The Intern's Handbook

Shane Kuhn

Simon and Schuster

John Lago is a very bad guy. But he's the very best at what he does. And what he does is infiltrate top-level companies and assassinate crooked executives while disguised as an intern. Interns are invisible. That's the secret behind HR, Inc., the elite "placement agency" that doubles as a network of assassins for hire who take down high-profile targets that wouldn't be able to remember an intern's name if their lives depended on it. At the ripe old age of almost twenty-five, John Lago is already New York City's most successful hit man. He's also an intern at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, clocking eighty hours a week getting coffee, answering phones, and doing all the grunt work actual employees are too lazy to do. He was hired to assas-sinate one of the firm's heavily guarded partners. His internship provides the perfect cover, enabling him to gather intel and gain access to pull off a clean, untraceable hit. Part confessional, part DIY manual, "The Intern's Handbook" chronicles John's final assignment, a twisted thrill ride in which he is pitted against the toughest--and sexiest--adversary he's ever faced: Alice, an FBI agent assigned to take down the same law partner he's been assigned to kill.

Keep Quiet

Lisa Scottoline

St. Martin's Press

Jake Buckman's relationship with his sixteen-year-old son Ryan is not an easy one, so at the urging of his loving wife, Pam, Jake goes alone to pick up Ryan at their suburban movie theater. On the way home, Ryan asks to drive on a deserted road, and Jake sees it as a chance to make a connection. However, what starts as a father-son bonding opportunity instantly turns into a nightmare. Tragedy strikes, and with Ryan's entire future hanging in the balance, Jake is forced to make a split-second decision that plunges them both into a world of guilt and lies. Without ever meaning to, Jake and Ryan find themselves living under the crushing weight of their secret, which threatens to tear their family to shreds and ruin them all. Powerful and dramatic, Keep Quiet will have readers and book clubs debating what it means to be a parent and how far you can, and should, go to protect those you love.

Astonish Me: A novel

Maggie Shipstead

Knopf

Astonish Me is the irresistible story of Joan, a young American dancer who helps a Soviet ballet star, the great Arslan Rusakov, defect in 1975. A flash of fame and a passionate love affair follow, but Joan knows that, onstage and off, she is destined to remain in the background. She will never possess Arslan, and she will never be a prima ballerina. She will rise no higher than the corps, one dancer among many. After her relationship with Arslan sours, Joan plots to make a new life for herself. She quits ballet, marries a good man, and settles in California with him and their son, Harry. But as the years pass, Joan comes to understand that ballet isn't finished with her yet, for there is no mistaking that Harry is a prodigy. Through Harry, Joan is pulled back into a world she thought she'd left behind-back into dangerous secrets, and back, inevitably, to Arslan.

The Collector of Dying Breaths: A Novel of Suspense

M. J. Rose

Atria Books

A lush and imaginative novel that crisscrosses time as a perfumer and a mythologist search for the fine line between potion and poison, poison and passion...and past and present. Florence, Italy-1533: An orphan named René le Florentin is plucked from poverty to become Catherine de Medici's perfumer. Traveling with the young duchessina from Italy to France, René brings with him a cache of secret documents from the monastery where he was trained: recipes for exotic fragrances and potent medicines-and a formula for an alchemic process said to have the potential to reanimate the dead. In France, René becomes not only the greatest perfumer in the country but the most dangerous, creating deadly poisons for his Queen to use against her rivals. But while mixing herbs and essences under the light of flickering candles, Rene doesn't begin to imagine the tragic and personal consequences for which his lethal potions will be responsible. Paris, France-The Present: A renowned mythologist, Jac L'Etoile, is trying to recover from personal heartache by throwing herself into her work, learns of the 16th century perfumer who may have been working on an elixir that would unlock the secret to immortality. She becomes obsessed with René le Florentin's work-particularly when she discovers the dying breathes he had collected during his lifetime. Jac's efforts put her in the path of her estranged lover, Griffin North, a linguist who has already begun translating René le Florentin's mysterious formula. Together they confront an eccentric heiress in possession of a world-class art collection. A woman who has her own dark purpose for the elixir... a purpose for which she believes the ends will justify her deadly means. This mesmerizing gothic tale of passion and obsession crisscrosses time, zigzagging from the violent days of Catherine de Medici's court to twenty-first century France. Fiery and lush, set against deep, wild forests and dimly lit chateaus, The Collector of Dying Breaths illuminates the true path to immortality: the legacies we leave behind.

If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother

Julia Sweeney

Simon and Schuster

In these candidly witty and poignant essays, comedienne and writer Julia Sweeney muses on the complex blessings of motherhood: deciding to adopt her daughter, a Chinese girl named Mulan ("After the movie?"); nannies (including the Chinese Pat); being adopted by a dog; and meeting Mr. Right through an email from a complete stranger who wrote, "Desperately Seeking Sweeney-in-Law." She recounts how she explained the facts of life to nine-year-old Mulan, a story that became a wildly popular TED talk and YouTube video. But no matter what the topic, Julia always writes with elegant precision, pinning her jokes with razor-sharp observations while articulating feelings that we all share.

