At 15, Polly Farmer escapes an alcoholic mother and a trailer-park no-future, hitchhikes to New Orleans and makes a life for herself as an English professor. Polly, divorced with two daughters, romantically intersects with handsome restoration architect Marshall Marchand—who's really Dylan Raines, who was incarcerated as the 11-year-old Butcher Boy who axe-murdered his parents 25 years earlier in Minnesota. As Barr artfully unfolds this mystery...

"Laura, a brilliant student and promising scholar, escapes from her small town, working class background to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield scholarship to Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her schoolwork, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation among the anointed "best and brightest" of her generation. Years later, back in the U.S. with a Ph.D. in Henry James studies, she...

"To an observer, hauling a baby grand piano onto a college quad to publicly serenade an ex might seem like a romantic gesture. To literature professor Eva Campbell, it's the latest manipulative move by a cheating jerk who won't take a hint. Plus, she never liked that song anyway. Setting the piano on fire might be an overreaction, but Eva's at the end of her rope, at least until hot young firefighter Sean Hannigan talks her down. And that's not all...

"After three disastrous marriages, a series of bad dates, and a tumultuous relationship with an emotionally abusive mother, psychology professor Nancy Jewel is through with love and commitment. Romantic or familial, the notion is a waste of her time. Content with being alone, she's starting to feel normal-ish when she learns her father, incarcerated in Georgia, has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Nancy is determined to get him a compassionate...

Elizabeth Lancaster, whose family thinks she deserves a more exciting life, joins her ex-husband for the summer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. There she meets a political operative, and gains some unexpected insights from studying the playwright.

"As an adjunct professor of English with a draining and tedious courseload, Dorothy feels "like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had no idea what else to do but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise." No one but her partner knows that she's just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists - Dorothy being the kind of person who begins seeing a second because she's too conflict-averse to break things...

"A dramatic and inspiring novel based on the true story of the Jane Collective and the brave women who fought for our right to choose, from the USA Today bestselling author of The Paris Bookseller. Chicago, early 1970s. Who does a woman call when she needs help? Jane. The best-known secret in the city, Jane is an underground women's health organization composed entirely of women helping women, empowering them to live lives free from the expectations...

"On a rainy day in May 1964, history professor Cecily Bridge-Davis begins to search for the sixty-five acres of land she inherited from her father's family. The quest leads her to uncover a dark secret: In every generation, one offspring from each Bridge family unit vanishes--and is mysteriously whisked back in time. Rules have been established that must be followed to prevent dire consequences: Never interfere with past events. Always carry your...

"From the author of the "raw, ingenious, and utterly fearless" (Wendy Walker, USA Today bestselling author) Temper comes a dynamic psychological thriller about two women who give bad men exactly what they deserve--one an English professor/serial killer who murders the most evil man she knows each year, and the other a lost college freshman seeking vengeance after her best friend is sexually assaulted at a party"--

"'Who put Ellen in the blackgum tree?' Decades after trespassing children spotted the desiccated corpse wedged in the treetop, no one knows the answer. Kate Thrush and her former college professor, Dr. Judith Kane, travel to Cinderwich, Tennessee, in hopes that maybe it was their Ellen: Katie's lost aunt, Judith's long-gone lover. But they're not the only ones to have come here looking for closure. The people of Cinderwich, a town hardly more than...