For years twelve-year-old CeeCee Honeycutt has been the caretaker of her psychotic mother, Camille, a woman trapped in her long-ago moment of glory as the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen. When Camille is killed by a truck, CeeCee's previously unknown great-aunt, Tootie Caldwell, whisks CeeCee away to Savannah, a world seemingly run entirely by women. These exotic women keep CeeCee enthralled for an entire summer.

Adrian Monk and Natalie return to San Francisco after an extended assignment in New Jersey to discover a dead woman in their bed with marked bills under the mattress.

"Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty, unmoored by a family tragedy and floundering in her career as a painter. So she applies to the National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica--the bottom of the Earth--where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own ... The only thing they have in common is the conviction that they don't belong anywhere else. Enter Frank Pavano, a climatologist...

"Clayton Stumper might be in his twenties, but he dresses like your grandpa and fusses like your aunt. Abandoned at birth on the steps of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, he was raised by a group of eccentric enigmatologists and now finds himself among the last survivors of a fading institution. When the esteemed crossword compiler and main maternal presence in Clayton's life, Pippa Allsbrook, passes away, she bestows her final puzzle on him: a promise...