While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

Oprah Book Club® Selection, May 2000: In her still startling debut, The Good Mother, Sue Miller explored the premium we put on passion--and the terrible burden it places on a mother and child. Her fourth novel, While I Was Gone, is another study in familial crime and punishment. But this time, her wife and good mother is accessory to more than emotional malfeasance. Jo Becker has everything a woman could desire: a loving spouse, contented children, and a nice dog or two. When her New England veterinary practice takes on a new client, however, her past comes back to haunt her. Long ago, it seems, Jo had escaped her family and identity for a commune in Cambridge. Her Aquarian illusions came to an abrupt, bloody end when one of her housemates was brutally murdered.

Who Moved My Cheese? : An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life by Spencer Johnson

Change can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. The message of Who Moved My Cheese? is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives. Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice--nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are "littlepeople," mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It's not just sustenance to them; it's their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they've found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods--our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in--although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out.

Hot Six by Janet Evanovich

If you were angry with Evanovich at the end of High Five, when she coyly didn't tell us which of Stephanie Plum's two studmuffins the Jersey Girl-bounty hunter called for a tryst, you'll soon forgive her. We find out Stephanie's amour of choice right away, but there's new action: Latino bounty hunter Ranger has gone missing, a suspect in a murder himself. Meanwhile, Stephanie's relationship with Joe Morelli, Trenton cop extraordinaire, is definitely compromised when her Grandma Mazur moves in.

The Indwelling : The Beast Takes Possession (Left Behind, 7) by Tim F. Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins

The Antichrist is dead... or is he? The city of Chicago lies in ruins, the safe house is blown, and the Global Community police are hot on the heels of the Tribulation Force. And who assassinated Nicolae Carpathia? It's a formidable challenge to keep the attention of an audience midway through a projected 12-volume series, but with their trademark blend of humor and gripping suspense, authors Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye continue to captivate readers with The Indwelling, the seventh installment of the Left Behind series.

The Bear and the Dragon by Tom Clancy

Time and again, Tom Clancy's novels have been praised not only for their big-scale drama and propulsive narrative drive but for their cutting-edge prescience in predicting future events. In The Bear and the Dragon, the future is very near at hand indeed. Newly elected in his own right, Jack Ryan has found that being President has gotten no easier: domestic pitfalls await him at every turn; there's a revolution in Liberia; the Asian economy is going down the tubes; and now, in Moscow, someone may have tried to take out the chairman of the SVR--the former KGB--with a rocket-propelled grenade. Things are unstable enough in Russia without high-level assassination, but even more disturbing may be the identities of the potential assassins. Were they political enemies, the Russian Mafia, or disaffected former KGB? Or, Ryan wonders, is something far more dangerous at work here?

The Perfect Storm : A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger

The Perfect Storm is the tale of a doomed ship caught in the middle of what some meteorologists have called the storm of the century. At its heart is a gripping narrative about struggling for survival in a tempest of ferocious winds and 100-foot waves. But rookie author Sebastian Junger does more than simply spin a good yarn. His account of how fishermen ply their trade and lead their lives in the 1990s is fascinating. The same goes for his descriptions of storm formation, wave physics, and the terror of drowning. Anybody who enjoys Jon Krakauer's work or Drama in Real Life from Reader's Digest will appreciate The Perfect Storm. --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

The Empty Chair : A Lincoln Rhyme Novel by Jeffery Wilds Deaver, Jeffrey Deaver

It's not easy being NYPD detective Lincoln Rhyme, the world's foremost criminalist. First of all, he's a quadriplegic. Secondly, he's forever second-guessed and mother-henned by his ex-model-turned-cop protégé, Amelia Sachs, and his personal aide, Thom. And thirdly, it seems that he can't motor his wheelchair around a corner without bumping into one crazed psycho-killer after another. In The Empty Chair, Jeffery Deaver's third Rhyme outing--after 1997's The Bone Collector and 1998's The Coffin Dancer--Rhyme travels to North Carolina to undergo an experimental surgical procedure and is, a jot too coincidentally, met at the door by a local sheriff, the cousin of an NYPD colleague, bearing one murder, two kidnappings, and a timely plea for help. It seems that 16-year-old Garrett Hanlon, a bug-obsessed orphan known locally as the Insect Boy, has kidnapped and probably raped two women, and bludgeoned to death a would-be hero who tried to stop one of the abductions.