"After the death of his favorite teacher--and secret lover--a young misfit with a deep interest in chemistry is launched into a search for an elixir of life started by his professor"-- Sammy Tampari was Conrad Aybinder's lover-- and his teacher. And, it turns out, he was not just a chemist, but an alchemist, searching for a mythic elixir of life. Sammy leaves twenty years' worth of his notebooks and a storage locker full of expensive, sometimes baffling...

"A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each other,...

"Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriel's nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar...

Detective Sergeant Adam Tyler, a cold case reviewer finally lands a high-profile murder investigation only to find the main suspect is a recent one-night stand ... When financier Gerald Cartwright disappeared from his home six years ago, it was assumed he'd gone on the run from his creditors. Then a skeleton is found bricked up in the cellar of Cartwright's burned-out mansion, and it becomes clear Gerald never left alive. The sole representative...

"Set on an Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota, This Town Sleeps is the story of Marion Lafournier, a gay Ojibwe man, and his search for meaning in a town he cannot seem to leave. When he begins a romance with a closeted former high school classmate Shannon, Marion finds himself struggling to connect with the volcanic and unstable man. One night, while roaming the dark streets of Geshig, Marion unknowingly brings to life a dog from underneath...