Greg and Tess MacAvoy are one of four prominent Nantucket couples who count each other as best friends. As pillars of their close-knit community, the MacAvoys, Kapenashes, Drakes, and Wheelers are important to their friends and neighbors, and especially to each other. But just before the beginning of another idyllic summer, Greg and Tess are killed when their boat capsizes during an anniversary sail. As the warm weather approaches and the island mourns...

The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law--in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell--can contain....

Henry, a writer, receives a curious letter from an elderly taxidermist who wants Henry to help him write a play about a donkey and a howler monkey--Beatrice and Virgil--but Henry feel increasingly uncomfortable as he learns more about the odd world of the taxidermist and his perilous plans for Beatrice and Virgil.

Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful--and attempts a nail-biting escape.

Alex Cross' life is finally getting back to normal following the shooting death of his wife several years earlier. He's set up a practice as a psychologist once again and even has a chance at a new love. Then Cross' former partner, John Sampson, calls in a favor. He's tracking a serial rapist in Georgetown that bears a similarity to a case the two worked on years earlier and reveals a connection to Alex's wife's death. Cross is about to go for the...

As a senior in high school Quentin Coldwater became preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. After graduating from college and being admitted into a highly exclusive, secret society of magic in upstate New York, he makes a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin's fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined for his childhood dream...

Tony Webster has always made the very reasonable assumption that he could trust his memories, but when he's forced to revisit his past, everything he believes about himself and his life is challenged. The fact is that Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, never gave much thought to his past at all until his closest childhood friends' return with a vengeance -- one of them from the grave and another maddeningly present. Tony thought he'd left all this uncertainly...

Lester Ballard, always an outsider in his East Tennessee community, descends into a world of murder, madness, and necrophilia after the forced sale of his property and a false accusation of rape.

'I was supposed to be having the time of my life.' When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society...

The Hartes and the Golds, long-time neighbors and friends, are not surprised when their children Chris and Emily fall in love, but the bond between the families is placed under an enormous strain when Emily is killed, leaving behind the question of whether her death was a suicide, or murder.