"Amelia Bae-Wood's life is falling apart. Unemployed, newly single and completely broke -- for reasons she hasn't told anyone yet -- she finds herself hitchhiking across California to deal with the fallout of her mother's eviction from the family estate. Amelia needs somewhere to live and time to figure out what to do with the rest of her life, so moving with her mother and sister to Arcadia, the cancer retreat center where her sister volunteers,...

The lawyer, the jeweler, the art critic, and the oil-company man...self-possessed, independent Lora Winter has had a child with each of them. But when one of these men drives up to her house with a fifth man in the car, Lora runs to hide. That's how this extraordinary novel opens - and by the time it ends, you'll have pieced together a masterful psychological jigsaw puzzle that is miles from a traditional crime novel, but whose desperate characters...

"Imogen Finch has just been through her seventeenth breakup. She saw it coming, so she's not as crushed as she might be, but with all sixteen of her exes leaving her for other partners, she's come to believe a prediction her well-intentioned and possibly clairvoyant mother made over twenty years ago: that Imogen would never come first at anything or to anyone. Is her love life failing due to a magical curse? Insufficient effort? Poor timing or personality...