Frank Hopper (Bon Jovi) is a former lawyer, long-term loser and constant dreamer - and frankly, probably just not all that bright. When he receives a credit card in the mail, he believes he's hit the jackpot. It's not long before he's working his way toward financing his dream - an all-woman hockey team. He's also put himself in debt to the tune of more than $300,000. Naturally, he winds up in court when his plan backfires.

Innocent lives hang on the whim of an elusive psychopathic murderer whose strange riddles and impossible timelines force three people into a mission to end the game before one or all of them die.

After the sudden death of her fiancé, Gray Wheeler finds comfort in the company of his friends: lighthearted and comic Sam, hyper-responsible Dennis, and, oddly enough, his old childhood buddy Fritz, an irresponsible playboy whom she'd previously pegged as one of the least reliable people in the world. As secrets about her supposedly perfect fiancé emerge, Gray comes to see new sides of the man she thought she knew, and at the same time, finds herself drawn to the last man she ever expected to fall for.

A mother and her daughter, a mother and her son, and a man living with one and attracted to the other. Miro, a teen from Sarajevo, lives near King's Cross with his mother; he's nimble, able to run across roofs, so his uncle hires him to break into office skylights, so the uncle can boost computers. Twice they steal from Will's architectural firm, so Will stakes it out at night. He follows Miro home and returns the next day and meets Miro's mother, Amira. At home, Will's relationship with Liv is strained - he feels outside Liv and her daughter Bea's circle. The stakeout and Amira's vulnerability are attractive alternatives to being at home. The police, too, watch Miro.

In 1958, in New York City, the upper class Diane Arbus is a frustrated and lonely woman with a conventional marriage with two daughters. Her husband is a photographer sponsored by the wealthy parents of Diane, and she works as his assistant. When Lionel Sweeney, a mysterious man with hypertrichosis (a.k.a. werewolf syndrome, a disease that causes excessive body hair), comes to live in the apartment in the upper floor, Diane feels a great attraction for him and is introduced to the world of freaks and marginalized people, falling in love with Lionel.

In the 1860s, five men have been tracking a sixth across Nevada for more than two weeks. They shoot and wound him, but he gets away. They pursue, led by the dour Carver, who will pay them each $1 a day once he's captured. The hunted is Gideon, resourceful, skilled with a knife. Gideon's flight and Carver's hunt require horses, water, and bullets. The course takes them past lone settlers, a wagon train, a rail crew, settlements, and an Indian philosopher. What is the reason for the hunt; what connects Gideon and Carver? What happened at Seraphim Falls?

A sci-fi writer (Hutton) is invited to an island for a conference, only to discover that he's become lured into a trap.

Berlin, July, 1945. Journalist Jake Geismer arrives to cover the Potsdam conference, issued a captain's uniform for easier passage. He also wants to find Lena, an old flame who's now a prostitute desperate to get out of Berlin. He discovers that the driver he's assigned, a cheerful down-home sadist named Corporal Tully, is Lena's keeper. When the body of a murdered man washes up in Potsdam (within the Russian sector), Jake may be the only person who wants to solve the crime: U.S. personnel are busy finding Nazis to bring to trial, the Russians and the Americans are looking for German rocket scientists, and Lena has her own secrets.

Thirty years old and single, Beatrix Potter lives in London with her social-climbing parents, who are exasperated that she has turned down any number of eligible young men. Her only real friends are the animals which since childhood she has lovingly drawn and made up stories about. She finally succeeds in selling a book of the stories, and it becomes Norman Warne's first project. He quickly falls in love with both the book and Beatrix and together they carefully arrange publication. This proves the first of many successes, offering her the possibility of escaping from both her parents' way of life and London.

In rural Mississippi, Lazarus, a former blues musician who survives by truck farming, finds a young girl nearly beaten to death near his home. She's the white-trash town tramp, molded by a life of sexual abuse at the hands of her father and verbal abuse from her mother, who seems to delight in reminding Rae of her mistake in not aborting her. Lazarus, who is also facing personal crisis at the dissolution of his marriage, nurses Rae back to health, providing her with gentle, fatherly advice as well as an education in blues music. Rae's boyfriend, Ronnie, goaded by the man who nearly beat Rae to death, misunderstands the relationship between Lazarus and Rae, and vows to kill him. Lazarus, exhibiting a street-smart understanding of violence and its motives, calls Ronnie's bluff, senses that he is as troubled as Rae, and becomes a guiding force in the young couple's resurrection.