Aging, reclusive author Vida Winter, having given out multiple versions of her life story over the years, decides to finally set the record straight and engages Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, to write her biography, drawing the young woman into a tale of a governess, a ghost, a willful woman, feral twins, and a gothic mansion.

"Longtime personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy has made a career out of putting others before herself. When an unexpected upheaval sends her away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, Georgie must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page. But then Georgie comes across a forgotten artifact--a 'friendfic' diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined....

In its 300-year history, there has never once been a scandal at Mullings, ancestral home of the decent but dull Stodmarsh family. Until, that is, Edward Stodmarsh makes an ill-advised second marriage to the scheming Regina Stapleton, who insists on bringing her family's 'ornamental hermit' to live on the estate. Suddenly everyone wants to visit Mullings to glimpse this mysterious figure. Strange but harmless, thinks Florence Norris, the family's longstanding...

When a successful New Yorker returns to her birthplace in the Adirondack Mountains to escape her publicly tragic life, she begins to find peace for the first time since she was five years old. Hired as a caretaker for an Adirondack Great Camp, she spends over ten years living alone. But Lily Martindale's days as a recluse are plagued by a secret which aggravates her fragile state of mind. On a winter day in the 1990s, deep in the mountains, she opens...

Scientist Larry Fowler investigates the mysterious circumstances that caused nearly every resident of a small New Mexico town to die on the same night while he lives in a remote cabin haunted by an earth spirit, and learns of the "psychlone," a force composed of psychic energy created after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

Claire Doheney, recovering from a serious illness, agrees to house-sit an oceanfront mansion on Chappaquiddick Island in Martha's Vineyard. The New Yorker book editor hopes to find solace, strength, and sufficient calm to finish a biography of the iconoclastic psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich. The last thing she expects to find is love. Then she meets a mysterious man the locals call the Hermit. No one knows his real name or where he lives. Quite by...

After his plastic surgery goes awry, actor Todd Pickett settles into a mansion in Coldheart Canyon to wait for the scars to heal, but when the president of his fan club arrives to try and uncover the truth behind his disappearance, she learns some unsettling secrets about the canyon.

An unbreakable cipher, a dead priest with expensive shoes, a hermit who converses with saints, an angry French girl, and much more might stop an ordinary fifteen-year-old safe-cracking genius, but not Percy St.-John. He's out to prove he did not steal a mysterious ancient book that may hold the key to mankind's greatest hope and greatest danger.