Nora heads home to Chateau in search of a fresh start, but her arrival comes at a time of social unrest that threatens to uncover long-hidden secrets. Nora Best is done running. She's heading to her hometown of Chateau, to the grand Quail House, to stay with her mother and claim the great American privilege of starting over. But she might find it is hard to start over when the past is catching up ... The night Nora arrives in Chateau, a white police officer shoots and kills Robert Evans, a young Black man. The officer in question is Nora's school sweetheart, Alden Tydings. What really happened that night? Did Alden act in self-defense as he claims? Robert is the nephew of Bobby Evans, a man whose murder during the race protests of 1967 was never solved. Bobby and his sister, Grace, used to work at Quail House before Nora was born and, as tensions in Chateau rise, Nora begins to uncover secrets within her family home that could upend the lives of everyone in town ...
Public defender Julia Geary moves through life in simmering resentment-at her husband, a soldier killed in Iraq, leaving her a single mother; at her low-paying job; and at her overbearing mother-in-law, whose home she shares. She longs for a breakout case, and it arrives when members of the high-school soccer team report seeing a teammate-Iraqi refugee Sami Mohammed-assaulting a girl in the locker room. In a town where animosity against refugees has already reached a fever pitch, Julia throws all her energy into Sami's defense. She finds an ally in high-school principal Dom Parrish, who believes Sami is innocent, and the case suddenly turns red hot. Then she begins receiving vicious threats against her family, and a senseless act of violence leaves Sami in a coma. And finally, a crop of new evidence emerges that points to the town's most prominent citizens and pits Julia against powerful forces set on burying the truth once and for all. If Sami survives and Julia can prove him innocent, it will be the case of a lifetime. But now it's her life that's on the line.
In the first of a new mystery series, we meet Nora Best as she flees her old life, cheating husband and all, and takes to the road with an Airstream trailer. Nora Best is the envy of her friends. She's just turned fifty and has traded in her home with The Perfect-Ass Husband for an Airstream trailer and an adventure of a lifetime across the US. But during their leaving party, Nora finds her husband in a compromising position with a friend. Storming out of the party she jumps into her truck with no idea how to tow the Airstream or where she's going. Nora ends up in a campground in the mountains of Wyoming, drowning her sorrows with its managers, Brad and Miranda. When she is woken by a frantic Miranda after Brad has disappeared and bloodstains have been found around the campsite, Nora finds herself caught up in an adventure she could never have expected . . . facing a charge of murder.
For fans of A Thousand Splendid Suns comes a stirring novel set in Afghanistan about two women—an American aid worker and her local interpreter—who form an unexpected friendship despite their utterly different life experiences and the ever-increasing violence that surrounds them in Kabul.
In 2001, Kabul is suddenly a place of possibility as people fling off years of repressive Taliban rule. This hopeful chaos brings together American aid worker Liv Stoellner and Farida Basra, an educated Pakistani woman still adjusting to her arranged marriage to Gul, the son of an Afghan strongman whose family spent years of exile in Pakistan before returning to Kabul.
Both Liv and her husband take positions at an NGO that helps Afghan women recover from the Taliban years. They see the move as a reboot—Martin for his moribund academic career, Liv for their marriage. But for Farida and Gul, the move to Kabul is fraught, severing all ties with Farida's family and her former world, and forcing Gul to confront a chapter in his life he'd desperately tried to erase.
The two women, brought together by Farida's work as an interpreter, form a nascent friendship based on their growing mutual love for Afghanistan, though Liv remains unaware that Farida is reporting information about the Americans' activities to Gul's family, who have ties to the black market.
As the bond between Farida and Liv deepens, war-scarred Kabul acts in different ways upon them, as well as their husbands. Silent Hearts is an absorbing, complex portrayal of two very different but equally resilient women caught in the conflict of a war that will test them in ways they never imagined.
Former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is getting a little bored in Magpie, Montana, where she landed at a small local newspaper after being downsized from her job in Kabul. Then Judith Calf Looking, a local Blackfoot Indian girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriff—whose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in years—thinks Judith probably froze to death while hitchhiking back to the reservation from wherever she’d been.
But Lola hears rumors that Judith had been working as an exotic dancer in the North Dakota oil fields and further discovers that several Blackfoot girls, all known drug users, have gone missing over the past year. She heads out to the oil patch to check things out, only to find herself in a place where men outnumber women a hundred to one, the law looks the other way, and life—especially her own—is cheap.
Dakota shows the frightening underside of a boom-and-bust economy; of the effect on a small town when big-city money washes in, accompanied by hordes of men far from their families; of what happens when the old rules no longer apply but the new ones are yet to be determined.
“Florio’s second novel mines familiar ground with another look at American Indian culture along the frozen US-Canadian border territory, with a compelling mystery folded in to add spice to the mix…The writing is top-notch, and the action builds at just the right pace. In Florio’s capable hands, Lola Wicks is going to be around for a long, long time.”—Kirkus Reviews
Foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is pissed off. Her editor, downsizing her from her Kabul posting, reassigns her to a stateside suburban beat formerly the province of interns. Meanwhile, arriving in Montana for some R&R at a friend’s cabin, she is surprised to find her friend nowhere in sight.
Anger turns to terror when Lola discovers her friend shot dead. She can’t get out of Montana fast enough but finds that she can’t leave, as she’s being held as a potential witness, thwarting her plan to return to Afghanistan on her own and have her editors change their minds. Her best hope now lies in solving the case herself. But this sure-footed journalist who deftly negotiated Afghanistan’s deadly terrain finds herself frighteningly off balance in this forgotten corner of her own country, plagued by tensions between the locals and citizens of the nearby Blackfeet Nation.
Lola’s lone-wolf style doesn’t work in a place where the harsh landscape and extreme isolation compel people to rely upon each other in ways she finds unsettling. In her awkward attempts at connection, she forms a reluctant alliance with a local reporter, succumbs to the romantic attentions of a wealthy rancher, and fences warily with the state’s first Indian candidate for governor, the subject of her friend’s final stories.
Ultimately she comes to truly care about the people she meets in Montana, only to miss the warning signals that her own life is in danger.
While unraveling her friend’s terrible fate, Lola joins many Americans in learning the hard lessons of a fraught economy—that circumstances change in a flash, that formerly overlooked places and people can hold deep value, and that human bonds matter more than fleeting career success.
