"In Belfast, Northern Ireland, memories of the city's troubled history haunt every street corner, but for one tortured soul, the incredible violence in his past is also his most cherished legacy. Rea Carlisle--daughter of influential Stormont politician Graham Carlisle--has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew. It doesn't take her long to clear out the dead man's remaining possessions, but one of the upstairs rooms remains stubbornly locked....

"Three years after his death at ninety-one, J.D. Salinger remains our most mythic writer. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) became an American classic, and he was for a long time the writer for The New Yorker. Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters introduced, by way of the Glass family, a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, voluble cast of characters whose stage is the Upper East Side of New York. But fame proved...