Dressed to Kilt (A Scottish Highlands Mystery)

Review Praise for the Scottish Highlands Mysteries “Reed writes an engaging tale full of belly laughs and white-knuckle moments.”—Jenn McKinlay, New York Times bestselling author of the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries   “Will please Scotophiles everywhere.”—Miranda James, New York Times bestselling author of the Cat in the Stacks Mysteries   “[Reed] captures the appeal of the Highlands, and features a plucky, determined heroine surrounded by a cast of quirky but believable characters.” —Sheila Connolly, New York Times bestselling author of the County Cork Mysteries   “A lively romp through the lush Scottish Highlands, complete with a strong protagonist and quirky supporting characters.”—Open Book Reviews   “Remarkable…Reed gives cozy readers a mystery, a likable protagonist, her own view of the Scottish Highlands, plenty of adorable critters, and a sexy guy in a kilt.”—MyShelf.com About the Author Hannah Reed is the national bestselling author of the Scottish Highland Mysteries, including Off Kilter and Hooked on Ewe , and the Queen Bee Mysteries, including Beewitched and Beeline to Trouble. Her own Scottish ancestors were seventeenth- century rabble-rousers who were eventually shipped to the new world, where they settled in the Michigan Upper Peninsula. Hannah has happily traveled back to her homeland several times, and in keeping with family tradition, enjoyed causing mayhem in the Highlands.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Commemorative Pop-up

Amazon.com Review To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz , master paper engineer Robert Sabuda has created a pop-up version of Dorothy's adventures in Oz that fans will find hard to resist. Modeling his depictions of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the rest after W. W. Denslow's original art, Sabuda adds a third dimension that would have rocked Denslow's--and Baum's--world. A rapidly spinning cyclone actually casts a breeze over the startled reader's face. Glorious red poppies wave seductively in a field. And the Emerald City positively glitters with green, especially when young readers try on the special tinted "Spectacles for You" provided in a pocket on the page. The abridged text, provided in minibooklets set onto each page, covers enough basics for the Oz novice, but we recommend a read-aloud of the original, as well, for all the glory and detail of Baum's fantastic tale. Sabuda's homage to the classic is truly spectacular; even purists will gasp in delight at the sight of the humbug wizard floating away in his shiny green, gold, and blue hot-air balloon. This great introduction to the story of Oz doubles as a fun collector's item. (Ages 3 to 7) --Emilie Coulter From School Library Journal Grade 2-5-This showstopping pop-up book celebrates the 100th birthday of The Wizard of Oz in a spectacular fashion; from the twister that spins up dizzyingly on the opening spread to the final "And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!" clinch, the array of special effects will wow even blas "seen it all" readers. Not only is Sabuda a wizardly paper engineer, able to pull off a bursting ball of flame, a melting witch, and a balloon rocking gently in the breeze, but he also shows a magic touch with pictorial art, creating colored lino-cut figures that strongly recall those of W. W. Denslow. The large central effects open up like stage settings, and are flanked with accordion-folded insets that contain even more pop-ups, along with an abbreviated text closely based on the original. Nor does the razzle-dazzle stop there, as Dorothy's silver shoes, the yellow brick road, and even the Emerald City are coated with shimmering foil, and by donning the included pair of tinted spectacles, readers are treated to a hidden message on one page. Sabuda's homage to an enduring classic captures its timeless sense of wonder, distinctive characters, and the flavor of its melodrama brilliantly. John Peters, New York Public Library Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Gr. 4-up, younger for reading aloud. As Mark Evan Swartz comments in Oz: Before the Rainbow [BKL O 15 00], L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "occupies a unique position in the cultural fabric of this country." Editor Peter Glassman ( Oz: The Hundredth Anniversary Celebration) calls the story "quintessentially American." Yet it has a universal appeal--which may account for its translation into many different languages. Although children are often first introduced to the Land of Oz by the classic 1939 movie, the original novel and its many sequels have enchanted both young and old over the years. Published for the centennial, several new books commemorate the beloved story. Readers unacquainted with Oz are sure to find a pleasing version; readers who already know the story will find something to delight them all over again.In Oz: The Hundredth Anniversary Celebration, Peter Glassman presents art and words from children's book authors and illustrators who are big fans of Oz and here pay homage to "the enchanted land that inspired them and helped shape their imaginations." The paintings, in each artist's recognizable style, lovingly convey the essence of Oz, making this truly wonderful. Contributions come from Tomie dePaola, who imagines himself going down the yellow brick road instead of Dorothy; Paul O. Zelinsky, who shared the Oz experience with his children; Uri Shulevitz, who escaped from hunger and war during the 1940s in the pages of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz ; Richard Egielski, whose childhood defense against the ghastly flying monkeys was to lie absolutely still in bed; Natalie Babbitt, Peter Sis, Bruce Degen, Lloyd Alexander, and many others. Proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to Reading Is Fundamental (RIF).Then there's Robert Sabuda's extraordinary pop-up version. On the first double-page spread, the fearful cyclone whirls up to loom over the tiny farm house in Kansas; in the next spread, the house stands squarely on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. And so it goes, spread after spread. The story itself is condensed and told on foldout booklets attached to the pages. The standout pop-ups are prints created from cut blocks of linoleum, with sparkling touches of colored foil that add pizzazz. Sabuda's art evokes that of Denslow, including the silver, rather than ruby, slippers, and once again, his mastery of his craft enhances and enchants. A good selection for story hours.Also now available is Henry Holt's reissue of its 1982 version of the book, with artwork by the well-known children's book illustrator Michael Hague. It contains several new pictures and a slightly longer profile of Baum. It's certainly not an essential purchase, but it's a gorgeous edition for collections that don't have the earlier volume.Last, but certainly not least, is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the "100th Anniversary Edition," part of the HarperCollins Books of Wonder imprint. For those who want the look and feel of the 1900 publication, this fills the bill. It's a very handsome facsimile, printed on high-quality paper and containing all of W. W. Denslow's 24 original colorplates and 130 two-color drawings. Long live Dorothy and her stalwart companions. Sally Estes Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Lyman Frank Baum was born in Chittenango, New York, on May 15, 1856. Over the course of his life, Baum raised fancy poultry, sold fireworks, managed an opera house, opened a department store, and an edited a newspaper before finally turning to writing. In 1900, he published his best known book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Eventually he wrote fifty-five novels, including thirteen Oz books, plus four “lost” novels, eighty-three short stories, more than two hundred poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings. Baum died on May 6, 1919. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in Glendale, California.Robert Sabuda is one of the most innovative and inventive children's book creators and is known worldwide for his amazing pop-up paper engineering. His books include Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Twelve Days of Christmas, The Night Before Christmas, The Winter's Tale, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, to name but afew, have garnered numerous awards and have made the New York Times bestseller lists on many occasions. He lives in New York City. Read more

Silence Fallen (A Mercy Thompson Novel)

