What would it be like to walk into your living room one day and meet a complete stranger who says she’s your mother? It happens to Dizzy on her twelfth birthday. Storm ("Please don’t call me mum!") arrives, and the nice, safe, predictable life Dizzy has made with her father is blown to bits. Storm convinces Dizzy to go away on a short holiday with her—something she says Dizzy’s father has agreed to—and so begins a wild, van-traveling, musicmaking, teepee-sleeping, patchouli-wearing summer! But soon enough the fun wears off, and Dizzy begins to realize that Storm is not the mother Dizzy always dreamed she’d be.
Magnus Pym, ranking diplomat, has vanished, believed defected. The chase is on: for a missing husband, a devoted father, and a secret agent. Pym's life, it is revealed, is entirely made up of secrets.
It's 1936, in Flint, Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud's got a few things going for him: 1. He has his own suitcase filled with his own important, secret things. 2. He's the author of Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself. 3. His momma never told him who his father was, but she left a clue: flyers of Herman E. Calloway and his famous band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!!
Butler Jack tracks down his childhood sweetheart, Monica, the daughter of Morton Sampson, president of Fiesta Cruise Lines. When he offers her the chance to avenge her mother and humiliate her father, she jumps at it, not realizing his true motives until he begins to kill the passengers one by one.
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.
