Mallory Petersen is a private investigator in Des Moines, Iowa, whose caseload usually runs to the routine, even the mildly offbeat. But when a young mom named Cheryl McGee comes to her with a heartbreaking story, Mallory is drawn into a nightmare of a case, in Stephen Brayton‘s mystery “Beta.” Cheryl’s 8-year-old daughter Cindy has disappeared, the apparent victim of a kidnapping. But there is no ransom demand, no word at all about what...
Small towns in America aren’t always like Mayberry or River City or Lake Wobegon. Sometimes they’re like Exeter, Massachusetts, the setting of Jennie Coughlin‘s book “Thrown Out: Stories from Exeter.” Buy the book This is a town of grudges, and secrets, and regrets. Alliances form and reform, the past becomes the future, where young boys find bodies in the marsh — and where nothing is ever quite what it looks like on the surface....
Sometime in the near future, a bright fourteen-year-old named Nick Lyons is trying to get back home – to the Lunar Colony from which he was brought to Earth a few years earlier by his parents. Buy the book Nick has it figured out. All he has to do is build a solar transference machine, win a million-dollar prize, and he can buy a one-way transworld shuttle ticket back to the Trafalgar Lunar outpost....
What do you know about your ancestors? You know what they look like, if you have photo albums. Perhaps they left some letters, maybe an old newspaper clipping. But what does that really tell you about them? Buy the book Imagine learning the truth about your family. I mean, the real truth, the parts no one talks about anymore, the details no newspaper clipping contains. In his novel “Faded Lives” Edward T. Vaughan introduces...
It has become an iconic image in American politics – the philandering husband, coming clean under the hot television lights, with his suffering but loyal wife by his side. Buy the book It makes you wonder. Why would a woman who knows her husband is a serial adulterer stick around? Tara Woolpy‘s novel “Releasing Gillian’s Wolves” helps us understand. Gillian is the wife of a successful politician who has trouble keeping his pants on....
Birdie Kaminsky steals things for a living. And now Birdie is on her way to the little town of Liberty, Ohio where her plan is, she figures, to steal a treasure that’s been hidden since the Civil War. How does she know about it? Because Birdie has a deliciously-cryptic clue passed down in her family for generations. And that’s just the first clue she uncovers, in her quest for riches and the good life...