Review PRAISE FOR SILENCE FALLEN AND THE MERCY THOMPSON NOVELS "Patricia Briggs is an incredible writer and Silence Fallen is simply fantastic. I love hanging out with the amazing characters in this series!"—Nalini Singh, New York Times bestselling author of the Psy-Changeling series“Patricia Briggs never fails to deliver an exciting, magic and fable filled suspense story. Silence Fallen is one of her best.”—Erin Watt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Royals series“I love these books.”—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author “The best new urban fantasy series I’ve read in years.”—Kelley Armstrong, #1 New York Times bestselling author“It is always a joy to pick up a new Briggs novel, and she certainly doesn’t disappoint with this latest Mercy Thompson book. . . . the character development is wonderful, not to mention there is plenty of action, humor and magic to satisfy readers’ cravings! Briggs hits another one out of the park!” — RT Book Reviews “Packed with an awesome mix of the supernatural, humor, romance, and action, topping itself off with one wallop of a surprise at the end that will knock you out of your armchair. If you haven’t given this series a try, you’re totally missing out!” — The Independent (Utah)“Silence Fallen . . . is now my favorite book in the series. There's no question that this series continues to get better with every book.” —Fresh Fiction“Briggs’ Mercy Thompson book series is one of the standard-bearers of the urban-fantasy subgenre.” — Booklist About the Author Patricia Briggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series and the Alpha and Omega novels. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 Mercy This wasn't the first time chocolate got me in trouble. I died first, so I made cookies. They were popular fare on Pirate night, so I needed to make a lot. Darryl had gotten me a jumbo-sized antique mixing bowl last Christmas that probably could have held the water supply for an elephant for a day. I don't know where he found it. If I ever filled the bowl entirely, I'd have to have one of the werewolves move it. It ate the eighteen cups of flour I dumped into it with room for more. All the while, piratical howls rose up the stairway from the bowels of the basement. "Jesse-" Aiden began, raising his voice to carry over an enthusiastic if off-key whistling rendition of "The Sailor's Hornpipe." "Call me Barbary Belle," my stepdaughter, Jesse, reminded him. Aiden might have looked and sounded like he was a boy, but he hadn't been young for a very long time. We had assimilated him, rather than adopted him, as he was centuries older than Adam and me put together. He was still finding some things about modern life difficult to adjust to, like the live-action-role-playing (LARP) aspect of the computer-based pirate game they were playing. "It only works right if you think of me as a pirate and not your sister," Jesse said patiently. Ignoring his response that she wasn't his sister, she continued, "As long as you call me Jesse-that's who you think of when you interact with me. You have to believe I'm a pirate to make it a proper game. The first step is to call me by my game name-Barbary Belle." There was a pause as someone let out a full-throated roar that subsided into a groan of frustration. "Eat clamshells, you sodding buffoon," Ben chortled. His game name was Sodding Bart, but I didn't have to think of him that way because I was dead, anyway. I got out my smaller mixing bowl, the one that had been perfectly adequate until I married into a werewolf pack. I filled it with softened butter, brown sugar, and vanilla. As I mixed them together, I decided that it wasn't that I was a bad pirate, it was that I had miscalculated. By baking sugar-and-chocolate-laden food whenever I died first, I'd succeeded in turning myself into a target. The oven beeped to tell me it was at temperature, and I found all four cookie sheets in the narrow cabinet that they belonged in-a minor miracle. I wasn't the only one who got KP duty in the house, but I seemed to be the only one who could put things in the same place (where they belonged) on a regular basis. The baking pans, in particular, got shoved all sorts of odd places. I had once found one of them in the downstairs bathroom. I didn't ask-but I washed that motherhumper with bleach before I used it to bake on again. "Motherhumper" was a word that was catching on in the pack with horrible efficiency after "Sodding Bart" Ben had started using it in his pirate role. I wasn't quite sure whether it was a real swearword that no one had thought up yet, one of those swearwords that were real swearwords in Ben's home country of Great Britain (like "fanny," which meant something very different in the UK than it did here), or a replacement swearword like "darn" or "shoot." In any case, I'd found myself using it on occasions when "dang" wasn't quite strong enough-like finding cookware in bathrooms. I thought I was good to go when I found the baking pans. But when I opened the cupboard where there should have been ten bags of chocolate chips, there were only six. I searched the kitchen and came up with another one (open and half-gone) in the top cupboard behind the spaghetti noodles, which made six and a half, leaner than I liked for a double-quadruple batch, but it would do. What would not do was no eggs. And there were no eggs. I scrounged through the fridge for the second time, checking out the back corners and behind the milk, where things liked to hide. But even though I'd gotten four dozen eggs two days ago, there was not an egg to be had. There were perils in living in the de facto clubhouse of a werewolf pack. Thawing roasts in the fridge required the concealment skills of a WWII French Underground spy working in Nazi headquarters. I hadn't hidden the eggs because, since they were neither sweet nor bleeding, I'd thought they were safe. I'd been wrong. The majority of the egg-and-roast-stealing werewolf pack was currently downstairs, enthralled in games of piracy on the high seas of the computer screen. There was irony in how much they loved the pirate computer game-werewolves are too dense to swim. Coyotes, even coyote shifters like me, can swim just fine-except, apparently, in The Dread Pirate's Booty scenarios, because I'd drowned four times this month. I hadn't drowned this time, though. This time, I'd died with my stepdaughter's knife in my back. Barbary Belle was highly skilled with knives. "I'm headed to the Stop and Rob," I called downstairs. "Does anyone need anything?" The store wasn't really called that, of course; it had a perfectly normal name that I couldn't remember. "Stop and Rob" was more of a general term for a twenty-four-hour gas station and convenience store, a sobriquet earned in the days when the night-shift clerk had been left on his or her own with a till full of thousands of dollars. Technology-cameras, quick-drop safes that didn't open until daylight, and silent alarms-had made working the night shift safer, but they'd always be Stop and Robs to me. "Argh," said my husband Adam's voice, traveling up the stairs. "Gold and women and grog!" He didn't play often, but when he did, he played full throttle and immersed. "Gold and women and grog!" echoed a chorus of men's voices. "Would you listen to them?" said Mary Jo scornfully. "Give me a man who knows what to do with what the good Lord gave him instead of these clueless scallywags who run at the first sight of a real woman." "Argh," agreed Auriele, while Jesse giggled. "Swab the decks, ye lubbers, lest