LeslieH

On Halloween 1963, 11-year-old Chuck Coolidge and his brother, Danny, are lost in a toxic smog covering the steel town of Slippery Elm, Pennsylvania. When the smog lifts, half the town is sick, and 20 people are dead. And Danny is missing. Now, more than 20 years later, Chuck's teenage daughter, Frank, plots her escape from this "busted and disgusted" town. When a murdered child is found in the river, investigators link the crime to the disappearance of Danny in '63, and Frank's life is turned upside down. In the face of her worst fears, she must uncover her family's dark past.

They meet at a local tavern in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. Polly is set on heading west. Adam says he's also passing through. Yet she stays, and he stays - drawn to this mysterious redhead whose quiet stillness both unnerves and excites him. Over the course of a punishing summer, Polly and Adam abandon themselves to a steamy, inexorable affair. Still, each holds something back from the other - dangerous, even lethal secrets. Then someone dies. Was it an accident or part of a plan? By now Adam and Polly are so ensnared in each other's lives and lies that neither one knows how to get away.

Living in a tiny Queens apartment, Rebecca and her husband Mickey typify struggling, 30-something New Yorkers—he's an actor, and she's a freelance journalist. But after the arrival of their baby son, the couple decides to pack up and head for sunny Palm Beach, where Mickey's been offered a sweet deal managing the household of a multimillionaire Democratic donor. Once there, he quickly doubles his salary by going to work for venture capitalist Cecil Stone. As the two are pulled deeper into the topsy-turvy household, they become increasingly dependent on their problematic benefactors.