Taken hostage by a failed bank robber while attending an open house, eight anxiety-prone strangers--including a redemption-seeking bank director, two couples who would fix their marriages, and a plucky octogenarian--discover their unexpected common traits. Viewing an apartment normally doesn't turn into a life-or-death situation, but this particular open house becomes just that: a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage....

"Pete Banning was Clanton, Mississippi's favorite son--a decorated World War II hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning he rose early, drove into town, and committed a shocking crime. Pete's only statement about it--to the sheriff, to his lawyers, to the judge, to the jury, and to his family--was: 'I have nothing to say.' He was not afraid of...

Winner of the 2007 Agatha Award for Best Novel!
From the Dagger award winning author Louise Penny comes the second Armand Gamache mystery set in the stunning countryside of Quebec.
Welcome to winter in Three Pines, a picturesque village in Quebec, where the villagers are preparing for a traditional country Christmas, and someone is preparing for murder.
No one liked CC de Poitiers. Not her quiet husband, not her spineless

...

"Maeve Binchy, "the grand story teller,"* returns with a cast of characters you will never forget when they all spend a winter week together on holiday at Stone House, a restful inn by the sea... Stoneyville is a small town on the coast of Ireland where all the families know each other. When Chicky decides to take an old decaying mansion, Stone House, and turn it into a restful place for a holiday by the sea, the town thinks she is crazy. She is...

"Former sheriff's investigator Cassie Dewell is trying to start her life over in private practice. She's her own boss and answers to no one, and that's just the way she likes it after the past few tumultuous years. All that certainty changes when an old friend calls in a favor: she wants Cassie to help exonerate a man accused of assaulting a young woman from an influential family. Against her own better judgment, Cassie agrees. But out by the Bitterroot...

The town knew darkness...and the awful, heavy silence of terrifying images grotesquely dancing in and out of the shadows...and stark white faces, huge empty eyes and long gnarled hands that reached out with lustful insistence...and the paralyzing fear of a diabolical corruption and a hideous peril more dreadful than death.

"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beartown and A Man Called Ove, hailed as "a writer of astonishing depth [with] the remarkable ability to make you understand the feelings of each of a dozen different characters" (The Washington Times), a heart-wrenching story of how loyalty, friendship, and love carry a town through its darkest days. After everything that the citizens of Beartown have gone through, they are struck yet another blow...

"Thirty-three-year-old Shea Rigsby has spent her entire life in Walker, Texas--a small college town that lives and dies by football. Raised alongside her best friend, Lucy, the daughter of Walker's head coach, Clive Carr, Shea was too devoted to her hometown team to leave. She stayed in Walker for college, even taking a job in the university athletic department. When an unexpected tragedy strikes the Walker community, Shea's world is upended, and...

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

"From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, comes a wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting. In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this...