Two Girls Down
2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist
Everyone in Gardiners Bay has a secret.
When Jenna Dallas and Adam Cole find Colleen O'Dell's body floating off the shore of their coastal town, the community of Gardiners Bay is shaken. But even more shocking is the fact that her drowning was no accident.
Once Jenna's best friend becomes a key suspect, Jenna starts to look for answers on her own. As she uncovers scandals inside Preston Prep School leading back to Rookwood reform school, she knows she needs Adam on her side.
A windswept private island off the coast of Massachusetts.
A hungry ocean, churning with secrets and sorrow.
A fiery, addicted heiress. An irresistible, unpredictable boy.
A summer of unforgivable betrayal and terrible mistakes.
Welcome back to the Sinclair family.
They were always liars.
Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isnʼt right at the motel, something haunting and scary.
Charlotte lost her mother six months ago, and still no one will tell her exactly what happened the day she mysteriously died. They say her heart stopped, but Charlotte knows deep down that there's more to the story.
The only person who gets it is Charlotte's sister, Maddi. Maddi agrees—people’s hearts don’t just stop. There are too many questions left unanswered for the girls to move on.
But their father is moving on. With their mother’s personal assistant. And both girls are sure that she’s determined to take everything that’s theirs away for herself.
Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison's body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. It turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only sad return home to broken lives.
A suburban Virginia divorcée struggles with that classic dilemma: What should she do when she’s offered a fat paycheck to kill a complete stranger? Struggling romantic suspense novelist Finlay Donovan doesn’t think much of her ex-husband, Steven, who’s been nickel-and-diming her ever since she dumped him over his affair with Theresa Hall, the realtor who’s since become his fiancee. So she’s not entirely surprised when Patricia Mickler, overhearing her chatting with her agent in the local Panera about her latest work in progress, indicates that her own husband is even worse.
There are multiple books, fiction and nonfiction, about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, but stories of what happened to the detainees after being released from the camps are less frequently told. Hirahara changes that with this deeply researched historical mystery about a Japanese family from California who were "resettled" in Chicago in 1944 after spending more than two years at the Manzanar internment camp.