A master of international intrigue, New York Times bestselling author Taylor Stevens introduces a pair of wild cards into the global spy game—a brother and sister who were raised to deceive—and trained to kill . . .
They live in the shadows, Jack and Jill, feuding twins who can never stop running. From earliest memory they’ve been taught to hide, to hunt, to survive. Their prowess is outdone only by Clare, who has always been mentor first and mother second. She trained them in the art of espionage, tested their skills in weaponry, surveillance, and sabotage, and sharpened their minds with nerve-wracking psychological games. As they grew older they came to question her motives, her methods—and her sanity . . .
Now twenty-six years old, the twins are trying to lead normal lives. But when Clare’s off-the-grid safehouse explodes and she goes missing, they’re forced to believe the unthinkable: Their mother’s paranoid delusions have been real all along. To find her, they’ll need to set aside their differences; to survive, they’ll have to draw on every skill she’s trained them to use. A twisted trail leads from the CIA, to the KGB, to an underground network of global assassins where hunters become the hunted. Everyone, it seems, wants them dead—and, for one of the twins, it’s a threat that’s frighteningly familiar and dangerously close to home . . .
Filled with explosive action, suspense, and powerful human drama, Liars’ Paradox is world-class intrigue at its finest.
Archives
Little Comfort
Harvard librarian Hester Thursby knows that even in the digital age, people still need help finding things. Using her research skills, Hester runs a side business tracking down the lost. Usually, she’s hired to find long-ago prom dates or to reunite adopted children and birth parents. Her new case is finding the handsome and charismatic Sam Blaine. Sam has no desire to be found. As a teenager, he fled his small New Hampshire town with his friend, Gabe, after a haunting incident. For a dozen years, Sam and Gabe have traveled the country, reinventing themselves as they move from one mark to another. Sam has learned how trusting wealthy people can be—especially the lonely ones—as he expertly manipulates his way into their lives and homes. In Wendy Richards, the beautiful, fabulously rich daughter of one of Boston’s most influential families, he’s found the perfect way to infiltrate the milieu in which he knows he belongs—a world of Brooks Brothers suits, Nantucket summers, and effortless glamour. As Hester’s investigation closes in on their brutal truth, the bond between Sam and Gabe is tested and Hester unknowingly jeopardizes her own safety. While Gabe has pinned all his desperate hopes of a normal life on Hester, Sam wants her out of the way for good. And Gabe has always done what Sam asks…
Chariot on the Mountain
A novel based on one of the most remarkable court cases in American history – a trial largely forgotten until now, as it is brought vividly to life by Emmy and Peabody award-winning journalist Jack Ford. Part adventure tale and part courtroom drama, Chariot on the Mountain is an astonishing account of the unlikely alliance between three extraordinary women – a young slave, her mistress, and the daughter of a wealthy land owner – their heroic and dangerous struggle against the shackles of slavery in the Old South, and the trailblazing court case they undertook.
We Shall See the Sky Sparkling
Susana Aikin’s debut is an epic historical novel set in turn-of-the-20th-century London and Vladivostok, against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War and the emergence of the Bolshevik revolution, which follows the exploits of Lily, a talented young actress disinherited by her father, who reaches great artistic heights on the London stage, only to be betrayed and whirled into a romance with a Russian count with whom she absconds to faraway Siberia. Lily, who is passionate about the stage and ambitious to succeed, refuses throughout to surrender to Edwardian expectations demanded of a young woman: she is raped and later further betrayed by her London co-star Wade; falls in love with but abandons the good-hearted Chut; meets a crowd of royal revolutionaries in St. Petersburg; follows Sergei, the father of her child, to Vladivostok, where she loses both Sergei and her baby in the aftermath of war. She finally reconnects as a mature, wizened woman with an older and still-ardent Chut, with whom she returns to London to set up an independent theater venue. The book is loosely based on the author’s great grand-aunt’s story, a theatrical dancer who traveled to St. Petersburg and Vladivostok with a Russian lover and later returned to Manchester in 1904 to die of tuberculosis at the age of 24.
Don’t Believe It
From acclaimed USA Today bestselling author Charlie Donlea comes a twisting, impossible-to-put-down novel of suspense in which a documentary filmmaker helps clear a woman convicted of murder— only to find she may be a pawn in a sinister game…When Sidney Ryan’s series on the case of Grace Sebold, who has spent the last 10 years in prison for murdering her boyfriend on spring break, becomes the most watched documentary in television history, public outcry leads officials to reopen the case. But as the show surges towards its final episodes, Sidney receives an anonymous warning that she got it horribly, terribly wrong. Now she wonders if she has helped to free a ruthless killer. Layer by layer, deceptions fall away. And as Sidney edges closer to the real heart of the story, she must decide if finding the truth is worth risking her newfound fame, her career . . . even her life.
