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A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?

Heartwood takes you on a journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.

Don’t lose your head over office politics…The horrors of the modern workplace meet actual horror in a fiendishly entertaining short story from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones.

When the lights go out and the slideshow begins, middle manager Jennifer has a disturbing a headless colleague right across the boardroom table. Is it a trick of the light, or a vision of the future? She tries to brush it off and salvage the afternoon—but when her ex unexpectedly drops off her son at the office after school, suddenly her whole world takes an alarming turn.

Stephen Graham Jones’s The Indigo Room is part of The Shivers, a collection of haunting stories that reveal the otherworldly terrors all around us. Once you know, there’s no going back. Read or listen to each story in one unsettling sitting.

A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .

A whip-smart family dramedy about estranged siblings competing to inherit their father’s Vietnamese sandwich franchise and unravel family mysteries.

Duc Tran, the eccentric founder of the national Vietnamese sandwich chain Duc’s Sandwiches, has decided to retire. With the help of the shady family lawyer, he informs his five estranged adult children that to get their inheritance, they must revitalize run-down shops in undesirable, old-school Little Saigon locations across Houston, San Jose, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—within a year. The only one without a shop is the bachelor son, but if he gets married before the year’s up, the inheritance goes to him.

Each daughter is stuck in a new city they don’t want to be in, battling gentrification, declining ethnic enclaves, messy love lives, and struggling to modernize their father’s American dream. The son wonders if he wants to marry for love or for money. As Duc’s children continue to work, family mysteries begin to unravel along the way as they learn the real intention behind the inheritance scheme.

The Family Recipe is about rediscovering one’s roots, different types of fatherly love, familial legacy, and finding one’s place in a divided country where the only commonality among your neighbors is the universal love of sandwiches.

NO DESCRIPTIONS

A coven of trans witches battles an evil AI in the magical coming-of-middle-age romp about love, loss, drag shows, and late capitalism. 

On a morning much like any other, 30-something queer Brooklynite Wilder makes the miraculous discovery: suddenly, as if by magic, they can understand every language in the world. Dazed and disconnected, Wilder is found and taken in by a small coven of trans witches who have all become Awakened with mystical powers of their own. Quibble, a handsome portal traveler, Artemis, the group’s caretaker and seer, and Mary Margaret, a smart-ass teen with telekinetic powers all work to make the cagey and suspicious Wilder feel comfortable, both within their group and with the knowledge that magic is, in fact, real.

Just as Wilder is finding their footing, a malicious AI threatens to dismantle the delicate balance of the coven and the world as they know it. Newly assembled and tenuously bound, the group scrambles to stay united as they parse the difference between difficult and dangerous, asking themselves continuously: is any consciousness—be it artificial, material, or magical—too dangerous to exist?

Awakened is an exhilarating, hilarious and thought-provoking reflection on the ways that we are responsible for creating our own realities , a story of finding community, and a meditation on what it means to have a body (and if it might be far worse never to have had one at all).

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By Ashley Flowers

All Good People Here

In the propulsive debut novel from the host of the #1 true crime podcast Crime Junkie, a journalist uncovers her hometown’s dark secrets when she becomes obsessed with the unsolved murder of her childhood neighbor—and the disappearance of another girl twenty years later.

You can’t ever know for sure what happens behind closed doors.

Everyone from Wakarusa, Indiana, remembers the infamous case of January Jacobs, who was discovered in a ditch hours after her family awoke to find her gone. Margot Davies was six at the time, the same age as January—and they were next-door neighbors. In the twenty years since, Margot has grown up, moved away, and become a big-city journalist. But she’s always been haunted by the feeling that it could’ve been her. And the worst part is, January’s killer has never been brought to justice.

When Margot returns home to help care for her uncle after he is diagnosed with early-onset dementia, she feels like she’s walked into a time capsule. Wakarusa is exactly how she remembers—genial, stifled, secretive. Then news breaks about five-year-old Natalie Clark from the next town over, who’s gone missing under circumstances eerily similar to January’s. With all the old feelings rushing back, Margot vows to find Natalie and to solve January’s murder once and for all.

But the police, Natalie’s family, the townspeople—they all seem to be hiding something. And the deeper Margot digs into Natalie’s disappearance, the more resistance she encounters, and the colder January’s case feels. Could January’s killer still be out there? Is it the same person who took Natalie? And what will it cost to finally discover what truly happened that night twenty years ago?

Twisty, chilling, and intense, All Good People Here is a searing tale that asks: What are your neighbors capable of when they think no one is watching?

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