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap

Matt Taibbi, Molly Crabapple

Spiegel and Grau

Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery: Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles. Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world's wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail. In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends-growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration-come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime-but it's impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side. In The Divide, Matt Taibbi takes readers on a galvanizing journey through both sides of our new system of justice-the fun-house-mirror worlds of the untouchably wealthy and the criminalized poor. He uncovers the startling looting that preceded the financial collapse; a wild conspiracy of billionaire hedge fund managers to destroy a company through dirty tricks; and the story of a whistleblower who gets in the way of the largest banks in America, only to find herself in the crosshairs. On the other side of the Divide, Taibbi takes us to the front lines of the immigrant dragnet; into the newly punitive welfare system which treats its beneficiaries as thieves; and deep inside the stop-and-frisk world, where standing in front of your own home has become an arrestable offense. As he narrates these incredible stories, he draws out and analyzes their common source: a perverse new standard of justice, based on a radical, disturbing new vision of civil rights. Through astonishing-and enraging-accounts of the high-stakes capers of the wealthy and nightmare stories of regular people caught in the Divide's punishing logic, Taibbi lays bare one of the greatest challenges we face in contemporary American life: surviving a system that devours the lives of the poor, turns a blind eye to the destructive crimes of the wealthy, and implicates us all.

Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

Barbara Ehrenreich

Twelve

Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In Living With A Wild God, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find "the Truth" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a "mystical experience"-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In Living With A Wild God, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.

Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World's Most Versatile Ingredient

Michael Ruhlman

Little, Brown and Company

For culinary visionary Michael Ruhlman, the question is not whether the chicken or the egg came first, it's how anything could be accomplished in the kitchen without the magic of the common egg. He starts with perfect poached and scrambled eggs and builds up to brioche and Italian meringue. Along the way readers learn to make their own mayonnaise, pasta, custards, quiches, cakes, and other preparations that rely fundamentally on the hidden powers of the egg. A unique framework for the book is provided in Ruhlman's egg flowchart, which starts with the whole egg at the top and branches out to describe its many uses and preparations -- boiled, pressure-cooked, poached, fried, coddled, separated, worked into batters and doughs, and more. A removable illustrated flowchart is included with the book. Nearly 100 recipes are grouped by technique and range from simple (Egg Salad with Tarragon and Chives) to sophisticated (nougat). Dozens of step-by-step photographs guide the home cook through this remarkable culinary journey.

Between Two Worlds

Katherine Kirkpatrick

Wendy Lamb Books

On the treeless shores of Itta, Greenland, as far north as humans can settle, sixteen-year-old Inuit Billy Bah spots a ship far out among the icebergs on the bay--a sight both welcome and feared. Explorers have already left their indelible mark on her land and its people, and a ship full of white men can mean trouble. The ship carries provisions for Robert E. Peary, who is making an expidition to the North Pole. As a child, Billy Bah spent a year in America with Peary's family. When her parents went to America years later, they died in a tragic scandal. Now, Peary's wife, daughter, and crew are in Itta to bring him supplies. Winter comes on fast, and when the ship gets caught in the ice, Billy Bah sets out to find Peary. The journey will imperil her life, and that of the man she loves. By turns lyrical and gripping, Between Two Worlds is an impassioned coming-of-age novel set in a land of breathtaking beauty and danger, where nature and love are powerful and unpredictable forces.

Lulu's Mysterious Mission

Judith Viorst, Kevin Cornell

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

This irresistible third illustrated chapter book starring Judith Viorst's Lulu is full of hilarious hijinks, delightful twists, and a top-secret mission "Eeny meeny miney mo, " "That babysitter's got to go." Lulu has put her tantrum-throwing days behind her. That is, until her parents announce that they are going on vacation--WITHOUT LULU. Not only that, but they are leaving her with the formidable Ms. Sonia Sofia Solinsky, who says hello by bellowing, "The Eagle has landed," and smiles at you with the kind of smile that an alligator might give you before eating you for dinner. The second her parents are out of the house, Lulu tries out several elaborate schemes to bring them straight back. But just when she seems to finally be making some headway, her babysitter reveals an astonishing secret...one that has Lulu crossing her fingers that her parents will go on vacation "all the time"--without her.

Duck & Goose Go to the Beach

Tad Hills

Schwartz and Wade

In this delightful follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Duck & Goose and Duck, Duck, Goose, Duck wants to go on an adventure. Goose doesn't. He doesn't see the point. After all, why would they go anywhere when they're happy right where they are? But then Goose sees the ocean and loves it. Who doesn't? Well, Duck, for one!