Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the Minnesota town of Wayzata, an entire family has been killed-husband, wife, two kids, dogs. On the wall, in blood: "Were coming." No apostrophe. There's something about the scene that tugs at Lucas's cop instincts-it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen from Mexican drug gangs. But this is a seriously upscale town, the husband...

When Dr. Craig Bowman is served with a summons for medical malpractice, he's shocked, enraged, and more than a little humiliated. A devoted physician who works continuously in the service of others, he endured grueling years of training and is now a partner in an exclusive concierge medical practice. No longer forced to see more and more patients while spending less and less time with each one just to keep his office door open, he now provides the...

"A poignant and hilarious oral history of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon. Celebrated music critic and cultural historian David Hajdu unravels the mystery of a one of-a-kind artist, a pianist with a rare neurological condition that enables her to make music that is nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. Her name is Adrianne Geffel, praised as 'the Geyser of Grand Street' and the 'Queen of Bleak Chic'. Yet despite her renown, she...

For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story. Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith's youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy's dimestore. It was in that dimestore--listening to customers and inventing adventures...

When developers threaten to bulldoze the old courthouse to make way for condominiums, Miss Julia is dismayed. She enlists the help of Etta Mae Wiggins in a plot to scare off the money by exposing the town's many eccentric characters. Abbotsville has plenty of local color of the kind not usually listed in brochures for upscale condos: Tonya's sex change, Julia's stint as a biker chick, Brother Vern's evangelistic passion, and a mysterious apparition...

"When H.G. Wells left school in 1880 at the age of thirteen he looked destined for obscurity. Defying expectations, he went on to become one of the most famous writers in the world, remaining active into the era of the atomic bomb, which he had predicted thirty years earlier. Along the way he created classic science-fiction tales such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, reinvented the Dickensian novel in Kipps and The...

In the unique landscape of the Camargue in the South of France during WW2, a young autistic boy lives on his parents' farm among the salt flats and the flamingos that live there. There are lots of things he doesn't understand, but he does know how to heal animals. He loves routine and music too; every week he goes to market with his mother, to ride his special horse on the town carousel. But then the Germans come, with their guns, and take the town....

Hooper's Crossing, New York, 1952. The post-war boom seems a million miles away, especially for a sheltered librarian who longs for the adventure and excitement of the big city. New York City. The hustle and bustle. The people and the excitement. It's all Lily Denton dreams about. But ever since her mother died, her overprotective father won't ease up on her. So she spends her days working at the library and her nights hoping life doesn't pass her...

The show follows Eleanor Shellstrop, an ordinary woman who enters the afterlife and, thanks to some kind of error, is sent to the Good Place instead of the Bad Place, which is definitely where she belongs. While hiding in plain sight from Michael, the wise architect of the Good Place who doesn't know he's made a mistake, she's determined to shed her old way of living and discover the awesome, or at least the pretty good, person within.

"Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930, when Gaddis was at boarding school, and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and are all the more valuable because Gaddis was not an autobiographical writer. Here we see him forging his...