Steve Almond is the author of 10 fiction and nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak y Against Football. His essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, El Los Angeles Times, and other periodicals. His short stories have been selected for several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories y Best American Mysteries. En All the Secrets of the World: A Novel (Zando), Lorena Saenz and Jenny Stallworth are paired for a school project by a teacher hoping to unite two girls from starkly different backgrounds. Jenny is pretty and popular, and her family lives a picture-perfect suburban lifestyle – from the outside. In reality, her glamorous mother, Rosemary, is needy, while her father, Marcus, spends his days teaching and his nights wandering the desert, researching the scorpions of Death Valley. For Lorena, that life is a seemingly far cry from her own, living in a small apartment with her single mother. But when Marcus disappears, Tony, Lorena’s troubled older brother, becomes the prime suspect. For Lorena, it’s the beginning of an odyssey into the desert, the secrets and lies of the Stallworths, and the dark heart of America’s criminal justice system.