V Johnson

Widower Mukesh lives a quiet life in the London Borough of Ealing after losing his beloved wife. He shops every Wednesday, goes to Temple, and worries about his granddaughter, Priya, who hides in her room reading. Aleisha is a bright but anxious teenager working at the local library when she discovers a crumpled-up piece of paper. It's a list of novels that she's never heard of before. When Mukesh arrives at the library, desperate to forge a connection with his bookworm granddaughter, Aleisha passes along the reading list…hoping that it will be a lifeline for him too.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself.

To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become “well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was the necessary price of survival.

Form-defining short stories. First published in 1914, James Joyce defined what the short story could be with his collection The Dubliners. A mixture of prose and poetry, each story can be listened to independently, or as a collection. From childhood to maturity, we see what life - and ultimately death - can be, via an extraordinary cast of characters, all of whom experience an epiphany. There’s Father Flynn, the priest; Evelyn, the shop girl who dreams of escape; Mrs Mooney, the butcher’s daughter, who runs a boarding house.

It is an ordinary Thursday, and things should finally be returning to normal. Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned. A decade-old cold case—their favorite kind--leads them to a local news legend and a murder with no body and no answers. Then a new foe pays Elizabeth a visit. Her mission? Kill or be killed. Suddenly the cold case has become red hot.

Meghan, Brecia, and Skye have just one thing in common. They were all murdered by the same man. He hunted them online, masquerading as an eligible bachelor. Then he played the perfect gentleman, a thick layer of charm and a thousand-watt smile hiding the fact that his first dates end in shallow graves. He’s gotten away with murder three times now. The only thing that might keep him from killing again? The women he murdered. Meghan, Brecia, and Skye might be dead, but they’re not gone. They’ve found each other. And they won’t rest until they find a way to stop him.

Meghan, Brecia, and Skye have just one thing in common. They were all murdered by the same man. He hunted them online, masquerading as an eligible bachelor. Then he played the perfect gentleman, a thick layer of charm and a thousand-watt smile hiding the fact that his first dates end in shallow graves. He’s gotten away with murder three times now. The only thing that might keep him from killing again? The women he murdered. Meghan, Brecia, and Skye might be dead, but they’re not gone. They’ve found each other. And they won’t rest until they find a way to stop him. The haunt is on.

She's just watching, thinking about it again, when a big flash car pulls up outside. No one gets out. Then the doors of the bar open and people appear. Two men and a youngish woman, and one of the men has a hold on the woman's arm. It looks as if they're having words. Then this all happens quickly—they push the woman towards the car, one of the back doors opens, and they manhandle her inside. Sarah hears a muffled shout from the woman and the car pulls away. It's all over in a few seconds.

In a windswept British seaside town, single mum Alice Lake finds a man sitting on the beach outside her house. He has no name and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, 21-year-old Lily Monrose has been married for only three weeks. When her husband fails to come home from work one night, she is left alone in a place where she knows no one and with the police telling her that her husband never existed.

"And see if there's any news about the missing girl." Life, as Smith used to say, is just one thing after another - as one investigation ends, a new one begins. But for reasons unknown to the rest of her team, DCI Cara Freeman will be haunted by the next case for the Kings Lake Central murder squad. They find themselves delving into the seamy side of life in the town, and one of their number will have departed before this new investigation is over. Perhaps Detective Sergeant Chris Waters should have seen it coming, but he has a lot more than work on his mind these days.