you slide in the blood and crack your four-pounders," I called. "And whate'er ye do, don't trust Barbary Belle at your back." There was a roar of general agreement, and Jesse giggled again. "And, Captain Larson," I said, addressing Adam-my mate had taken the name from Jack London's The Sea-Wolf-"you can have gold, and you can have grog. You go after another woman, and you'll be pulling back a stub." There was a little silence. "Argh," said Adam with renewed enthusiasm. "I got me a woman. What do I need with more? The women are for my men!" "Argh!" roared his men. "Bring us gold, grog, and women!" "Men!" said Auriele, sweet-voiced. "Bring us a few good men." "Stupidheads," growled Honey. "Die!" There was a general outcry because, apparently, several someones did. I laughed my way out the door. After a moment's thought, I took Adam's SUV. I was going to have to figure out what to do for a daily driver. My beloved Vanagon Syncro was getting far too many miles put on her, and her transmission was rare and more precious than gold on the secondary market. I'd been driving her ever since my poor Rabbit had been totaled, and the van was starting to need more and more repairs. I'd looked at an '87 Jetta with a blown engine a few days ago. They wanted too much for it, but maybe I'd just have to pony up. The SUV growled the couple of miles to the convenience store that was ten miles closer to home than any other store open at this hour of the night. The clerk was restocking cigarettes and didn't look up as I passed him. I picked up two dozen overpriced eggs and three equally overpriced bags of chocolate chips and set them on the counter. The clerk turned away from the cigarettes, looked at me, and froze. He swallowed hard and looked away-scanning the bar codes on the eggs with a hand that shook so much that he might save me the effort of cracking the shells myself. "You must be new?" I suggested, running my ATM card in the reader. He knew who I was without knowing the important things, I thought. I found the limelight disconcerting, but I was slowly getting used to it. My husband was Alpha of the local pack; he'd been a household name in the Tri-Cities since the werewolves first revealed their existence a few years ago. When we'd married, I'd gotten a little of his reflected glory, but after helping to fight a troll on the Cable Bridge a couple of months ago, I had become at least as well-known as Adam. People reacted differently to the reality of werewolves in the world. Sensible people stayed a certain length back. Others were stupidly friendly or not-so-stupidly afraid. The new guy obviously belonged to the latter group. "Started last week," the clerk muttered as he bagged the chocolate chips and eggs as if they might bite him. "I'm not a werewolf," I told him. "You don't have anything to fear from me. And my husband has put a moratorium on killing gas-station clerks this week." The clerk blinked at me. "None of the pack will hurt you," I clarified, reminding myself not to try to be funny around people who were too scared to know I was joking. "If you have any trouble with a werewolf or something like that, you can call us"-I found the card holder in my purse and gave him one of the pack's cards, printed on off-white card stock-"at this number. We'll take care of it if we can." We all carried the cards now that we'd (my fault) taken on the task of policing the supernatural community of the Tri-Cities, protecting the human citizens from things that go bump in the night. We'd also been called in to find lost children, dogs, and, once, two calves and their guard llama. Zack had composed a song for that one. I hadn't even known he could play guitar. Sometimes the job of protecting the Tri-Cities was more glamorous than others. The livestock call, in addition to being musically commemorated, had actually been something of a PR coup: photos of werewolves herding small lost calves back home had gone viral on Facebook. The clerk took the card as if it were going to bite him. "Okay," he lied. I couldn't do any better than that, so I left with my cookie-making ingredients. I hopped into the SUV and set the bag on the passenger seat as I backed out of the parking space. Frowning, I wondered if his strong reaction might be due to something that had happened to him-a personal incident. I looked both ways before heading out onto the road. Maybe I should go talk to him again. I was still worrying about the clerk when there was a loud noise that stole my breath. The bag with the eggs in it flew off the seat, and something hit me with a loud bang and a foul smell-and then there was a sharp pain, followed by . . . nothing. I think I woke up several times, for no more than a few minutes that ended abruptly when I moved. I heard people talking, mostly the voices of unfamiliar men, but I couldnÕt understand what they were saying. Magic shimmered and itched. Then a warm breath of spring air drifted through the pain and took it all away. I slept, more tired than I ever remembered being. When I finally roused, awake and aware for real, I couldn't see anything. I might not have been a werewolf, but a shapeshifting coyote could still see okay in very dim light. Either I was blind, or wherever I was had no light at all. My head hurt, my nose hurt, and my left shoulder felt bruised. My mouth was dry and tasted bad, as if I'd gone for a week without brushing my teeth. It felt like I'd just been hit by a troll-though the left-shoulder pain was more of a seat-belt-in-a-car thing. But I couldn't remember . . . even as that thought started to trigger some panic, memories came trickling back. I'd been taking a run to our local Stop and Rob-the same all-night gas station slash convenience store where I'd first met lone and gay werewolf Warren all those years ago. Warren had worked out rather well for the pack . . . I gathered my wandering thoughts and herded them down a track that might do some good. The difficulty I had doing that-and the nasty headache-made me think I might have a concussion. I considered the loud bang and the eggs and realized that it hadn't been the eggs that had exploded and smelled bad, but the SUV's air bags. I was a mechanic. I knew what blown air bags smelled like. I didn't know what odd effect of shock made me think it might have been the eggs. The suddenness of the accident had combined the related events of the groceries' hitting me and the air bag's hitting me into a cause and effect that didn't exist. As my thoughts slowly achieved clarity, I realized that the SUV had been struck from the side, struck at speed to have activated the air bags. With that information, I reevaluated my situation without moving. My face was sore-a separate and lesser pain than the headache-and I diagnosed the situation as my having been hit with an air bag or two that hadn't quite saved me from a concussion or its near cousin. The sore left shoulder wasn't serious, nor was the general ache and horrible weariness. Probably all of my pain was from the accident . . . car wreck, I supposed, because I was pretty sure it hadn't been an accident. The vehicle that hit me hadn't had its headlights on-I would have remembered headlights. And if it had been a real accident, I'd be in the hospital instead of wherever I was. Under the circumstances, I wasn't too badly damaged . . . but that wasn't right. I had a sudden flash of seeing my own rib-but though I was sore, my chest rose and fell without complication. I pushed that memory back, something to be dealt with after I figured out where I was and why. Read more

