Mysteries, Interior and Exterior

An architect by profession, Charles Belfoure has published several architectural histories, one of which one a Graham Foundation Grant for architectural research. He graduated from the Pratt Institute and Columbia University, and he taught at Pratt as well as at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. His area of specialty is historic preservation. He has been a freelance writer for the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times. His debut novel was The Paris Architect. The dark side of New York's Gilded Age comes to life in Charles Belfoure’s latest suspenseful novel, House of Thieves (Sourcebooks Landmark). In its starred review, Publishers Weekly writes, "Belfoure's sly, roguish writing opens a window to those living both gilded and tarnished lives...”

Glenn Taylor is the author of the novels The Marrowbone Marble Company and The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at West Virginia University. A Hanging at Cinder Bottom: A Novel (Tin House Books) is his latest book. The year is 1910. Halley’s Comet has just signaled the end of the world. Keystone, West Virginia, is the region’s biggest boomtown, and on a rainy Sunday morning in August, Abe Baach and Goldie Toothman are at the gallows, awaiting their execution. He’s Keystone’s most famous poker player; she’s the madam of its most infamous brothel. Abe split town seven years prior under suspicion of armed robbery and murder, and has been playing cards up and down the coast, hustling under a variety of pseudonyms, ever since. But when he returns to Keystone to reunite with Goldie and to set the past right, he finds a brother dead and his father’s saloon in shambles―and suspects the same men might be responsible for both. Only then, in facing his family’s past, does the real swindle begin.

Michael Ruhlman has written more than 20 books about food and cooking, and their fundamental importance to our families, our communities, and our world. He has also authored non-food non-fiction on topics ranging from his experience renovating an old house to a dramatic narrative of the life inside an elite pediatric surgical unit. The three novellas contained in Ruhlman’s In Short Measures (Skyhorse Publishing) delve deeply into the nuanced complexity of romantic and sexual love—and the inevitable evolution of the heart over the span of years and decades. He is also a contributor to Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting (W. W. Norton & Company), in which two dozen writers reflect on the transformative and healing powers of knitting.