Staff Picks -- favorites from all over GRRL

After a suspicious fire, Amaranth gathers her children and flees from the cult where her children were born and raised. Now she is on the run with no one but her daughters, Amity and Sorrow, neither of whom have ever seen the outside world, to help her. After four days of driving without sleep, Amaranth crashes the car, leaving the family stranded at a gas station, unsure of what to do next. Rescue comes in the unlikely form of a downtrodden farmer, a man who offers sanctuary when the women need it most. --FantasticFiction.com

In Nov. 1942 a U.S. cargo plane crashed into the Greenland ice cap, the B-17 sent on the search-and-rescue mission got caught in a storm and also crashed, miraculously all nine men aboard surrived. A second rescue operation was launched, but the plane, the Grumman Duck, flew into a storm and vanished. The survivors of the B-17 spent 148 days fighting to stay alive while waiting for rescue by famed explorer Bernt Balchen. Then in 2012 the U.S. Coast Guard and North South Polar mount an expedition to solve the mystery of the vanished plane and recover the remains of the lost plane's crew.

Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis. He befriends the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood further ostracizes Ava and her son. Lewis never recovers from the disappearance of his childhood friend. Rose is now a schoolteacher in another city, watching over children as she was never able to watch over her own brother. Ava is building a new life for herself in a new decade. When the mystery of Jimmy s disappearance is unexpectedly solved, all three must try to reclaim what they have lost.

Charles Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to a terrifying playground of amusements he calls "Christmasland." Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx's unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget but Manx is on the road again and he's picked up a new passenger: Vic's own son.

On the eve of the emergence of a new and unrecognizable world that will challenge the existence of humanity, a group of people begin to notice they are different from everyone else.

A suspenseful novel about a grieving woman who discovers the long-lost letters of novelist Victor Hugo, awakening a mystery that spans centuries.

Determined to put his past behind him and start a new life, hitman Ray Lamar, agreeing to one last heist, discovers that the road to redemption is much harder than he thought when things start to go very wrong.

Chava, a golem brought to life by a disgraced rabbi, and Ahmad, a jinni made of fire, form an unlikely friendship on the streets of New York until a fateful choice changes everything.

Defense attorney Dismas Hardy returns to defend a close friend against murder charges in New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart's most suspenseful and intricately plotted novel to date.

Waking up in a modern London hospital 200 years after meeting his death on a Napoleonic battlefield, Nick Falcott is indoctrinated into a time-traveling society and returned to the side of a woman he loves to reclaim a vital talisman, a mission that places the fate of the future in his hands.

An inspiring story of how a Mormon kid with Tourette's found salvation in books and weight-lifting.