It's Christmastime in Caerphilly and Meg, full of holiday spirit, is helping out with the town's festivities. While directing a nativity pageant and herding the children participating in it, she finds a surprise in the manger: a live baby.

"The brutal, inexplicable death of Inspector Thomas Lynley's wife, Helen, has left Scotland Yard shocked and searching for answers. Even more horrifying is that the trigger was apparently pulled by a twelve-year-old boy. The story begins on the other side of London in rough North Kensington, where three three mixed-race, virtually orphaned Campbell children are bounced from their grandmother to their aunt. The oldest, fifteen-year-old Ness, is headed...

"Emma Townsend. Five years old. Gray eyes, brown hair. Missing since June. Emma is lonely. Living with her cruel mother and clueless father, Emma retreats into her own world of quiet and solitude. Sarah Walker. Successful entrepreneur. Broken-hearted. Kidnapper. Sarah has never seen a girl so precious as the gray-eyed child in a crowded airport terminal. When a second-chance encounter with Emma presents itself, Sarah takes her-far away from home....

MAY, 1968. On a murky pre-dawn Mother's Day, sinister secrets play out miles apart in New York City. In Harlem, a church janitor finds an innocent newborn in a basket. In Brooklyn, an elusive serial killer prowls slumbering families, leaving a trail of blood and a twisted calling card. Cloaked in lies, these seemingly unrelated lives--and deaths--are destined to intersect on a distant, blood-soaked day. OCTOBER, 1987. Reeling from shocking personal...

"Sarah Brandt is shattered when she learns that a woman has inquired at Hope's Daughters Mission for Catherine, the abandoned child she has taken as her daughter. The woman claims she was Catherine's nursemaid, now acting on behalf of the girl's mother to reunite them. Unwilling to simply hand Catherine over to a complete stranger, Sarah asks Malloy to investigate. But when he goes to interview the woman at her tenement in Chelsea, he finds she has...