“An inventively plotted, goose-bumps inducing ghost story.” —Booklist A house with a sinister past—and a grisly power . . . When Michael Flint is asked by American friends to look over an old Shropshire house they have unexpectedly inherited, he is reluctant to leave the quiet of his Oxford study. But when he sees Charect House, its uncanny echoes from the past fascinate him—even though it has such a sinister reputation that no one has lived there for almost a century. But it’s not until Michael meets the young widow, Nell West, that the menace within the house wakes . . . “Rayne spins eerie yarns within yarns like a latter-day Isak Dinesen or Wilkie Collins.” —Kirkus Reviews “A chilling mystery from another era. . . . Once again Rayne delivers.” —Booklist

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham) Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

Octopussy and the Living Daylights has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

Not much is going right these days for once rich, now impoverished Nora Blackbird—what with her lover under house arrest and her best friend in the slammer. Then Nora and her sisters receive word of a million-dollar inheritance.... Great-aunt Madeleine Blackbird has died in a volcanic eruption on an Indonesian island and left her fabulous Bucks County estate to the three Blackbird sisters. But when Nora and her scandal-ridden sisters, Libby and Emma, go to claim their windfall, they find the house in decay and all of their aunt’s to-die-for treasures gone. They also find a woman’s body.... Nora feels compelled to seek out the truth, but even with help from her mobster boyfriend, Mick Abruzzo, who provides distractions both dark and delightful, solving this case proves challenging. Relatives are circling to claim a share of Madeleine’s property, the suspect list is growing, and Nora’s wild and wacky sisters are adding one surprise after another. It’s enough to put Nora’s couture undies in a serious twist!

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE • Set in 1828 on a Louisiana sugar plantation, this novel from the bestselling author of Mary Reilly presents a “fresh, unsentimental look at what slave-owning does to (and for) one's interior life.... The writing—so prised and clean limbed—is a marvel" (Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved). Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.

The magnificent Ivanoff emerald: It surfaced at Christie's at Geneva, "The Property of a Lady"--a lady now sought by powerful men intent on seizing a legacy that could tilt the world balance of power . . . The terrifying Ivanoff secret: She lived like a pauper with a royal ransom in gems, determined to carry her secret to the grave . . . until an act of love and a public auction brought the world--and the curse--to her door . . . The last of the Ivanoffs--pawns in a deadly game: The royal gems are merely the lure to the hidden billions for which nations are willing to kill. The last of the Ivanoffs should have died in 1917. Now, two generations later, they are the prize--and the prey . . . From war-torn Russia to New York's teeming Lower East Side . . . from Ziegfeld's Broadway and the Hollywood of the moguls to contemporary Washington, Geneva, and Berlin, Elizabeth's Adler's novel of passion, power, and royal privilege will command your attention to the very last page.

In Cecilia Grant’s emotionally rich and deeply passionate Regency romance debut, a deal with a rumored rogue turns a proper young woman into . . . A Lady Awakened. Newly widowed and desperate to protect her estate and beloved servants from her malevolent brother-in-law, Martha Russell conceives a daring plan. Or rather, a daring plan to conceive. After all, if she has an heir on the way, her future will be secured. Forsaking all she knows of propriety, Martha approaches her neighbor, a London exile with a wicked reputation, and offers a strictly business proposition: a month of illicit interludes . . . for a fee. Theophilus Mirkwood ought to be insulted. Should be appalled. But how can he resist this siren in widow’s weeds, whose offer is simply too outrageously tempting to decline? Determined she’ll get her money’s worth, Theo endeavors to awaken this shamefully neglected beauty to the pleasures of the flesh—only to find her dead set against taking any enjoyment in the scandalous bargain. Surely she can’t resist him forever. But could a lady’s sweet surrender open their hearts to the most unexpected arrival of all . . . love?