email attachment Cinnamon Peters sent to Dub before she died? Elin Hilderbrand and her daughter, Shelby Cunningham, answer these questions and more in The Thoroughbreds, a page-turning story about friendship, treachery, ambition, and growing up-- at any age.....

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Switzy : a novel

Cline, Emma, author.

The story of an aging man's last pilgrimage... A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting. A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable. This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades. His final destination is Zurich. David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life. As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.....

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The most dangerous games

MrBeast, 1998- author.

A thousand strangers receive the invitation. One hundred make the cut. An unprecedented competition where the stakes couldn’t be higher... The Games begin in Antarctica, where one wrong step on the ice kills you, and they never let up: Shark water off a remote Chilean island, desert heat that cooks you where you stand, storm-battered peaks, and caves so black you cannot find your own hand. No rescue. No second chances. A billion dollars to whoever is still standing. Then the terrain stops being the thing that can kill you, and the other players start. Alliances turn into ambushes. Trust becomes the sharpest weapon. And somewhere above it all, a hidden voice is watching every move, testing, deciding who deserves to survive.....

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