For Adults

On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were the Walkers--the ship's captain Frederick, his wife Elizabeth, their three teenage sons, and their dog--along with the ship's crew. The family had spotted a promising fishing location when a terrible storm arose, splitting their vessel in two and leaving those onboard adrift on the perilous sea. When the castaways awoke the next morning, they discovered they had been washed ashore--on an island inhabited by a large but ragged and emaciated man who introduced himself as Hans. But Hans had a secret. As the Walker family gradually came to learn more, what seemed like a stroke of luck to have the mysterious man's assistance became something darker.

Nikk Alcaraz, creator of Practical Peculiarities, brings you a book full of peculiar desserts that will bring a distinctly macabre air to your next dinner party. Your guests will know that they’ve finally caught your eye when you bring out a platter of Apple Eye Pies that stare up from the plate. Or, gaze in wonder as you tempt the hands of fate with a Tarot Sun Sheet Cake that brings magic to mind.
Nikk has delivered a mystifying masterclass in all things dark and delicious.

Hazel and Fox are an ordinary married couple with a baby. Except for one small thing: they're murderers. Well, they used to be. They hadan enviable London lifestyle, five-star travels, and plenty of bad men to rid from the world. Then Hazel got pregnant. They gave up vigilante justice for life in the suburbs: arranged play dates instead of body disposals, diapers over daggers, mommy conversations instead of the sweet seduction right before a kill. And the more Hazel forces herself to play her monotonous, predictable role, the more she begins to feel that murderous itch again. Then Hazel kills someone without telling Fox. And when police show up at their door, Hazel realizes it will take everything she has to keep her family together.

Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. But even good girls have secrets and regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she's had her fair share of both. Their bond—forged when May was just twelve years old—has withstood a tragic accident, individual scandals, heartbreak and loss. Now the three friends have reunited for the first time in years for a few days of sun and fun in the Hamptons. But a chance encounter with a pair of strangers leads to a drunken prank that goes horribly awry. When she finds herself at the center of an urgent police investigation, May begins to wonder whether Lauren and Kelsey are keeping secrets from her, testing the limits of her loyalty to lifelong friends.
 

Beautiful, royal, rich: Rhea has it all—until her father loses his kingdom in a treacherous coup, and she is sent to the order of the Vestal Virgins to ensure she will never produce an heir. Except when mortals scheme, gods laugh. Rhea becomes pregnant, and human society turns against her. Abandoned, ostracized, and facing the gravest punishment, Rhea forges a dangerous deal with the divine, one that will forever change the trajectory of her life…and her beloved land. To save her sons and reclaim their birthright, Rhea must summon nature’s mightiest force – a mother’s love – and fight.

With playful curiosity and a breadth of scientific interest across neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and even literature, THE FORGOTTEN SENSE reveals the wonders of smell, and all that we lose in neglecting it. We meet ancient philosophers who prized smell as well as the nineteenth-century scholars who associated it with "beastly" instincts and charted its devaluation for over a century. Olofsson untangles the role of smell in human evolution and answers the question of why two people can interpret the same smell differently. And, crucially, we see smell as the intellectual exercise that it is, with invaluable insight into how we might train our brains to strengthen and even regain our sense of smell after illness. 

On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. The murder divided the country and inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—but the reverend was not convicted, and questions linger to this day about what really led to Sarah Cornell’s death. In The Sinners All Bow, acclaimed true-crime historian Kate Winkler Dawson re-examines Cornell's death. Using modern investigative advancements—including “forensic knot analysis” and criminal profiling (which was invented fifty-five years later with Jack the Ripper)—Dawson fills in the research gaps  to find the truth and bring justice to an unsettling mystery that speaks to our past as well as our present.

Worn out and newly broke, chef Paul Delamare would be tempted to turn down the request to fill in as teacher for a week-long residential course at the Chester Square Cookery School in the heart of London if anyone other than old friend, fellow chef, and cooking show host Christian Wagner were asking. The students are a motley crew, most of whom seem more interested in ogling the surroundings (including handsome Christian) than learning the best ways to temper chocolate. Despite his misgivings, Paul starts to enjoy imparting his extensive knowledge to the recruits—until someone turns up dead, murdered with a cleaver Paul used earlier that day to prep a pair of squabs. 

The year is 1949, the city London. Amidst the smog of the capital stumbles Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless eighteen year-old employed by a second-hand bookshop. Dennis stumbles on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret: if Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse). So begins a journey delving deep into the city's occult underbelly and tarrying with an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters, and murderers.

At the same time that the number of people in the US who claim Native identity has exploded—increasing 85 percent in just ten years—the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity—the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children—she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today’s Tribal identity policing. 

In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments. Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required Herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists. Lise fled to Sweden, where she made a groundbreaking discovery in nuclear physics, and the others fled to the United States, where they brought advanced physics to American universities. 

The last thing Nick Morrow expected to receive was an invitation from his father to return home. But neither Nick nor his brother Joshua, disowned for marrying Emilia, a woman of Asian descent, can ignore such summons from their father, who hopes for a deathbed reconciliation. Predictably, Joshua and Carlyle quickly warm to each other while Nick and Emilia are left to their own devices. Nick puts the time to good use and his flirtation with Emilia quickly blooms into romance. Though not long after the affair turns intimate, Nick begins to suspect that Emilia’s interest in him may have sinister, and possibly even ancient, motivations.

In The Tiger Slam, Kevin Cook delivers a gripping, inside-the-ropes account of an astonishing streak of victories that left Woods’s rivals scrambling to keep up. Readers will hear from many of golf ’s biggest names—Tiger’s caddie, his coach, his opponents, his idols, and others, all offering fresh insight into the electrifying highs of his victories and the obstacles on and off the course that threatened his relentless pursuit of perfection.

 

In this book, historian Frank Guridy recounts the contested history of play, protest, and politics in American stadiums. From the beginning, stadiums were political, as elites turned games into celebrations of war, banned women from the press box, and enforced racial segregation. By the 1920s, they also became important sites of protest as activists increasingly occupied the stadium floor to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, fascism, and more. Following the rise of the corporatized stadium in the 1990s, this complex history was largely forgotten. But today's athlete-activists, like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe, belong to a powerful tradition in which the stadium is as much an arena of protest as a palace of pleasure.

It's October 1931. When Winnie Ruth Judd arrives at the Los Angeles train station from Phoenix, her shipping trunks catch the attention of a suspicious porter. By the time they're pried open, revealing the dismembered bodies of two women inside, Ruth has disappeared into the crowd. The search for, and eventual apprehension of, the Trunk Murderess quickly becomes a headline-making sensation. The one question on everyone's lips: How could a twenty-six-year-old reverend's daughter and doctor's wife--petite, pretty, well educated, and poised--commit such a heinous act on two people she'd called "my dearest friends in the world?"