Between Earth and Sky
In Amanda Skenandore’s provocative debut, set in the tragic intersection between white and Native cultures, a girl whose father runs a “savage-taming” boarding school in the late-19th century learns about friendship, betrayal, and the sacrifices made in the name of belonging. Exploring the devastation and hope wrought by the US Government’s policy of forced assimilation in the years after the Indian Wars, Between Earth and Sky is told seen through the eyes of Alma, a white girl who falls in love with a Native American boy at the boarding school they both attend. It’s a tale of friendship, racism, and cultural identity—a journey of atonement that bears the reader from the 1880s to 1900, when the school’s brightest and most celebrated graduate stands trial for the murder of a white man.
This I Know
Grace bears a strange gift that is also a burden, something we might call acute intuition, but which her small town at the tail end of the 1960’s sees as a kind of witchcraft and her father, an Evangelical pastor, deems a sacrilege. Grace calls it The Knowing. Her uncanny abilities are impossible for those around her to reconcile with their black-and-white views of the good and evil forces in the world. As the era of small-town American innocence comes to a close, it’s the darker forces that seem to push Grace’s mother into postpartum depression and permeate the town with a wider sense of loss when one of its young girls go missing.
Hot and Badgered
In the first of a brand new paranormal romance series about three outrageously snarky sisters, New York Times bestselling author Shelly Laurenston returns to the shape-shifters genre and the animal her readers have been clamoring for since the release of her fan-favorite novel, Bite Me: the fearless honey badger!
It’s not every day that a beautiful naked woman falls out of the sky and lands face-first on grizzly shifter Berg Dunn’s hotel balcony. Definitely they don’t usually hop up and demand his best gun. Berg gives the lady a grizzly-sized t-shirt and his cell phone, too, just on style points. And then she’s gone, taking his XXXL heart with her. By the time he figures out she’s a honey badger shifter, it’s too late. Honey badgers are survivors. Brutal, vicious, ill-tempered survivors. Or maybe Charlie Taylor-MacKilligan is just pissed that her useless father is trying to get them all killed again, and won’t even tell her how. Protecting her little sisters has always been her job, and she’s not about to let some pesky giant grizzly protection specialist with a network of every shifter in Manhattan get in her way. Wait. He’s trying to help? Why would he want to do that? He’s cute enough that she just might let him tag along—that is, if he can keep up . . .
The Road to Bittersweet
Set in the Carolinas in the 1940s, The Road to Bittersweet is a beautifully written, evocative account of a young woman reckoning not just with the unforgiving landscape, but with the rocky emotional terrain that leads from innocence to wisdom…For fourteen-year-old Wallis Ann Stamper and her family, life in the Appalachian Mountains is simple and satisfying, though not for the tenderhearted. While her older sister, Laci—a mute, musically gifted savant—is constantly watched over and protected, Wallis Ann is as practical and sturdy as her name. When the Tuckasegee River bursts its banks, forcing them to flee in the middle of the night, those qualities save her life. But though her family is eventually reunited, the tragedy opens Wallis Ann’s eyes to a world beyond the creek that’s borne their name for generations. Carrying what’s left of their possessions, the Stampers begin another perilous journey from their ruined home to the hill country of South Carolina. Wallis Ann’s blossoming friendship with Clayton, a high diving performer for a traveling show, sparks a new opportunity, and the family joins as a singing group. But Clayton’s attention to Laci drives a wedge between the two sisters. As jealousy and betrayal threaten to accomplish what hardship never could—divide the family for good—Wallis Ann makes a decision that will transform them all in unforeseeable ways.
The Last Suppers
Set in 1950s Louisiana, Mandy Mikulencak’s beautifully written and emotionally moving novel evokes both The Help and Dead Man Walking with the story of an unforgettable woman whose quest to provide meals for death row prisoners leads her into the secrets of her own past…Many children have grown up in the shadow of Louisiana’s Greenmount State Penitentiary. Most of them—sons and daughters of corrections officers and staff—left the place as soon as they could. Yet Ginny Polk chose to come back to work as a prison cook. She knows the harsh reality of life within those walls—the cries of men being beaten, the lines of shuffling inmates chained together. Yet she has never seen them as monsters, not even the ones sentenced to execution. That’s why, among her duties, Ginny has taken on a special responsibility: preparing their last meals. Pot roast or red beans and rice, coconut cake with sevenminute frosting or pork neck stew . . . whatever the men ask for Ginny prepares, even meeting with their heartbroken relatives to get each recipe just right. It’s her way of honoring their humanity, showing some compassion in their final hours. The prison board frowns upon the ritual, as does Roscoe Simms, Greenmount’s Warden. Her daddy’s best friend before he was murdered, Roscoe has always watched out for Ginny, and their friendship has evolved into something deep and unexpected. But when Ginny stumbles upon information about the man executed for killing her father, it leads to a series of dark and painful revelations. Truth, justice, mercy—none of these are as simple as Ginny once believed. And the most shocking crimes may not be the ones committed out of anger or greed, but the sacrifices we make for love.