New York, 1932. Grace Verlander is the secret beating heart of Macy’s. She’s the go-to person for keeping everything running smoothly behind the scenes at the famous, bustling store. Three days before the Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, Grace arrives at work to find a note from the store Santa Claus in her locker: someone has sent him a death threat. Grace promises to look into it and speaks to the store detective about the parade’s security, confident that they’ve found a solution that will keep everyone safe. But on the day of the parade, despite all their precautions, a dead body is found on one of the floats. Using her wits and deep knowledge of the ways of the place, Grace is determined to find the killer and seek justice.

Growing up motherless and under the cruel eye of his alcoholic, emotionally distant father, Tiller Loomis seems destined for a hardscrabble life. The one ray of light is his older brother, Smith, who salvages what otherwise might have been a brutal childhood. But when Smith is drafted into the Vietnam War, Tiller’s world collapses. He stumbles into a children’s puppet show at his church and ultimately finds purpose and joy through puppetry. Chasing his dream of puppeteering full time, Tiller lands in the bohemian hothouse of 1977 New York City, where experimental artists and misfit idealists are using puppets to try to reach teens with a message of hope on a PBS show called “Imagine Nation.” In the cast, Tiller finds a chosen family of dreamers and creators who will change his life forever.

American heiress Ruby Vaughn has long believed that her entire family died when the Lusitania sank in 1915. But then her solicitor brings news that her mother inexplicably survived the catastrophe, and he believes he’s found her in a Belgian hospital just across the channel. With trepidation, Ruby sets off for Belgium with a simple task --- to go to the hospital at Saint Oda’s priory, find her mother and bring her home. However, upon her arrival at the priory, she learns the woman she sought had died and been hastily buried days before. Stunned, Ruby refuses to believe that her mother is truly gone. The more Ruby inquires into the woman’s fate, the more suspicious the death becomes.

For more than 40 years, Elena Altieri has been hiding from the tragedies of her New York City punk rock youth. Tragedies that left her best friend, Sin, dead, and other women in their orbit missing. Now, the past is catching up with her in more ways than one. Not only is she hearing strange noises under the hum of her tinnitus, but the photographs she took of a recently deceased musician are going viral. When Elena begins to hear the screams of a woman ringing in her ears, she becomes convinced that she's somehow hearing Sin's murder. What she'll uncover not only will force her to reckon with her own fractured memories, but might prove that Sin and other innocent women from their youth were the victims of an unspeakable crime that only she can solve.

Four decades ago, Joyce Carol Oates penned her first novel of psychological suspense under the name “Rosamond Smith.” In the Smith books, Oates explored themes of betrayal and deception, lust and murder, through stories involving twins, doubles and hidden second identities. Hard Case Crime is proud to bring these extraordinary works of crime fiction back into print in definitive double editions, each pairing two complete novels and two never-before-collected Oates short stories. In this volume, a model suburban husband grows obsessed with a beautiful stranger in DOUBLE DELIGHT, while an eminent professor preys on a vulnerable student in NEMESIS --- and the echoes continue in the rare short stories “A Girl Worth Twenty Million” and “First Death.”

On a rainy night, Luke Oshel gets stood up halfway through dinner. But before his date walks off to the bathroom and never returns, she leaves an old photograph under her napkin --- Luke as a child, a dead body in the shadows of his bedroom, and a terrifying masked man. He has no recollection of this event. Then more photos disrupt his life --- Luke posing with murder victims, covered in blood --- and he falls back into the deep paranoia and repressed memories he has tried to leave behind. All the drugs and alcohol, therapy and hypnosis sessions have never conquered his deepest fear --- that he hasn’t escaped the hidden legacy of his late father, who killed his victims by blood loss. But now there is a new string of serial killings, and the evidence all points to Luke.

Ensconced in a fabulous apartment overlooking the Eiffel Tower, Cécile Duval is anxious for a post-divorce makeover. Who is Nina Berry, an on-the-rise personal stylist in America, to say no to a career-making proposal from an older, wealthy étranger? Except Cécile has secrets. She already knows Nina. Nina was her husband’s mistress, or so she believes. And Cécile doesn’t want a glow-up. She wants revenge. Arriving in Paris with her fiancé, Jean, Nina is ready to absorb all the city has to offer and transform her new client’s closet, confidence and entire life. But she has no idea what’s coming. Neither does Cécile. Because she’s not the only one keeping secrets. As the line between predator and prey disappears, a guessing game of deadly deceptions has only just begun.