"Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a bucolic Irish village would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens. But when a local kid whose brother has gone missing arm-twists him into investigating, Cal uncovers layers of darkness beneath his picturesque retreat, and starts to realize that even small...

Yearning for more adventure in her life and longing to know the truth behind her mother's disappearance, Lillian Haswell, the daughter of the local apothecary, seizes the opportunity when a distant aunt offers to educate her as a lady in London.

"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel 'How Beautiful We Were.' Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to...

After a terrible mass shooting at Cicero's Circus, the evil presence responsible for the carnage is taken in by a doomsday cult lying in wait for such an opportunity. The village struggles to get back to normal in the aftermath of the shooting. The massacre was the final straw for many inhabitants, triggering a mass exodus. Families left their homes without looking back, not even to find out what could have caused such a tragedy. However, to those...

"Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize-winner Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present. In the wake of her mother's death, Kalyani, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that...

Alone and listening to the moaning of the Dark City dying around her, Annah wants to find her way back home, to her sister and family and their village in the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

"Not far from London, there is a village. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to those who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England's mysterious past and its confounding present. It belongs to Mad Pete, the grizzled artist. To ancient Peggy, gossiping at her gate. To families dead for generations, and to those who have only recently moved here. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort who has woken from his slumber...

Twelve-year-old Zola, who has a surprising connection to Jessie, discovers that she is stuck in a fake utopian future, and that those around her are counting on her to help them escape.

Agatha Raisin's neighboring village of Ancombe is usually the epitome of quiet rural charm, but the arrival of a new mineral-water company—which intends to tap into the village spring—sends tempers flaring and divides the parish council into two stubborn camps. When Agatha, who happens to be the PR person for the water company, finds the council chairman murdered at the spring, tongues start wagging. Could one of the council members

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A more than welcome addition to the growing ranks of Scandinavian fiction . . . Fjallbacka and its crimes and people will soon be as popular here as they are in (Lackberg's) native Sweden.--Peter Robinson, author of "All the Colors of Darkness."