Jack is terminally ill and has a very short time to live. As Christmas approaches, he prepares to spend his last days with his wife Lizzie and their three kids. But suddenly, Lizzie is tragically killed in a car accident, and the children are separated and sent to live with different family members. However, when Jack miraculously recovers, he sets out to reunite his family.

Suburban madam Heloise, with no one left to trust, decides to get out of the game when another suburban madam is brutally murdered, forcing her to stay one step ahead of a killer--and the father of her child--who is just as lethal behind bars as he was on the outside.

"Crawford Hunt wants his daughter back. Following the death of his wife four years ago, Crawford, a Texas Ranger, fell into a downward spiral that left him relegated to desk work and with his five-year-old daughter Georgia in the custody of her grandparents. But Crawford has cleaned up his act, met all the court imposed requirements, and now the fate of his family lies with Judge Holly Spencer. Holly, ambitious and confident, temporarily occupies...

"Richard and Michael, both three years sober, have just decided to celebrate their love by moving in together when Richard--driven by the desire to do the right thing for his ten-year-old-daughter, Brady, whom he has never met--impulsively calls his former father-in-law to connect with her. With that phone call, he jeopardizes the one good thing he has--his relationship with Michael--and also threatens the world of the fundamentalist Christian grandparents...

"Chicago is burning. And Lucy Hathaway is running for her life. As she rushes past a fine hotel engulfed in flames, a wrapped bundle tumbles from a window into her arms. Seconds later the building crumbles-and Lucy is astonished to discover the swaddled blanket contains a baby. Five years later Lucy walks into Rand Higgins's bank and knows: the orphan she rescued that day actually belongs to this ruthless financier. Now, to keep the child she's come...

Twined around one another are the stories of Allen Carmichael, now in his fifties, who is the man that Vietnam made him, and Jamie O'Connell, who loves and hates the father who tortures him. Carmichael rescues abused children and their mothers in a number of patient and inventive ways. The details of Jamie's father's psychological abuse of him will make readers dizzy and breathless ; how Allen and his cadre of associates reintroduce Jamie to the simple...

"From the widely acclaimed author of Waiting for Eden: a stirring, timely new novel which unfolds over the course of a single day in Istanbul: the story of an American woman attempting to leave behind her life in Turkey--to leave without her husband. Catherine has been married for many years to Murat, an influential Turkish real estate developer, and they have a young son together, William. But when she decides to leave her marriage and return home...

On falling in love with a woman half his age, novelist Michael Noonan of Maine is drawn into a custody battle for the woman's daughter. The father-in-law, a nasty millionaire, is trying to take the girl away and to complicate matters malevolent spirits are at work. Part love, part ghost story.