Bewitched and Betrothed (Witchcraft Mystery)

Review Praise for the New York Times Bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries “Blackwell sits firmly on my list of must-read authors!”— New York Times bestselling author Victoria Laurie “Extraordinarily entertaining.”— Suspense Magazine “Hard to put down, and wickedly fun.”—MyShelf.com “Juliet Blackwell is a master…Reading the entire series is a pleasure.”—Fresh Fiction “An excellent blend of mystery, paranormal, and light humor.”—The Romance Readers Connection About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the New York Times bestselling author who writes the Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series. She is also the author of Letters from Paris and The Paris Key . Together with her sister, Juliet wrote the Art Lover's Mystery series. The first in that series, Feint of Art , was nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2019 Juliet Blackwell Chapter One A salty, heavy shroud of fog obscures the night. Frigid waters close over my head. Sparks of silvery moonlight dance on the surface of the bay, calling to me. I flail and kick, struggling to lift myself, to breathe sweet air, my arms and legs numb with cold and exhaustion. The cheerful lights of San Francisco peek through the fog, tantalizingly far away; the island behind me is closer, but gleams and pulsates in the light of the full moon like a living, malevolent thing. The Golden Gate is the third point on the triangle, and I am in the center. A foghorn sounds in a mournful cry. Strong currents wrap around my legs, tugging at my feet, pulling me toward the Golden Gate and out to the vast Pacific Ocean. Lost at sea. Lost forever. I can’t go on. I fear drowning, but remind myself: Witches don’t sink. At least I don’t. I had been in the bay once before and popped up like a cork. But . . . what about now? Icy fingers grip my ankles, drawing me down. The water closes over my head again, and I try to scream. “Mistress!” I struggle toward the surface. Fighting, flailing. I have to. I have to. “Mistress!” a gravelly voice called again. “Are you all right? Why are you all wet?” I opened my eyes. I was in my own home, in my own bed. Safe. Oscar, my ersatz witch’s familiar—a shape-shifting cross between a gargoyle and a goblin—perched on my brass bedstead, leaning over to peer at me. His fearsome face was upside down and his breath smelled vaguely of cheese. Soaked and shivering, I let out a shaky sigh. I wasn’t sweaty from fear, but dripping wet—and smelling of brine—as though I had, indeed, just emerged from the San Francisco Bay. “I had a nightmare,” I said. “Yeah, no kiddin’. That’s one heck of a nightmare if you’re manifesting in your sleep. Were you swimming or something?” Oscar waved a handful of travel brochures under my nose. “Hey, check these out. I think we should go to Barcelona first, maybe.” “Oscar, I cannot discuss my honeymoon plans with you at the moment.” My brain felt fuzzy. I sat up and glanced at my antique clock on the bedside table. Its hands glowed a mellow, comforting green that cut through the darkness. City lights sifted through my lace curtains, but even raucous Haight Street was hushed at three o’clock in the morning. “But it’s the witching hour,” Oscar whined. “Ideal for spellcasting, not for making travel plans.” Oscar cocked his head. “What better time is there?” “In the morning. After coffee. When normal people are awake.” “But we’re not ‘normal people’—like we’d even want to be, heh!” He chuckled, a raspy sound reminiscent of a rusty saw. I’m Lily Ivory, a natural-born witch from West Texas who wandered the globe for years, searching for a safe place to settle down. On the advice of a parrot named Barnabas, whom I had met in a bar in Hong Kong, I had come to San Francisco—specifically, to Haight Street—where a witch like me could fit in. I love it here. For the first time in my life I have friends, a community, a home. If only the beautiful City by the Bay weren’t so chock-full of murder and mayhem. Oscar was right, I thought, plucking the soggy nightgown away from my skin. It was unusual to manifest during a dream, to bring a physical object—in this case, water from the bay—from the realm of slumber into the waking world. I shivered again. “Just saying, we’re both awake right now,” Oscar continued. “And not for nothing, but you might want to dry off and maybe put a towel down before you ruin your mattress.” Throwing back the covers, I hopped out of bed and headed to the bathroom to take a shower. Washing away the waters of the bay with lemon verbena soap, I lingered under the hot spray until warmth settled down deep in my core. I emerged from the bathroom to find that Oscar had gone. He had left the travel brochures fanned out in a semicircle atop my comforter, and on the nightstand was a steaming mug of chamomile tea. He had also managed to dry the bed, somehow, and to make it up with fresh sheets. Oscar might not be a typical (read: obedient) witch’s familiar, but he definitely had his moments. Not to mention he had saved my life on more than one occasion. I sat on the side of the bed, sipped the tea, and picked up a brochure with a glossy photo of Barcelona’s famous Sagrada Família. The next brochure featured the Eiffel Tower, and the last the Voto Nacional de Quito, in Ecuador. I had promised Oscar he could tag along on my honeymoon so that we could search for his mother, a creature suffering under a curse that transformed her into a gargoyle. The problem was he had no idea where she might be, only that “gargoyles live a long time.” I reminded myself to discuss this with my fiancé, Sailor, so that we could come up with a targeted approach before Oscar whipped up an entire world tour for us. Recently it had been difficult for Sailor and me to find the time—and the peace of mind—to talk about much of anything, much less gargoyle-guided tours. I yawned. Speaking of honeymoons, I had a bucketload of decisions to make before the wedding, and more than a few wrinkles to iron out. My grandmother’s eccentric coven had recently arrived in town; I was about to be married to a beautiful but secretive man—an attachment to whom, I had been warned, might weaken my powers. Oscar kept disappearing to search for his mother even though he was supposed to be helping secure the perfect venue for my upcoming wedding, and recently I had come to realize that instead of one guiding spirit, I had two, and they weren’t getting along, which was messing with my magic. And finally, my beloved adopted city of San Francisco was facing a frustratingly nonspecific existential threat that primarily involved a cupcake lady named Renee. I took another sip of tea. I also still needed to find just the right vintage bridesmaid dresses for my friends Bronwyn and Maya. Under any other circumstance I would have said “Wear what you like!” but the style editor for the San Francisco Chronicle was planning to do a feature on our antique bridal wardrobe, which would be great publicity for my vintage clothing store, Aunt Cora’s Closet. I may be a witch and a soon-to-be bride, but I’m also a small-business owner vying for customers on increasingly competitive Haight Street. I needed the exposure. I also needed some rest. Grabbing an in fidem venire praesidii amulet off the dresser mirror, I held it in my right hand and walked the perimeter of the bedroom in a clockwise direction, chanting: I have done my day’s work, I am entitled to sweet sleep. I am drawing a line on this carpet, over which you cannot pass. Powers of protection, powers who clear, remove all those who don’t belong here. As I lay back down and switched off the light, waiting for sleep to take me, I couldn’t shake the sensation of the waters closing over my head. It wasn’t like me to have a nightmare. Much less a manifesting nightmare. It was enough to worry a weary witch like me. Chapter Two The next morning Aunt Cora’s Closet was bursting at the seams with witches. Fourteen elderly women—an entire West Texas coven, plus my mother—crowded the aisles of my shop, searching for glittery garments to rival the silver bugle bead jacket my grandmother Graciela had nabbed from my inventory a few days ago. “The sparklier, the better,” said Agatha, pawing through a rack of ’80s-era, padded-shoulder flapper-revival tops. “I want one exactly like Graciela’s, except in blue,” said Kay, her thick tortoiseshell glasses magnifying her rheumy eyes to a comical extent as she tilted her head back to examine a royal blue sequined jacket through the bottom of her bifocals. Her beaded glasses chain clicked. “Blue brings out my eyes.” “No two vintage items are the same, that’s what makes them so special,” MariaGracia said, then added in a loud whisper: “If you want that silver one you can win it from Graciela on pagan poker night.” My mother, Maggie, was flipping listlessly through a rack of 1950s sundresses, listening to the goings-on with a slightly bewildered expression. Not only was my mother not part of the coven, she had only very recently come to approve of magic at all. I couldn’t imagine what the long road trip from Texas had been like for her, given her boisterous, opinionated travel companions. “This one’s nice,” said Winona, holding up a bolero jacket encrusted with gemlike rhinestones known as crystal chatons. Their facets reflected the late-morning light streaming in through the store’s street-front display windows. “It’s purple, that’s my color.” “That’s not purple, it’s eggplant,” said Caroline in an imperious tone, tucking her subtly highlighted blond hair behind one ear as she studied