In addition to dealing with her moody teen son, Brody, and her stubborn granddad, Paislee Shaw finds her shop, Cashmere Crush, busy with the summer influx of tourists to Nairn, in the Scottish Highlands. As a volunteer for the upcoming Highland Games, she’s lucky to have part-time help: Her newest hire, Rhona Smythe, is working to repay her parents for the speeding tickets she’s amassed. Rhona’s into Highland Dance, and her boyfriend, Artie Whittle, is involved in several events, including the caber toss, which involves throwing a tapered log of about 16 feet long. At the games, all kinds of last-minute problems arise, including rumors of steroid use. When someone gives Artie a bit of slippery oil instead of resin for his hands, his toss ends in disaster and his caber splits. Artie’s older brother was on his way to becoming a professional strongman before he died in a car accident, and their father is a rage-filled taskmaster who constantly puts Artie down. A couple of days later, Paislee takes Rhona to Artie’s house when he fails to answer repeated phone calls, and they find him unconscious on the lawn, covered in the blood of his father, who’s dead in the kitchen. Artie is naturally a suspect, but he has plenty of competition, for Joseph was not only a bad father but also a serial cheater and a seller of steroids. DI Mack Zeffer, who’s met Paislee on other murder cases, listens attentively when she says that Artie’s innocent. Although Paislee’s in love with the handsome, wealthy detective, she refuses to become involved until Brody turns 18. Unexpected revelations long before then break the case and change her life.

Angus McPherron, a beloved resident of Sea Harbor, Massachusetts, who used an unexpected inheritance to benefit the town, is approaching his 100th birthday. A huge birthday party has been planned, including the whole town but especially his closest friends, Harry Garozzo, Gus McGlucken, Henry Staab, and Jake Risso, who with Angus are known as the fab five. When Angus is found dead just before his birthday, everyone seems devastated. But his party goes on until the knitters find Angus’ friend Father Lawrence Northcutt wounded and clinging to life. The attack encourages police Chief Jerry Thompson to order an autopsy on Angus to confirm that he died of natural causes, but it discloses instead that he was poisoned. Enter the Seaside Knitters: Birdie Favazza, an octogenarian whose wise counsel has helped solve many a murder; Nell Endicott, a retired nonprofit director; her niece, Izzy Perry, whose store, Sea Harbor Yarn Studio, provided the impetus for the knitting group; and Cass Brandley, who owns a lobster company. Although the Knitters have been involved in several murders, this one may prove their most difficult, since most of the suspects are old friends. The exception is Annie Smith, an attractive and talented woman who showed up in Sea Harbor and grew close to Angus. Annie, who shares a house with Izzy’s younger brother, nurse Charlie Chambers, is an enigmatic figure who made special teas for Angus. When the knitters start looking into other residents, they find cracks in what seemed like perfect friendships.

Montana in 1906 may not be quite as wild as in the recent past, but it’s certainly exciting enough for Lord Atherly, who’s fossil hunting and awaiting the arrival of his heir, Viscount “Lyndy” Lyndhurst, and his wife, Stella, on the Ninebark Ranch owned by Ned Smith, the second husband of Stella’s mother. Stella and Lyndy, coming from Kentucky after having settled her father’s estate, arrive with some Thoroughbred horses as a gift, only to hear that Lord Atherly is missing. Hit on the head by a tree branch, Atherly wanders in the wilderness until journalist Purdy Sullivan finds him and returns to the camp, where Professor Amos Gridley is directing the search for early horse fossils. A lot of bickering occurs in the camp among the fossil hunters and the recently arrived rival fossil hunter, Dr. Aurelius Moss. While Atherly’s group is out looking for escaped horses, they come upon a body in the creek, which turns out to be that of Harp Richter, the guard at their camp. The group is reluctant to call on Sheriff Hank Becker, who, as it happens, is willing to listen to Stella’s suspicions of murder. Coroner Elmer Claxton, Becker’s enemy, then pushes through a verdict of accidental death. Atherly then realizes that some of his fossils have been stolen, and Ninebark is accused of stealing horses. Since her marriage, Stella has helped to solve several complicated murder cases, and she has to solve this one to save her mother and father-in-law from disaster.

The author opens the book with a series of devastating events that occurred to people in the author’s inner circle that made him realize that “life can be more than mere survival.” Survival mode, he writes, is an “emergency response system” that may manifest as irritability, procrastination, or simply becoming numb. By contrast, thriving is characterized by feeling “open, energized, flexible, and deeply connected.” Creativity and curiosity are other hallmarks of the latter. Rosemberg introduces a map of nine interconnected elements—beliefs; thoughts; emotions; sensations and actions; transcendence; the past; the present; the future; and space—that can help readers shift from surviving to thriving. He explores each in depth and invites readers to go deeper into each one by using his AIR (“Awareness, Inquiry, and Reframing”) framework. The book also discusses ways to face emotional challenges, interpret bodily sensations, adopt an optimistic explanatory style, and balance hedonia (the pursuit of pleasure and happiness) with eudaimonia (the pursuit of purpose and meaning). The book also explores the power of objects, spaces, systems, and culture. Case studies from Rosemberg’s coaching clients highlight how agency, mindfulness, prospection, and space affect one’s ability to thrive. The book concludes with a reminder that learning from challenges, rather than being defined by them, is essential to living life to the fullest. Rosemberg creatively combines personal history, professional anecdotes, neuroscience, and psychology in this all-compassing life-improvement guide. Anecdotes from the author’s coaching clients sometimes feel a bit too polished, presenting a process of transformation that seems smoother than it often is. However, his experience with depression, anxiety, and upheaval lends gravitas to such statements as “Transitions in life often feel disorienting and heavy, like wading through thick mud. The harder we fight against it, the deeper we sink.” Rosemberg compassionately acknowledges the role of privilege in well-being, noting that “Systemic decisions give some people easy access to thriving while leaving others to struggle.”

At 26, Agata, already an eager world-traveler, leaves her small hometown in Tuscany to spend a few months in China. Eschewing popular tourist destinations, her first stop is rural Yangshuo, where she stays in a local village, teaching English and learning Chinese at an international school. Next, she journeys to a Buddhist monastery in the Fujian province. She earns her keep by assisting with all of the meal preparations and spends her days learning from the monks and other monastery volunteers from different parts of the world. Agata then must abruptly change pace when she travels to New York City for work obligations. As she adjusts to the frenetic pace of the city, she meets Jack, a DJ about 20 years her senior, with whom she feels a strong but uncertain connection as they explore the city together; she fears their relationship will end after she returns home. When she receives another opportunity to work in New York, Agata accepts, hoping to reconnect with Jack and find the place where she wants to settle. Errante evocatively conveys Agata’s enthusiasm for the places she visits through her admiring attention to detail, both in her descriptions of her surroundings and in her interactions with the strangers she meets; she is appealingly open-minded and appreciative of each new experience. However, the reader doesn’t get a good sense of who Agata is before her journey, so it’s hard to see how much her experiences have changed her at the end. (She was already an avid, experienced traveler at the outset.) The revelations gleaned from her travels often sound clichéd: “China was not just a place to visit but a world to discover, a world that, perhaps, was too big to be understood in a single lifetime.” Finally, the third-person perspective holds the reader at arm’s length—a closer, more intimate portrait of Agata is needed to fully understand how she views the lands she travels through.