A Los Angeles girl whose mother goes to jail is taken in hand by the city's foster-care program and the novel describes her experience in a series of homes, each a new adventure. A first novel. At the age of 12, Astrid has her world blown away when her mother is sentenced to life in prison for murdering her lover. Sharpened by harsh foster home environments, Astrid remakes herself as a survivor, and ultimately, an artist. Everywhere hailed as a...

Ten years after leaving, Arlene Fleet finds she still has not escaped Possett, Alabama, when an old classmate turns up asking questions about a crime Arlene committed in her youth, forcing her into a confrontation with her past. For 10 years Arlene has kept her promises, and God has kept His end of the bargain. Until now. When an old schoolmate from Possett turns up at Arlene's door in Chicago asking questions about Jim Beverly, former quarterback...

By turns horrifying and erotic, critically-acclaimed author Thomas Perry's new thriller takes us on a dangerous cat-and-mouse game that pits two women against each other: a beautiful serial killer and the detective who is determined to stop her.When the cousin of Los Angeles underworld figure Hugo Poole is found shot to death in his Portland, Oregon, home, police find nothing at the scene of the crime except several long strands of blond hair hinting...

Louise Wilson is an expert at just barely making it. She's mastered the tricks and shortcuts that a penniless small-town girl needs to survive in New York City. When she meets the beautiful, wealthy, eccentric, and aimless Lavinia Williams, she thinks her dreams of a cosmopolitan existence may be coming true. Lavinia introduces her to a rarified life of beauty and indulgence: private opera boxes, secret bookstores in brownstones, Shakespearean masked...

Amanda Eyre Wards debut novel is an intimate portrait of three women whose lives collide during a brutal Texas summer. In Gatestown, Texas, twenty-nine-year-old Karen Lowens awaits her execution with a host of convicted serial killers on death row. In Manhattan, Dr. Franny Wren, also twenty-nine, tends to a young cancer patient, and resists the urge to run from her fiancé and her carefully crafted life. In Austin, Texas, brassy Celia Mills, a once-vibrant...

Criminally Insane: Ethel Jankowski has just been released from an asylum where her both violent and suicidal tendencies had kept her under medical supervision. Deemed "cured", save for her severe weight problem, she moves in with her grandmother, who, under doctor's orders, locks up the household's food supply to prevent Ethel from continuing to gorge herself. However, Ethel's raging appetite cannot be contained and, as visitors to the house begin...

Ana finds herself transported to a dreamlike and dangerous land where she joins an army of girls engaged in a never-ending war along a rugged coast where the women lure men to their deaths at sea via radio transmissions, like twentieth-century sirens. Though she finds strength in this exhilarating world, she comes to realize that she's not the killer they want her to be.

A young graduate student has two problems too many: she is pregnant following an affair with a married professor, and blonde women are mysteriously being transformed into crazed killers. Hazel Hayes is a grad student living in New York City. As the novel opens, she learns she is pregnant (from an affair with her married professor) at an apocalyptically bad time: random but deadly attacks on passersby, all by blonde women, are terrorizing New Yorkers....

Former executive editor of Essence magazine and Blackboard best-selling author Valerie Wilson Wesley has received the Literary Award for fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She has also been nominated for the Shamus award. In Playing My Mother's Blues, Wesley explores the complexities of love and family. Dani Carter is seven years old when her mother Maria leaves the family for a new lover. As a child, Dani could not...