"After the Great War, American heiress Ruby Vaughn made a life for herself running a rare bookstore alongside her octogenarian employer and housemate in Exeter. She's always avoided dwelling on the past, even before the war, but it seems to have a way of finding her. When Ruby is forced to deliver a box of books to a folk healer living deep in the Cornish countryside, she is brought back to the one place she swore she'd never return. A more sensible...

The rare book world is stunned when a reclusive collector, Adam Diehl, is found on the floor of his Montauk home: hands severed, surrounded by valuable inscribed books and original manuscripts that have been vandalized beyond repair. Adam's sister, Meghan, and her lover, Will-- a convicted if unrepentant literary forger-- struggle to come to terms with the seemingly incomprehensible murder. But when Will begins receiving threatening handwritten letters,...

When Lula Dean, trying to rid public libraries of "pornographic" books, starts her own lending library in front of her home, Lindsay, the daughter of Lula's arch nemesis, sneaks in nightly, secretly filling it with banned books wrapped in "wholesome" dust jackets, changing the lives of those who borrow them in unexpected ways.

Carlisle's discursive 11th Bibliophile mystery finds bookbinder and heiress Brooklyn Wainwright coveting a rare edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in a San Francisco book shop. But her main concern is the imminent arrival from England of the upper-class parents of her tall, dark, and handsome fiancé, Derek Stone, a former British secret agent who now runs an internationally renowned private security agency. How will these toffs get along...

Just as Bruce Cable's Bay Books is preparing for the return of bestselling author Mercer Mann, Hurricane Leo veers from its predicted course and heads straight for Camino Island. Florida's governor orders a mandatory evacuation and most residents board up their houses and flee to the mainland, but Bruce decides to stay and ride out the storm. The hurricane is devastating: Homes and condos are leveled, hotels and storefronts ruined, streets flooded--and...

Bookstore owner Addie is dog sitting for a friend in the hospital. When Addie goes to her friend's house, she notices an interesting item on the nightstand which belongs to her shop assistant, Paige, a very valuable copy of the beloved children's book The Secret Garden. But Addie's blood runs cold when she finds something else, a dead body behind the bakery next door to her shop. Martha, the bakery owner, has no alibi, and has been seen in a heated...

When a baby is discovered floating in a basket along the canals of 1807 Venice, a guild of artisans takes him in and raises him as a son, skilled in each of their trades. Although the boy, Sebastien Trovato, has wrestled with questions of his origins, it isn't until a woman washes ashore his lagoon island that answers begin to emerge. In hunting down his story, Sebastien must make choices that could alter not just his own future, but that of the beloved...

The stories collected here are linked by more than the exquisitely winding prose of their creator: Helen Oyeyemi's ensemble cast of characters slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits...

"Wedding bells are about to ring again in Greyborne Harbor, and as Addie slips into her white dress her thoughts are focused on a bright future with Dr. Simon Emerson. But a discovery in her attic leads her to startling revelations about the past. As the owner of Beyond the Page Books and Curios and a lifelong bibliophile, Addie is delighted to find a rare collection of classic children's books gathering dust in a secret room beneath the rafters,...

Sage Singer becomes friends with an old man who is particularly beloved in her community after they strike up a conversation at the bakery where she works. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. One day he asks Sage for a favor, to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses, but then he tells her he deserves to die. Once he reveals his secret, Sage wonders if he is right. Can someone who has committed a truly heinous act...