The first Pippi book ends with Pippi’s birthday party at Villa Villekulla, where she gives presents to her friends Tommy and Annika instead of receiving them.

Josef K., arrested one morning for a crime no one ever names, is taken on the eve of his thirty-first birthday to a quarry by two men in frock coats and stabbed through the heart.

Insurance agent Walter Huff helps Phyllis Nirdlinger murder her husband for a double-indemnity accident payout, but the scheme falls apart under the claims manager Keyes.

Little Willy is about to win the National Dogsled Race, which would pay the $500 in back taxes on his grandfather’s Wyoming farm, when his dog Searchlight’s heart bursts just short of the finish line.

Isabel, an enslaved girl in New York during the American Revolution, breaks her friend Curzon out of a British prison, where he is sick with fever.

Tom Ripley murders the art collector Thomas Murchison, who was about to expose the Derwatt forgery scheme, and later the guilt-ridden forger Bernard Tufts falls to his death.

Dick Diver, a brilliant psychiatrist who married his wealthy patient Nicole, declines into alcoholism as she grows stronger.

Charles Wilcox attacks Leonard Bast, the father of Helen Schlegel’s unborn child, with a sword, and Leonard dies of a heart attack.

Cassia Reyes, who was officially Matched with her best friend Xander but fell in love with Ky Markham, watches the Society send Ky away to the Outer Provinces as punishment.

After Naoko, the troubled girl he loved, kills herself in the sanatorium, Toru Watanabe wanders Japan in grief.