"It isn't paranoia if it's really happening ... Anna Fox lives alone -- a recluse in her New York City home, drinking too much wine, watching old movies ... and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move next door: a father, a mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna sees something she shouldn't, her world begins to crumble -- and its shocking secrets are laid bare. What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is...

Landing her personal hero and mega-best-selling author Essie Starling as a client, housecleaner Liv Green forms an unlikely friendship with this infamous recluse, but when Essie suddenly dies, leaving her an astonishing last wish, Liv discovers a connection between them that changes Liv's own life story forever.

"When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed a property listing for a grand estate that had been unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled into one of the most surprising American stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Empty Mansions is a rich tale of wealth and loss, complete with copper barons, Gilded Age opulence, and backdoor politics. At its heart is a reclusive 104-year-old heiress named Huguette Clark. Dedman...

Finally finding the mecca of isolation in a distant region known as the High Meggas, Larry Lynsey, a recluse who is aggressively protective of his singular solitude, finds his quiet existence shattered by the arrival of two accidental tourists and will do everything in his power to make them leave.

Ellie Bowman barely remembers the incident that put her into a coma. When she awoke, filled with unease, all she knew for certain was that her boyfriend, Rick, was missing. She knew she needed to get away from her old life and recover in safety. With the proceeds of a video game she helped develop, Ellie starts over in rural Missouri, working from her cottage and trusting no one except her friend and business partner. Yet even in this quiet small...

"At fifty-one years old, twins Jeanie and Julius still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation in the English countryside. The cottage they have shared their entire lives is their only protection against the modernizing world around them. Inside its walls, they make music, and in its garden, they grow everything they need to survive. To an outsider, it looks like poverty; to them, it is home. But when Dot dies unexpectedly, the world they've...

"When two boys--John William Barry and Neil Countryman-- meet in 1972 at age sixteen, they're brought together by what they have in common: a fierce intensity and a love of the outdoors that takes them, together and often, into Washington's remote backcountry, where they must rely on their wits--and each other--to survive. Soon after graduating from college, Neil sets out on a path that will lead him toward a life as a devoted schoolteacher and family...

Reclusive literary legend M. M. 'Mimi' Banning has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years. But after falling prey to a Bernie Madoff-style ponzi scheme, she's flat broke. Now Mimi must write a new book for the first time in decades, and to ensure the timely delivery of her manuscript, her New York publisher sends an assistant to monitor her progress. The prickly Mimi reluctantly complies, with a few stipulations: No Ivy-Leaguers or English...

Describes the sad life of Huguette Clark, heiress to a copper magnate's fortune, who withdrew from society to live in isolation in a huge 5th Avenue apartment before spending the last years of her life in a New York hospital.

Eleven-year-old Ronald "Cheesie" Mack relates events he and his best friend, Georgie, experience as fifth grade comes to an end and their summer plans are drastically changed, due in part to an old, possibly valuable coin that may belong to the mysterious inhabitant of a place they call The Haunted Toad.