a full-length silk charmeuse evening gown. “Purple, eggplant, what’s the difference?” Winona shrugged. “And that, my dear, is why you’ve never mastered color magic,” quipped Caroline. “Well, at least I can work with a pendulum without breaking a black mirror,” muttered Winona, slipping some cheesy crackers to Oscar, who was currently in his public guise as my pet Vietnamese miniature potbellied pig. The thirteen coven members were women of a certain age: Darlene, Winona, Betty, Caroline, Iris, Kay, MariaGracia, Nan, Pepper, Rosa, Viv, Agatha, and, of course, my grandmother Graciela. They represented all sizes and colors and temperaments; sort of a witchy United Nations drawn from the far-flung corners of our dusty West Texas county. I had grown up with and around these powerful, stubborn, quirky witches and was overjoyed to have them with me now. I needed them with me now, given everything I was facing in San Francisco. Even if they were helping themselves to some of my best sparkly inventory, for which I would not, of course, allow them to pay. “My mom—Lucille—can add a little bling to just about anything, if that’s what you’re after,” offered Maya. “Her shop’s right next door; you could get things altered, or even custom-made. All the glitter you could ask for.” A chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” greeted this suggestion. Graciela, secretly delighted that her discovery of the silver bugle bead jacket had caused such a sensation, was investigating a rack of gauzy negligees, muttering racy comments. She spoke in a spicy mixture of Spanish and English that I was unwilling to translate for my coworkers. Bronwyn and Maya were helping to rehang items, but were mostly, with good-natured fascination, observing the chaos on the shop floor. The coven had been hitting the touristy highlights when they stopped in for jackets to ward off the summer chill. Nan and Iris already had donned garish sweatshirts purchased from the ubiquitous street vendors that catered to the tourists who flocked to town, ready to enjoy all this city had to offer but ill-equipped for its microclimate. People often equated “California” with “warm,” only to discover that San Francisco had little in common with Los Angeles or San Diego. Here, a day might start out chilly and damp, soar to eighty degrees by lunchtime, then plummet into the fifties with the arrival of a thick blanket of afternoon fog. Locals learned to dress in layers. I yawned. I’m usually not bothered much by lack of sleep, but the memory of last night’s dream troubled me. Could it have been a prophetic vision, or simply random snippets of worry and anxiety forming themselves into a story line? Or was someone—or something—harassing me by sending mares to disrupt my rest? I considered consulting the coven about it, but decided to wait for a more appropriate moment. As I fiddled with the antique engagement ring on my finger and watched the druzy stone glitter under the shop lights, I hoped that whatever the nightmare signaled wouldn’t interfere with my upcoming wedding. Me. Betrothed. I still couldn’t quite believe it. At last, their hands clutching purple Aunt Cora’s Closet bags filled with new-to-them clothes, the coven—and my mother—clambered back aboard the ancient yellow school bus to resume their tour of the city. Wendy, Bronwyn’s coven sister and a San Francisco native, had offered to be their tour guide on the condition that she pilot the old bus. Impressed but concerned that Agatha had managed to drive them all the way from Texas, Wendy had suggested tactfully that, since San Francisco’s famously steep hills were a bit of a challenge for even the most skilled chauffeur, it might be best for a local—and, as Wendy pointed out quietly to me, someone with 20/20 vision—to be behind the wheel. “I’ll see you all tonight. I’m bringing the pizza,” I said. The coven was staying with my friend Calypso Cafaro, a botanical expert with a big old farmhouse near Bolinas, up the coast. Since Calypso had filled her home with air beds and cots for a drawn-out witchy slumber party, the least I could do was to provide the occasional dinner. Calypso’s farm was where the handfasting would be held in a mere two weeks, assuming Oscar was able to broker an agreement with the woods spirits. This could be tricky, because I had received their help once in the recent past but had neglected to properly repay the favor. So there was that. “Make sure there’s a vegetarian option?” Viv said, hanging out one of the windows of the old school bus. She was watching her cholesterol, but was very fond of cheese. “Got it right here,” I said, patting a pad of paper with thirteen special requests. The coven members were nothing if not opinionated. Some were vehemently anti-anchovy, others all-veggie, still others pro-pepperoni (“A meat lover’s version would be delightful!”). I wondered if I should try to fit all their requests onto half a dozen pies or save myself time and trouble, and just order thirteen individual pizzas. “I’ll bring some snacks as well.” “Oooh, garlicky knots?” someone called out; I couldn’t tell who. “Garlicky knots.” I nodded, jotting it down. “Anything else?” “With dipping sauce!” Rosa said. “Knots and dipping sauce. Got it.” Seeing where this conversation was going, Bronwyn intervened to bring it to an end. “Now, won’t that just be lovely! Have a wonderful tour, ladies. Tomorrow, I’ll bring the makings for margaritas! Bye-bye!” Wendy closed the door, threw the bus in gear, and roared off in a cloud of diesel exhaust, carefully navigating the crowded streets of the Haight. Bronwyn and I waved until the bus disappeared, then turned to each other. “Phew!” Bronwyn said. “You can say that again,” I said with a smile. “Phew!” Bronwyn was nothing if not obliging. A lovely, ample, fifty-something Wiccan, Bronwyn had been enjoying the opportunity to discuss the healing properties of botanical teas and tonics with Graciela’s coven—not to mention grilling them about details of my misspent youth. Still, she and I had businesses to run. Bronwyn had special-order herbal infusions to mix, and I—well, I had laundry to do. Every garment that came into my store first had to be inspected and cleaned. As much as I disliked doing laundry per se, I adored sifting through the new acquisitions. Finding inventory was a perennial challenge in my line of work, so I made frequent visits to estate sales and garage sales, as well as the Bay Area’s many charitable thrift stores and flea markets. Maya scoured the attics, basements, and closets of the people she met through her long-term pet project interviewing and recording the stories of elderly Bay Area residents. And sometimes the inventory came to me: As my shop gained a reputation and had become better known, I began fielding calls from those helping their elderly aunts, mothers, and grandmothers clean out their closets. Currently, half a dozen Hefty bags filled with Maya’s latest acquisitions awaited me in the workroom at the back of the store, which was separated from the shop floor by a thick brocade curtain. I was eager to see what new treasures she had discovered. Opening one sack, I ran my hands along a cool satin aqua-colored poodle skirt from the mid-’50s, then brought out a 1960s lace cocktail-length gown with a pinch waist. Both items went into the hand-wash pile. Very few true vintage items could be run through the jumbo-sized washing machine that crowded the back room. Maya joined me, a cup of steaming chai tea in her hand. Maya was in her early twenties but seemed much older and wiser than a lot of people twice her age. She wore no makeup or jewelry, but her black hair was twisted into shoulder-length locks and decorated with beads and a single streak of bright blue. “Lily,” Maya said, “I wanted to ask you about something. I found a . . . well, a special item.” “I sure hope it’s spangly, because the aunties snapped up most of our glittery goods,” I replied as she lifted one of the Hefty bags onto the workroom table, a jade green Formica dinette set from the 1960s, and began searching through the bag. “I wouldn’t say it’s spangly, exactly. Here it is.” Maya held up a man’s long-sleeved blue chambray shirt. It was faded and old, and not at all attractive. Definitely no sparkles. But that’s not what bothered me. Even from across the workroom I felt its vibrations: a low, malevolent hum. My eyes fell on a series of numbers stamped in black ink over the chest pocket: 258. That was one nasty shirt. Chapter Three “What is that?” I asked her. “I think it’s a genuine piece of history,” said Maya, restrained excitement showing in her dark eyes. “I already talked to Carlos’s cousin Elena, who works on Alcatraz as a National Park Service ranger. We think it might be part of an inmate’s uniform from the old prison.” Carlos Romero was a San Francisco homicide inspector who had become a good friend over the course of several police investigations. I had met his cousin Elena a few months ago, at Carlos’s birthday party. When she heard I’d never been to Alcatraz, she’d encouraged me to come for a visit and promised me a personal tour. I had demurred; I had no desire to visit a penitentiary bound to be full of angry ghosts and mournful spirits. Not to mention bad vibrations. “A . . . real inmate’s uniform?” I asked. “Are you sure?” Along with selling gaudy sweatshirts, the city’s sidewalk vendors peddled a vast array of Alcatraz-themed items, such as T‑shirts emblazoned with Alcatraz Swim Team or gangster Al Capone’s mug shot. Black-and-white-striped infant onesies seemed a bit macabre to me, but then I’ve never