A chance encounter between two childhood friends, including one who escaped an abusive father, reveals how their fortunes have reversed.

Jenny Wolf's murdered father has left her in charge of a multi-billion-dollar empire--a newspaper, a football team, a holding company...and a dysfunctional family that knows no bounds.

"After their father dies of an overdose and the debts incurred from his addiction cause the loss of the family home in Detroit, Kenyatta Bernice (KB) and her sister, Nia, are sent by their overwhelmed mother to live with their estranged grandfather in Lansing. Over the course of the summer, KB attempts to get her bearings in a world that has turned upside down. Pinballing between resentment, abandonment, and loneliness, she is forced to carve out...

After a painful divorce, Maisey Lazarow returns to the small island off the North Carolina coast where she grew up. Upon finding a box of old photographs, Maisey and her brother Keith begin to uncover distant memories of a little girl who they believe was their sister. Their mother claims there was no sister, but Maisey is convinced there was. So where is she now?

Christmas has never brought out the best in the MacDougal family. Still, year after year, they gather together in the Blue Ridge Mountains to try to make the season merry and bright. But this year is an especially strained one, between Shayne's impending divorce, Morwenna's slavish devotion to work, and Bobbie's reluctance to face what life has to offer. Then, in the midst of a snowy sibling shouting match, a mysterious stranger appears.

Seventeen-year-old Pattyn, the eldest daughter in a large Mormon family, is sent to her aunt's Nevada ranch for the summer, where she temporarily escapes her alcoholic, abusive father and finds love and acceptance, only to lose everything when she returns home.

"An emotionally damaged seventeen-year-old boy in Pennsylvania who was once an infamous reality television show star, meets a girl from another dysfunctional family, and she helps him out of his angry shell"--

"Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I'd killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it's a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let's get started"--...