Sarah Challis
Jumping To Conclusions

A couple of books bought secondhand from a village jumble sale; in the front, a name - Johnnie Bearsden - scrawled in a childish hand. This is all it takes for old wounds to open and rumours to begin swirling again. Rumours about little Izzy Haddon, whose mother, Jess, has kept the identity of her daughter's father a secret for seven years. Now Johnnie Bearsden is coming back to the village with his American wife and children. Everyone has assumed that he is Izzy's father, but Jess will neither confirm nor deny it.

• Warmth and numour are Sarah Challis's hallmarks, and this is her best novel yet.

Mary Higgins Clark
No Place Like Home

In a riveting new thriller from America's Queen of Suspense, a young woman is ensnared into returning to a place she had wanted to leave behind forever - her childhood home. There, at the age of ten, Liza Barton had shot her mother, trying desperately to protect her from her estranged stepfather, Ted Cartwright. Despite his claim that the shooting was a deliberate act, the juvenile Court ruled the death an accident. Many people, however, agreed with Cartwright, and tabloids compared Liza to the infamous murderess Lizzie Borden, pointing even to the similarity of their names. To erase Liza's past, her adoptive parents changed her name to Celia, but can she escape her past as she attempts to build her future?

Ten years after his phenomenal number-one bestseller, The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans returns with his most powerful novel to date. On a crystalline Montana morning, two back-country skiers find the body of a young woman embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. All through the night police work with floodlights and chainsaws to extract her. Identifying her, however, takes no time at all. Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of eco-terrorism and her picture is on lawenforcement computers all across America. But how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?