had my finger on the pulse of popular culture. “I’m not certain, but I think it might be,” said Maya. “Didn’t the prisoners wear black-and-white stripes, like in the movies?” asked Bronwyn, who had taken a break from straightening the racks and putting away the garments the coven had tried on and rejected. “That’s what I thought, too!” said Maya. “But apparently not, they wore jeans and blue chambray shirts like this one.” “Jeans? How stylish,” Bronwyn said. “You’d think so, but not really,” Maya said. “Before the rebellious youth of the 1950s made them cool, jeans were considered working-class clothing: sturdy and inexpensive, worn by farmers, construction workers, miners panning for gold . . .” “And prisoners?” I asked. “Yep. I did a little research online last night. If the shirt is real, then the number over the pocket means it belonged to a prisoner who escaped from Alcatraz in 1937.” “I didn’t realize anyone actually escaped from the Rock,” Bronwyn said. “I thought that was the point of putting a federal penitentiary on an island in the middle of the bay—it was considered escape-proof.” “I can see how being stuck on an island would slow an escaped prisoner down, since you can’t just walk away,” I said. “But Alcatraz Island is only, what, a mile offshore? Isn’t there an annual swim contest from there—called ‘Escape from Alcatraz,’ as a matter of fact?” “Yes, but those are highly trained athletes competing in a triathlon,” Maya said. “Keep in mind that not everyone knows how to swim, especially not in the past, when swimming pools were few and far between. Plus, the currents in San Francisco Bay are very dangerous—even good swimmers can get caught and swept out to sea.” Once again, the memory of last night’s nightmare washed over me. Currents tugging at my legs, pulling me toward the Golden Gate. “But you’re suggesting someone did escape?” I asked. “Apparently that’s still up for debate.” Maya consulted her notebook. “Let’s see: A total of thirty-six prisoners were involved in escape attempts. Most were foiled while still on the island; six inmates were shot and killed in the attempts, and five prisoners made it into the water but were never seen again. Since their bodies were never found, the authorities concluded they were swept out to sea and drowned; but because there’s no proof of that, either, it’s possible some actually made it to land. Over the years, there have been supposed sightings of the escaped prisoners reported in South America. “The number 258 on the pocket was Ray Perry’s inmate identification number,” continued Maya. “In 1937 he slipped into the water, never to be seen again.” “Where did you find this shirt?” I asked Maya. I hadn’t gone near the thing, repelled by its vibrations. But now I stroked my medicine bag to center myself and held out my hands for the shirt. “It was in Mrs. Archer’s attic, along with these other items,” Maya said, gesturing to the contents of the Hefty bag and passing the shirt to me. “What do you think, Lily?” Bronwyn asked, sounding intrigued but concerned. “Does it feel like it could belong to an escaped prisoner?” “It’s . . .” I held the chambray shirt close. The cotton fabric was soft with age, but its vibrations were pure malice. I sensed despair, rage, a bleak nothingness. “I’m pretty sure it’s . . . genuine.” I held it out, away from my core, and the three of us stared at it. “Did Mrs. Archer say anything about it?” I asked. Maya shook her head, the beads in her braided locks making a pleasant clacking sound. “She said it was there when she moved in, thirty years ago, in a bunch of boxes left behind by the previous homeowner. There were old photographs and that sort of thing up there, too.” “What was this Ray Perry in prison for?” asked Bronwyn. “Kidnapping and bank robbery,” Maya said. At least it wasn’t murder, I thought, then reflected on how bizarre my life had become that I was afraid the spirit of a murderer might be lurking in the vintage items that passed through my hands. “What do you think, Lily? Pretty interesting, isn’t it?” Maya asked. “It’s fascinating, Maya, I agree. But we can’t sell this. It could be dangerous to whoever wore it.” “Dangerous how?” Bronwyn asked. “The vibrations are . . . off.” “I guess that would make sense,” Maya said. Unlike Bronwyn and me, Maya wasn’t sure what to make of magic, and had a natural tendency toward skepticism. But she’d been around me enough to know that I was tapped into something she didn’t understand, and she respected it. “Perry was a federal prisoner, after all, and if this really was his shirt, it’s possible he survived a desperate swim in the cold waters of the bay. I imagine that experience would leave behind some bad juju.” “Some very bad juju,” I said, retrieving a copper Sri Yantra talisman from my collection in the shop’s glass display case. “Wear this for a few days, please, Maya, just in case. You’ve been handling the shirt, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.” “Be glad to. I’ve been admiring this necklace for days,” murmured Maya, studying the charm. “What is it supposed to do?” “It’s for good luck and protection,” I explained. “The nine interlocking triangles form a total of forty-three smaller triangles. I’m . . . feeling triangles lately.” Recently, triangles and the number three had been coming to mind. In a way, that was no surprise: Three is a sacred number in many faiths and belief systems. But the moment I spoke, I realized something: Either I was intuiting more than ever before, or I was paying more attention to my insights. Maybe all that witchy training was finally paying off. “Cool,” said Maya, slipping the amulet over her head and patting the copper sphere against her chest. “What about you, Lily?” Bronwyn said, looking worried. “Shouldn’t you wear one, too?” “I’ve got my medicine bag and guiding spirits, and my witch’s intuition and what-all. I’ll be fine.” “Okay, so what do we do now?” Maya asked, nodding at the shirt. “I think . . . maybe I should burn it. I’ll have to give that some thought.” “What? You can’t burn it, Lily,” Maya protested. “It’s a piece of history.” “It’s horrifying.” “Horrifying, but historic.” I wasn’t convinced. “Besides,” continued Maya, “I wasn’t suggesting selling it. I’ve already spoken with Elena Romero about it, remember? She’s coming by the shop in an hour. She wants the shirt for the park service’s museum—assuming it’s genuine, that is.” Oh, it’s genuine, I thought. “That might be a problem, Maya,” Bronwyn said. “Lily thinks the shirt is dangerous.” “Well, we can’t just burn it,” Maya said. “What would I tell Elena?” “Could you cleanse it of its evil vibrations, Lily? Or bind them, perhaps?” suggested Bronwyn. I blew out a breath. “All right, let me think. . . . I suppose if I restrained the vibrations with a binding spell, and Elena immediately put it under glass in the museum, it would be safe enough. It’s not as though she’s going to wear it, after all. Right? I’ll talk to her about it.” “Good,” said Maya. “I know it’s creepy, but it’s also fascinating. Like Alcatraz itself. You really should go visit it one day, Lily.” The frigid bay waters, closing over my head. I took the shirt upstairs to my apartment over the store, and performed a hasty binding spell over it, using a small vial of saltwater from the bay to cleanse it. I was familiar with those waters; they had once cleansed me. But cleansing required harnessing the salts of the bay and concentrating them within a serenity spell. In last night’s dream, the bay waters weren’t cleansing as much as threatening. Once again, I shivered at the memory. My nightmare and today’s appearance of the inmate’s shirt from Alcatraz could be a simple coincidence. Except that I had learned the hard way that events in my life were rarely coincidental and almost never simple. I shook it off. This was no time to allow my mind to wander. Spellcasting was all about focusing one’s intent. From the living room bookshelf I retrieved a smooth stone I had found in the Ruby River in Montana, and extracted a rusty, square-headed nail from my medicine bag. I had picked up the nail in an old silver mining ghost town in New Mexico, the site of a terrible mining tragedy that killed twenty-two men. I cast a quick salt circle, then set the nail upon the stone and struck it thrice with an iron hammer while intoning a spell in Latin. Finally, I scored the stone three times with the point of the rusty nail and returned the nail to my medicine bag. Later I would cast the stone into the bay, completing the circle, but for now I braided and knotted yard-lengths of orange, blue, and black yarn, focusing my intent while chanting: By knot of one, my spell’s begun. By knot of two, the wish comes true. By knot of three, so mote it be. By knot of four, this charm is a door. By knot of five, my intent comes alive. By knot of six, the enchantment I fix. By knot of seven, the strength of eleven. By knot of eight, I cast this fate. By knot of nine, what’s dreamt is mine. I wrapped the prisoner’s shirt in brown paper and tied the whole thing with the braided strings. The shirt’s vibrations were still bleak, but that was to be expected. It was no longer dangerous—as long as no one put it on. It was too easy to forget the effect clothing can have upon a person; to change into a new set of clothes can, indeed, change the wearer, if only very subtly. Everyone is different, of course, and some need a touch of darkness in their clothes to highlight the sunshine in their lives. But not this shirt. Not #258. This shirt was too much of a burden for even the strongest among us to bear. Read more

