Successful New York editor Jen Gibbs is at the top of her game with her new position at Vida House Publishing--until a mysterious manuscript from an old slush pile appears on her desk. Turning the pages, Jen finds herself drawn into the life of Sarra, a mixed-race Melungeon girl trapped by dangerous men in turn-of-the-century Appalachia. A risky hunch may lead to The Story Keeper's hidden origins and its unknown author, but when the trail turns toward...

"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...

Halloween in North Carolina's Outer Banks becomes seriously tricky when librarian Lucy Richardson stumbles across something extra unusual in the rare books section: a dead body. Wealthy businessman Jay Ruddle is considering donating his extensive collection of North Carolina historical documents to the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library, but the competition for the collection is fierce. Unfortunately, while the library is hosting a lecture on ghostly...

Berlin 1933. Following the success of her debut novel, American writer Althea James receives an invitation from Joseph Goebbels himself to participate in a culture exchange program in Germany. There, Althea meets a woman who promises to show her the real Berlin, and soon she’s drawn into a group of resisters who make her question everything she knows about her hosts—and herself. Paris 1936. She may have escaped Berlin for Paris, but Hannah Brecht...

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...