"1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amid the horrors of the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, Poland, during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her mother are forced to seek refuge in the sewers beneath the city. Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. While on an errand in the market, she catches...

"In a 'hood boiling over with sex, brutality and crime, three friends are at a turning point. But a tangled web of sex and violence binds the women to the very place that could destroy them."--

Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl, only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home. Now Amanda is sixteen and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing....

An inquisitive young boy who lives with his mother and younger sister in a rough housing project in New Haven, Connecticut, approaches his tenth birthday with a mixture of anticipation and worry.

"In the dead of night, there's a knock on the door at Haven, an inner-city youth center in St. Louis. A refugee family--scared, tired and hungry--seeks shelter. Fresh back from Afghanistan, former marine sergeant Joshua Duff takes on the mission. He recruits aid worker Liz Wallace, but she has questions for Joshua. Such as why a Texan with an oil magnate for a father is working at Haven. Or why a man who fears nothing--including the gang violence...

"Almost since the day she was born, Sandra had to fend for herself on the streets of Detroit. Crime and pain were her closest companions. Then someone she had no business believing in waltzed onto her life-- a man willing to watch her back and show her how to make easy money. But when Chink gets caught, Sandra commits the ultimate act of love to keep her man out of jail. For a black girl lost, murder was always in the cards..." -- Page [4] of cover....

When his brother is murdered, Jason Palmer finds himself protecting his eight-year-old nephew from two killers with a mysterious agenda, while his Chicago South Side neighborhood erupts in a bloodbath of gang warfare and high-level political corruption.

"On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto--a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place...

After his quick-tempered father gets in a fight and is sent back to jail, sixth-grader Bryan, known for being quiet and thoughtful, snaps and follows new friend Mike into trouble.