NCW Libraries

" For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice's old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries...

Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence -- but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he's hit something else. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty. The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with Landreaux's five-year-old son, LaRose. The two families have always been close, sharing...

A collection of short stories by the "Queen of Suspense" features her first published short story, "Stowaway."

From the author of the "New York Times" bestseller "Tuesdays with Morrie" comes a novel that explores unexpected connections and the idea that heaven is more than a placeQit's an answer. Just as the television adaptation of "Tuesdays with Morrie" boosted that title to its highest sales level ever, similar results are anticipated following the airing of a made-for-tv version of "The Five People You Meet In Heaven" on ABC December 5.

Story after story offers haunting images: a husband interrupts his bludgeoning murder of his wife to sing their daughter back to sleep (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's In the New Development); a cop eats an apple that fell from the shaven head of a drunken deputy chief detective just shot to death, who'd been playing William Tell (Alexander Anuchkin's Field of a Thousand Corpses). In Anna Starobinets's The Mercy Bus, a taut tale with a wicked bite, a con...