In the stately nineteenth-century homes on Philadelphia's Delancey Street, the wilder passions scarcely ruffle the peace. Murder is unthinkable, particularly a murder involving an upscale book discussion group, of which schoolteacher Amanda Pepper is a devoted member. Nevertheless, on the day after a heated discussion of a fictional heroine's suicide, book group member Helen Coulter falls to her death from her roof garden. Helen's death is declared...

In the mid-twentieth century in a home economics program at a prominent university, real babies are being used to teach mothering skills to young women. For a young man raised in these unlikely circumstances, finding real love and learning to trust will prove to be the work of a lifetime. From his earliest days as a "practice baby" through his adult adventures in 1960s New York City, Disney's Burbank studios, and the delirious world of the Beatles'...

Jubilee Days: Laramie, Wyoming's annual rodeo bash and sin fest. It's a whole week of broncos bucking, guitars twanging, and cash registers ringing. Nobody much wants to spoil the party, not even when a local loser turns up dead in the mountains east of town. Almost nobody. Sally Adler and Hawk Green, a couple of college professors out for an afternoon hike, find the body, and for Sally and Hawk, murder is anything but academic. Like the victim,...

"Welcome to Sugarcreek, Ohio, where the Amish schoolteacher has a determined admirer. Tragically losing her parents as a child, Lisa Miller has grown up being afraid of loving and losing. She dedicates herself to teaching at an Amish schoolhouse and helping the grandparents who raised her, all the while avoiding the advances of newcomer Paul Herchberger. Paul enjoys antiques and meets Orley Troyer while looking for unique old milk bottles at yard...

Aria is no stranger to tragedy. Fifteen years ago, a family outing took the lives of her father and baby sister, leaving remaining members of this fractured family struggling with their own guilt-real and imagined. At twenty-five, Aria believes she can reinvent herself through her planned marriage with all its promise of a family of her own. Her infertility changes her life as swiftly and irrevocably as the urban landscape around her. With prose that...

"Notorious rake Alexander Sinclair, Earl of St James, takes pride in displaying his sins. When he's tasked by the Home Office with finding the men who attempted to assassinate the prime minister, his hunt leads him to Olivia Everett, a most proper schoolmistress who wants nothing to do with a profligate nobleman like him. Unknown to her, Olivia's brother Henry has been working with the revolutionary group planning to overthrow the government. Shocked...

For Iris Greenfeder-all but published, all but a professor, and all but married to her boyfriend of ten years-the sudden impulse to write a story about her mother, Katherine, leads to a shot at literary success. The piece recounts an eerie Irish fairy tale her mother used to tell her at bedtime-and nestled inside is the sad story of her mother's death, a strange, untimely end in a fire thirty years ago. When Iris returns to the remote Hotel Equinox...