Policewoman Charlotte Monroe has a near psychic ability to read people's faces and body language and the FBI wants her in the worst way, maybe even to the point of blackmail. Still, Charlotte's gift fails to prepare her for the stranger who shows up on her doorstep with a chilling warning for her husband, a mysterious not scrawled in Cherokee hieroglyphics, and a promise of things to come: "You're next." When Charlotte's deeply troubled teenage daughter runs away with the stranger, she follows the two of them into the mists of the Great Smoky Mountains and into a 150-year-old blood feud that will endanger everything she loves.
Like any big-city paramedic, Shaw Chandler had probably seen a thousand suicides in Miami. But he knows a murder when he sees one--and this time it's his own father. Suddenly he's got a metal cannister marked "US NAVY" in his hands, and he's dragged back to the crazed, coral shores of Key West to explain it. There he comes face-to-face with a deranged killer--and a psychotic mastermind. Soon to be a major motion picture.
When Alexandra Rafferty was a girl, something unspeakable cruel happened to her on a summer afternoon. Only her father knew about it-or so she thought. Now a forensic photographer for the Miami P.D., Alexandra remains haunted by that horrible day, and it colors all of her relationships. Stan, her emotionally estranged and loutish husband, drives a Brinks armored car and has his own mind-bending agenda. Her now-aging, not-altogether-there father is growing more dependent and less dependable. And her work photographing crime scenes has become a life-consuming obsession.
Once, A. J. and Darlene Braswell had it all -- fortune, three beautiful children, power, bright futures. But then their golden son, Andy, was killed in a grotesque battle with a giant blue marlin, and in the ten years since his death, the Braswell family has crumbled -- Darlene ultimately giving in to suicidal depression, the family business nearly in ruins.
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a ship bound for England, and at mealtimes is seated at the 'cat's table' with a ragtag group of 'insignificant' adults and two other boys. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, 'bursting all over the place like freed mercury.' But there are other diversions: one man talks to them about jazz and women, another about literature. And at night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner - his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.