Stitches and Witches: A Paranormal Cozy Mystery (Vampire Knitting Club Book 2)

About the Author Nancy Warren is the USA Today bestselling author of more than sixty novels, including the Take a Chance series and the Vampire Knitting Club series. She's appeared in the New York Times, is a three-time finalist for the RITA Award, was honored by Romantic Times magazine, and often shares her love of writing in her popular workshops. Nancy's originally from Vancouver, Canada, but she tends to wander. She currently lives in an eighteenth-century house in Bath, England, where she loves to pretend she's Jane Austen, or at least a character in a Jane Austen novel. Nancy Warren is the USA Today bestselling author of more than sixty novels, including the Take a Chance series and the Vampire Knitting Club series. She's appeared in the New York Times, is a three-time finalist for the RITA Award, was honored by Romantic Times magazine, and often shares her love of writing in her popular workshops. Nancy's originally from Vancouver, Canada, but she tends to wander. She currently lives in an eighteenth-century house in Bath, England, where she loves to pretend she's Jane Austen, or at least a character in a Jane Austen novel. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Death and Daisies: A Magic Garden Mystery

Review Praise for Death and Daisies : “A surprising killer, oodles of local color, and a touch of mysticism all add up to a charming read.”— Kirkus Reviews “Those with a taste for fantasy-tinged cozies will want to see more of the appealing Fiona.” — Publishers Weekly "A great series, this author continues to write stories that should not be missed!"— Suspense Magazine “Fans of cozies with mystical elements will enjoy Fiona’s visits to her magical garden.”— Booklist "Enchanting."— Woman’s World "If you love Hallmark Channel movies, seed catalogues, and very mild magical realism, Flower’s (yes, that’s her real name) Death and Daisies is made for you."— Entertainment Weekly “Introduce this series, with its charming characters and enchanting setting, to readers of other Scotland-set cozies, such as those by Paige Shelton and Molly MacRae. The magic realism aspect may appeal to fans of Ellery Adams and Sarah Addison Allen.”— Library Journal “As you follow Fiona around as she opens the flower shop, hangs with her sister and friends, you can’t help but feel like you, yourself are there in Scotland along side her...It will have you hooked!”— Cozy Mystery Book Reviews “Amanda Flower captures this quaint and lovely Scottish town...A sweet and charming follow up with magic, heart, and the bond between sisters.”— Tulsa Book Review Praise for Flowers and Foul Play : “An enchanted garden in rural Scotland? Bestill my heart. Amanda Flower’s latest, Flowers and Foul Play , is quirky, mysterious, magical fun. A delight from start to finish.”—Juliet Blackwell, New York Times bestselling author of the Witchcraft and Haunted Home Renovation mysteries Praise for the Magical Bookshop mysteries: "An enchanting tale of mystery, magical books, and endearing characters. Prepare to be charmed." —Heather Blake, national bestselling author of The Witch and the Dead on Crime and Poetry “In her page-turning style, Flower builds effective suspense.” — Booklist About the Author Amanda Flower , a USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning mystery author, started her writing career in elementary school when she read a story she wrote to her sixth grade class and had the class in stitches with her description of being stuck on the top of a Ferris wheel. She knew at that moment she'd found her calling of making people laugh with her words. She also writes mysteries as USA Today bestselling author Isabella Alan. In addition to being an author, Amanda is a librarian in Northeast Ohio. This is her second Magic Garden mystery. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

A Call to Charms (Forever Charmed Mysteries)

The Lake of Learning: A Cassiopeia Vitt Novella (Cassiopeia Vitt Adventure Series Book 2)

About the Author Steve Berry is the New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author of fourteen Cotton Malone and four stand-alone novels. He has over twenty-three million books in print, translated into forty languages. He is an emeritus member of the Smithsonian Libraries Advisory Board and a founding member of International Thriller Writers, formerly serving as its copresident. M. J. Rose is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels. She is a founding member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors, AuthorBuzz.com, as well as the cofounder of 1001DarkNights.com. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including RT's Best Historical Fiction and People Magazine Picks. The Fox TV series, Past Lives , was based on her novel The Reincarnationist . Natalie Ross is an actress and voice-over artist whose acting credits include multiple appearances in the television series All My Children , among others. She is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Flowers and Foul Play: A Magic Garden Mystery

