John Eric Severson is a veteran of the First World War, a Marine Corps captain who once got lost in a forest behind enemy lines and unknowingly led his men into a leper colony. Now, five years later, he is an idealistic schoolteacher in a tough, working-class neighborhood where earning a high school diploma is something most of his students can only dream about. Severson vows to educate every one of them. But he quickly learns there is one student...

This depicts the men of Alpha Company. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she...

"During a training exercise, Creed's scent dog, Grace, is drawn off course and discovers a shallow grave. The body was never meant to be found, hidden deep in an isolated part of Florida's Blackwater River State Forest. The remote area has no easy access in or out. The killer obviously hoped his secret would be scattered and swallowed up by the forces of nature. When Creed's dogs continue to find more remains, investigators quickly realize they're...

Fos returns to Tennessee from the trenches of war-torn France, falling in love with the beautiful Opal and running a photography studio with his former Army buddy, Flash, who soon gets them all into trouble when his love for trouble crosses paths with the Ku Klux Klan.

The characters of Catch-22 are now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End.

"In Chicago, a young man jumps from his thirtieth-story hotel room; along the Missouri river, a hunter and his son stumble upon a lake whose surface is littered with snow geese, all of them dead; and in southern Alabama, Ryder Creed and his search-and-rescue dog Grace find the body of a young woman who went missing in the Conecuh National Forest...and it appears she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the river. Before long Ryder Creed and...

After joining the army at fifteen and having his face blown away by a grenade in a battle in France, Francis returns home to Frenchtown hoping to find--and kill--the former childhood hero he feels betrayed him.

"The year is 1975. Elle Sheen--a single mother who is supporting herself and her six-year-old, African-American son, Dylan, as a waitress at the Noel Street Diner--isn't sure what to make of William Smith when his appearance creates a stir in the small town of Mistletoe, Utah. As their lives unexpectedly entwine, Elle learns that William, a recently returned Vietnam POW, is not only fighting demons from his past, but may also have the answer to her...

Ben returns to Vietnam after the war ends seeking closure and a measure of peace, and finds love in the arms of Tien, a contemporary Vietnamese woman who is trying to come to terms with her own past.