LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA INTERNATIONAL DAGGER 2018 Antoine is twelve years old. His parents are divorced and he lives with his mother in Beauval, a small, backwater town surrounded by forests, where everyone knows everyone's business, and nothing much ever happens. But in the last days of 1999, a series of events unfolds, culminating in the shocking vanishing without trace of a young child. The adults of the town are at a loss to explain the disappearance, but for Antoine, it all begins with the violent death of his neighbour's dog. From that one brutal act, his fate and the fate of his neighbour's six year old son are bound forever. In the years following Rémi's disappearance, Antoine wrestles with the role his actions played. As a seemingly inescapable net begins to tighten, breaking free from the suffocating environs of Beauval becomes a gnawing obsession. But how far does he have to run, and how long will it take before his past catches up with him again? Translated from the French by Frank Wynne

HOW MUCH IS LIFE TRULY WORTH? Kusunoki used to believe he was destined for great things. Ostracized as a child, he held on to a belief that a good life was waiting for him in the years ahead. Now approaching the age of twenty, he's a completely mediocre college student with no motivation, no dreams, and no money. After learning he can sell his remaining years-and just how little they're worth-he chooses to divest himself of all but his last three months. Has Kusunoki truly destroyed his last chance to find happiness...or has he somehow found it?

In 1999, in the small provincial town of Beauval, France, twelve-year-old Antoine Courtin accidentally kills a young neighbor boy in the woods near his home. Panicked, he conceals the body and to his relief--and ongoing shame--he is never suspected of any connection to the child's disappearance. But the boy's death continues to haunt him, shaping his life in unseen ways. More than a decade later, Antoine is living in Paris, now a young doctor with a fiancée and a promising future. On a rare trip home to the town he hates and fears, Antoine thoughtlessly sleeps with a beautiful young woman from his past. She shows up pregnant at his doorstep in Paris a few months later, insisting that they marry. Meanwhile, the newly discovered body of Antoine's childhood victim means that the case has been reopened, and all of his old fears rush back. With the gravitational pull of his hometown strengthening its grip, Antoine may finally be forced to confront his past. Is he prepared to do what he must to keep his darkest secrets buried?

Author Abigail Thomas shares the story of how she started a new life after an accident left her husband brain damaged and institutionalized.

They’ll never see her coming. . . . When Evangeline Stone wakes up naked and bruised on a cold slab at the morgue—in a stranger’s body, with no memory of who she is and how she got there—her troubles are only just beginning. Before that night she and the two other members of her Triad were the city’s star bounty hunters, mercilessly cleansing the city of the murderous creatures living in the shadows, from vampires to shape-shifters to trolls. Then something terrible happened that not only cost all three of them their lives but also convinced the city’s other Hunters that Evy was a traitor—and she can’t even remember what it was. Now she’s a fugitive, piecing together her memory, trying to deal some serious justice—and discovering that she has only three days to solve her own murder before the reincarnation spell wears off. Because in three days Evy will die again—but this time there’s no second chance. . . .

Successful environmental lawyer Abby Williams is forced to confront her small-town past while investigating a high-profile corruption case back home.