The lyrical and haunting story of a great American dream--the progress of a utopian community and its lasting impact on a gifted young man.

"A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life-with potentially fatal consequences-in this gripping standalone novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved places on the West Coast: a magnificent house in vast formal grounds, home to a family that shaped California-and fought hard to conceal the turmoil and eccentricities...

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop, South Carolina. Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet in this love letter to language.

"In 1950, a core group of nine old families leaves the increasingly corrupted African American community of Haven, Oklahoma, to found in that same state a new, purer community they call Ruby. But in the early 1970s, the outside world begins to intrude on Ruby's isolation, forcing a tragic confrontation. It's about this time, too, that the first of five damaged women finds solace in a decrepit former convent near Ruby ... The individual stories of...

Certain that society is on the verge of economic and environmental collapse, five disillusioned twenty-somethings make a bold decision: They gather in upstate New York to transform an abandoned farm, once the site of a turn-of-the-century socialist commune, into an idyllic self-sustaining compound called the Homestead. Louisa spearheads the project, as her wealthy family owns the plot of land. Beau is the second to commit; as mysterious and sexy as...

"Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. But Ursa's powers come with a cost"--

During a typically crowded morning commute, a naked runner is dodging between the stalled cars. The strange sight makes the local news and captures the imaginations of a stunning cast of misfits and lost souls. There's Ren, just out of juvie, who travels to LA in search of his mother. There's Owen and James, teenage twins who live in a desert commune, where their father, a self-proclaimed healer, holds a powerful sway over his disciples. There's Britt,...

"A comic satire and roman a clef that takes us inside the Hamptons commune populated by the newly liberated women present at the creation of the seminal 1970 Women's March for Equality. The Commune's pioneering feminists can talk the talk, but find themselves whipsawed between the bold new ideals of the women's movement and the powerful tug of the past."--Publisher's description.

When her ex-girlfriend Kay is murdered and everyone in her old commune is a suspect, Dora, while investigating, discovers Kay's death is one of several terrible incidents and is drawn into a twisted conspiracy while trying to stop a potential war between two nefarious companies.