Fiction

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A decorated former Air Force pilot. A pregnant flight attendant. A dedicated TSA agent. The fates of these three, and many others, converge in Danielle Steel's gripping new novel--a heart-stopping thriller that engages ordinary men and women in the fight of their lives during a flight from New York to San Francisco.

On a beautiful May morning at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, two planes have just departed for San Francisco--one a 757, another a smaller Airbus A321. At a security checkpoint, TSA agent Bernice Adams finds a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge bearing an ambiguous--perhaps ominous--message. Her supervisor dismisses her concerns, but Bernice calls security and soon Ben Waterman arrives. A senior Homeland Security agent, still grappling with guilt after a disastrous operation in which hostages were killed, Ben too becomes suspicious. Who left the postcard behind, which flight is that person on, and what exactly does the message mean?

As Ben scans the passenger manifests, his focus turns to the A321, with Helen Smith as its senior pilot. Helen's military service and her tenure with the airline have been exemplary. But her husband's savage death in Iraq was more than anyone should bear, leaving her widowed with three children. A major film star is on board. So is an off-duty pilot who has just lost his forty-year career. So is a distraught father, traveling with the baby son he has abducted from his estranged wife. Sifting through data and relying on instinct, Ben becomes convinced that someone on Helen's plane is planning something terrible. And he's right. Passengers, crew, and experts on the ground become heroes out of necessity to try to avert tragedy at the eleventh hour.

In her stunning novel, Danielle Steel combines intense action with stories of emotionally rich, intertwined lives. As the jet bears down on its destination of San Francisco, strangers are united, desperate choices are made, and futures will be changed forever by a handful of accidental heroes.

The new John Cuddy novel by Shamus Award-winning author Jeremiah Healy (Shallow Graves). It's springtime in Boston, and John Cuddy has two clients--a petite, determined widow and a cagey young man--united by a missing girl and a shocking murder. Author autographings.

The wedding of billionaire Adam Bloch and Maisie Maclaren is the event of the year in Clement's Cove, Maine a town in which the mansion-like "cottages" of the summering elite sit side-by-side with the modest homes of working-class locals. Adam, a shy, tentative man with a terrible tragedy in his past, has, at fifty-four, reached the moment in his life when he feels he is finally ready to live and yet he doesn't quite know what to do with himself. When Maisie asks for a lap pool so she can strengthen her body, debilitated by years of Hodgkin's disease, Adam approaches his neighbor with a generous offer to buy the plot of land on which her trailer sits to make room for the pool. She refuses, and a chain of events is set in motion that pits Adam against his neighbors, the new rich against those scraping by, outsider against old-timer, in an escalating struggle that can only end in catastrophe.

Taut, swift, and startling, Adam the King depicts the inexorability of fate against the backdrop of the money-mad '90s, the emptiness of raging ambition and the fallout of the drift toward conservative politics and values."

Evergreen Award Winner

The Strand Critics Awards Best Debut Nominee

Crime Writers of Canada Best First Novel Award Finalist

Off the storm-lashed coast of the Pacific Northwest, Ess regains consciousness with no recollection of who she is or why she's alone on a sailboat in the wilderness. Her only clue is a chilling typewritten note--cryptic and urgent--and the instinctive knowledge of how to sail, survive, and stay invisible.

The world she sails into is at a tipping point. In 2038, climate change is pushing people to the limit, driving more and more to flee storms, drought, and rising seas. The earth is precariously balanced at a climate tipping point and Ess is perched on the edge of a choice. Haunted by the alarming clues about who she was before and hunted by forces she doesn't understand, Ess must decide whether to vanish for good or risk everything to confront the truth.

Adrift is a genre-bending blend of character-driven psychological suspense, speculative mystery, and climate fiction. It's a novel about memory, identity, and who we become when the past is out of reach.

"Crackles with urgency and humanity...a book made to meet the moment. A must read." --Katie Lattari, author of Dark Things I Adore

"Fast-paced, riveting...a great read." --Booklist