Long and short of it--Barclay delivers on the hype. Fear the Worst starts with one of the better opening lines I've read in a while: "The morning of the day I lost her, my daughter asked me to scramble her some eggs." It's such a simple sentence, speaking of everyday domesticity. You can picture a father. You can picture a daughter. Yet you're already filled with dread. A bad thing has happened. And yeah, for the next four hundred pages, the bad thing...

A young girl describes activities that her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother all did for their daughters, and that she does for her doll. A young girl describes activities that her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother did for their daughters

"In this powerful novel about the cost of ambition and success, a legendary athlete attempts a comeback at an age when the world considers her past her prime-from the New York Times bestselling author of Malibu Rising. Carolina Soto is undeniably fierce. She is determined to be the best professional tennis player the world has ever seen. And by the time she retires from the game in 1989 at the age of thirty-one, she is just that: the best. She has...

Gabriella Mondini is a rarity in 16th century Venice: a woman who practices medicine. Her father, a renowned physician, has provided her entree to this all male profession, and inspired in her a shared mission to understand the secrets of the human body. Then her father disappears and Gabriella faces a crisis: she is no longer permitted to treat her patients, women who need her desperately, without her father's patronage. She sets out across Europe...

Rose cannot accept the medical diagnosis that her daughter, who suffers nightmarish trances, is going insane. Over the protests of her husband, Rose flees with their child, Sharon, to the town of Silent Hill. There, Rose is hoping that Sharon's traces can be explained. It is revealed that the town had been evacuated thirty years earlier due to an unstoppable, still burning underground coal fire. A local motorcycle cop ends up pursuing Rose and Sharon...

It's Gamache's first day back as head of the homicide department, a job he temporarily shares with his previous second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Flood waters are rising across the province. In the middle of the turmoil a father approaches Gamache, pleading for help in finding his daughter. As crisis piles upon crisis, Gamache tries to hold off the encroaching chaos, and realizes the search for Vivienne Godin should be abandoned. But with a daughter...

Finn is looking for a lost Spanish galleon in the Caribbean. He believes he has found the galleon and has marked the location with his own sunken boat. He enlists the help of his ex-wife, Tess, who is intrigued until she finds he has no real proof of the Spanish ship's location. Fate has put the two together again, this time onboard the boat of multi-millionaire Nigel Honeycutt and his daughter, Gemma. Nigel is fascinated by Finn's story and wants...