National Network for Equitable Library Service

Searching for a mysteriously vanished girlfriend in contemporary Japan, the protagonist plunges into a wind tunnel of sexual violence and metaphysical dread, colliding with call girls, playing chaperone to a teenage psychic, and receiving cryptic instructions from a shabby oracle.

Peregrine Long sees a Chinese family on board a ship--in his morning tea. The image inspires him to write the story of this family, but then a woman claims that he's writing her family history exactly as it happened. She has just one question: What happened to her long-lost uncle?

Presented in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer and the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, she is forbidden from working, but encouraged to eat well and get plenty of exercise and air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency, a diagnosis common to women in that period.

Sixteen-year-old Lisa, smart, attractive, and outwardly successful, suffers from a nervous breakdown that only her closest friends seem to notice and care enough about to try to find a way to help her.

On Whidbey Island, the Gray quintuplets are the stuff of legend. Pixie and her brothers have always been bigger and blonder than their neighbors, as if they were birthed from the island itself. Together, they serve as an unofficial search-and-rescue team for the island, saving tourists and locals alike from the forces of wind and sea. But, when a young boy goes missing, the mysteries start to pile up. While searching for him, they find his mother's dead body instead, and realize that something sinister is in their midst.

Cat Mateo, a once-stray teenager, owes her rescue to Detective Stride. But Cat holds something else to her chest: a secret, the sheer power of which she could not possibly comprehend. A secret that, once out of the bag, will viciously scratch at Duluth's still-healing wounds.

A goodhearted priest and scholar, a professor with a passion for the darker side of medieval psychology, a defrocked monk, and a rich young businessman are all helplessly beguiled by the same coed.

A crime of unfathomable horror has a ripple-like effect on four profoundly different souls. Helen, a troubled inmate at Sloatsburg women's prison, is serving a life sentence for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, the recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, has forsworn the Park Avenue practice for which she trained in favor of the chief of psychiatry job at Sloatsburg. Former New York City narcotics detective Ike Bradshaw is a sardonic corrections officer at the prison. And Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet, is intent on nothing but achieving fame.

After watching a tv program about Otzi, a 5,000-year-old Ice Man, Kit's friend Ike becomes convinced that Kit's destiny is to become the next ice man -- a source of information for future generations. Together they obtain artifacts they think will accurately reflect life in the early twenty-first century and plan their journey to a nearby mountain. Kit gets tattoos similar to Otzi's, writes a manifesto and tries to come to terms with making the ultimate sacrifice.

Beauty is afraid to sleep, her dreams are haunted by the Shadow Lady who stalks and threatens her. During her waking hours, Beauty's life is safe, safer than she wants it to be. Since her mother's death, her father has become so over-protective that he has locked away all the knives in the house. Her mother's death, the accident, is never discussed. Beauty has lost her desire to be an artist. At school Beauty tries to be invisible to avoid the questions and innuendo that have arisen since her mother's death. But when a new student arrives, things begin to change.