In its 300-year history, there has never once been a scandal at Mullings, ancestral home of the decent but dull Stodmarsh family. Until, that is, Edward Stodmarsh makes an ill-advised second marriage to the scheming Regina Stapleton, who insists on bringing her family's 'ornamental hermit' to live on the estate. Suddenly everyone wants to visit Mullings to glimpse this mysterious figure. Strange but harmless, thinks Florence Norris, the family's longstanding...

"After a tumultuous childhood, Christa Liddle has hidden away, both figuratively and literally. Happily studying sea snails in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Christa finds her tranquil existence thrown into chaos when her once-famous father--long thought dead after a plane crash--turns out to be alive, well, and ready to make amends. The world goes wild, fascinated by this real-life saga, pinning Christa and her family under the spotlight. As if...

Perpetually hunting Floridian arcana and lore, Serge and his permanently baked sidekick, Coleman, are on a frenzied literary pilgrimage that leads them back to Riviera Beach, the cozy seaside town where the boys spent their formative years. There's The Legend of Riviera Beach, aka Darby, a welder at the port who surfed the local waves long before the hot spots were hot. And there's a murkier legend of the crazy hermit living in a makeshift jungle...

"The man known as Wilde is a mystery to everyone, including himself. Decades ago, he was found as a boy living feral in the woods, with no memory of his past. After the police concluded an exhaustive hunt for the child's family, which was never found, he was turned over to the foster system. Now, thirty years later, Wilde still doesn't know where he comes from, and he's back living in the woods on the outskirts of town, content to be an outcast, comfortable...

Arriving in Tangier with her new husband only to encounter the estranged best friend she has not seen in more than a year, Alice allows her friend to introduce her to the rhythms and culture of Morocco, only to be quickly stifled by the woman's controlling nature.-- For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. She's barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when handsome...

"Over twenty years ago, the heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family's estate, then locked inside an isolated cabin for months. Patricia escaped, but so did her captors--and the items stolen from her family were never recovered. Until now. On the Upper West Side, a recluse is found murdered in his penthouse apartment, alongside two objects of note: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase bearing the initials WHL3....

While on a school field trip in Vietnam, a young boy climbs a mountain without finding the Buddhist hermit he is expecting to see, but later realizes that he has found much more.

"England, 1255. What could drive a girl on the cusp of womanhood to lock herself away from the world forever? Sarah is just seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a cell that measures only seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth as well as pressure to marry the local lord's son, she decides to renounce the world -- with all its dangers,...