Review Praise for Flowers and Foul Play : “[A] superior series launch...The well-constructed plot, seasoned with humor, builds slowly toward a surprising conclusion. Cozy fans will look forward to Fiona’s further adventures.”— Publishers Weekly starred review“ Flowers and Foul Play is a delightful mystery with a variety of characters to enjoy along with stunning Scotland scenery, history, and second chances.”— Seattle Book Review five-star review“An enchanted garden in rural Scotland? Bestill my heart. Amanda Flower’s latest, Flowers and Foul Play , is quirky, mysterious, magical fun. A delight from start to finish.”—Juliet Blackwell, New York Times bestselling author of the Witchcraft and Haunted Home Renovation mysteries"[ Flowers and Foul Play ] smoothly paced series debut is layered with appealing characters and a well-plotted puzzle flavored with gentle magic and a whisper of romance. I look forward to many more stories from Amanda Flower and her heroine, Fiona."—Bailey Cates, New York Times bestselling author of the Magical Bakery mysteries"Delightful...Amanda Flower combines Scotland, mystery, romance, and just enough magic in this series debut to create a fun and engaging read!"—Dawn Eastman, national bestselling author of the Family Fortune mysteries"Filled with Highland color and memorable characters, this mystery is a delightfully deadly read! Amanda Flower knows how to create pure magic."—Hannah Reed, bestselling author of the Scottish Highlands mystery series“A Magical secret garden, a picturesque Scottish village on the shores of the North Sea, and a cozy cottage inherited from a loving godfather—a dream come true for American Fiona Knox. But dreams turn into nightmares when Fiona stumbles upon a dead body laying next to an ancient stone with mystical powers. Is her garden a curse or a blessing? Hopefully she’ll find out before the killer strikes again. A fun whodunnit that will keep you guessing till the wee hours.”—Kathleen Bridge, author of the Hamptons Home and Garden and By the Sea mysteries About the Author Amanda Flower is a USA Today bestselling American writer of mystery novels under her real name and the pen name, "Isabella Alan". She writes for adults and children. She won the Agatha Award for Children's/Young Adult book in 2015 for Andi Unstoppable, and was nominated for an Agatha Award in 2010, 2013, and 2014. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra

Review Praise for Anne Rice and Christopher Rice's RAMSES THE DAMNED "It's got the Edwardian feel that we've come to expect of Anne Rice's best novels, and it's got something more ... Tying feudal pasts with modern passions, Anne Rice and Christopher Rice have crafted a supreme sequel." -- Mountain Times.com "An entertaining soap opera replete with romantic alliances, betrayals, and ends left tantalizingly loose as grist for sequels. Fans of both authors' work will enjoy this one." -- Publishers Weekly "Mesmerizing ... mother and son have triumphed in their first team-up effort. ... An enthralling story rendered with the full flourish of a classic Rice tale ... a superb, philosophically deep sequel to 1989's The Mummy . This mother/son team-up is a resounding success and leaves us eager for more." --Andrea Sefler, Pop Mythology "Rice ( Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis , 2016) continues the tale begun almost 30 years ago in The Mummy (1989) with the help of her novelist son, Christopher ( The Heavens Rise , 2013), and it has been worth the wait. This thrilling read blends historial fiction, fantasy, and romance into a book readers will not be able to put down." -- Booklist About the Author ANNE RICE is the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021. CHRISTOPHER RICE is the author of twelve books. He lives in West Hollywood, California. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Proem It was a tale told by the newspapers in 1914—of a spectacular find by a British Egyptologist in an isolated tomb outside of Cairo—a royal mummy of Egypt’s greatest monarch and, beside his painted sarcophagus, a vast collection of ancient poisons and a journal in Latin, written in the time of Cleopatra, comprising some thirteen scrolls. Call me Ramses the Damned. For that is the name I have given myself. But I was once Ramses the Great of Upper and Lower Egypt, slayer of the Hittites, father of many sons and daughters, who ruled Egypt for sixty-four years. My monuments are still standing; the stele recount my victories, though a thousand years have passed since I was pulled, a mortal child, from the womb. Ah, fatal moment now buried by time, when from a Hittite priestess I took the cursed elixir. Her warnings I would not heed. Immortality I craved. And so I drank the potion in the brimming cup . . . . . . How can I bear this burden any longer? How can I endure the loneliness anymore? Yet I cannot die . . . So wrote a being who claimed to have lived a thousand years, slumbering in darkness when the great kings and queens of his realm had no need of him, ever ready to be resurrected at their command to offer wisdom and counsel—until the death of Cleopatra and of Egypt itself drove him to an eternal rest.   What was the world to make of this bizarre tale, or the fact that Lawrence Stratford, discoverer of the mystery, died in the tomb itself at the moment of his greatest triumph?   Julie Stratford, daughter of the great Egyptologist and sole heiress to the Stratford Shipping fortune, brought the controversial mummy to London, along with the mysterious scrolls and poisons, to honor her father’s discovery with a private exhibition in her home in Mayfair. Within days Julie’s cousin, Henry, made frantic claims that the mummy had risen from its sarcophagus and tried to murder him, and talk of a mummy’s curse astonished Londoners. Before rumors could die down, Julie appeared in public with a mysterious blue-eyed Egyptian named Reginald Ramsey, who then journeyed with Julie back to Cairo in the company of beloved friends Elliott, the Earl of Rutherford, and his young son, Alex Savarell, and the aggrieved Henry.   More shocking events unfolded.   An unidentified corpse stolen from the Cairo Museum, grisly murders amongst the European shopkeepers of the city, and Ramsey himself sought by the Cairo police, and the disappearance of Henry. Finally, a fiery explosion left baffled witnesses and a frantic Alex Savarell grieving for a nameless woman who had fled the Cairo Opera House in terror, driving her motorcar into the path of an oncoming train.   Out of chaos and mystery, Julie Stratford emerged as the devoted fiancée of the enigmatic Reginald Ramsey, traveling Europe with her beloved, while in England the Savarell family sought to understand the exile of the Earl of Rutherford and the grief of young Alex for the woman he had so tragically lost to the flames in the Egyptian desert. Gossip dies down; newspapers move on.   As our story opens, the country estate of the Earl of Rutherford will soon be the location of the engagement party for Reginald Ramsey and Julie Stratford, as others far and wide hear echoes of the story of the immortal Ramses the Damned and his fabled elixir, though the mummified body itself, brought to London with such fanfare, has long since vanished. Read more

Witches of East End (Witches of East End, 1)

Review "A sexy, magical romp, sure to bring de la Cruz a legion of new fans."― Kelley Armstrong, New York Times bestselling author of The Otherworld series About the Author Melissa de la Cruz is the author of many bestselling novels, including all the books in the Blue Bloods series and Witches of East End . She lives in Los Angeles, California with her husband and daughter, and continues to be a hitmaker for both adult readers and her YA fans.

The White Princess (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels)

Review "Loyalties are torn, paranoia festers and you can almost hear the bray of royal trumpets as the period springs to life. It’s a bloody irresistible read." ― People Magazine "Bring on the blood, sex and tears! . . . You name it, it's all here." ― USA Today “This rich tapestry brings to vivid life the court of Henry and Elizabeth. Meticulously drawn characters with a seamless blending of historical fact and fiction combine in a page-turning epic of a story. Tudor-fiction fans can never get enough, and they will snap this one up.” ― Library Journal (starred review) " The White Princess features one of the more intriguing theories about the possible fate of the princes." ― The Washington Post "This is the most fascinating and complex of the series--not only in history, but in the psychological makeup of the characters, the politics of the era and the blending of actual and reimagined history. Gregory makes everything come to life. . . . This is why Gregory is a queen of the genre." ― Romantic Times “As usual, Gregory delivers a spellbinding . . . exposé.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Elizabeth must navigate the treacherous waters of marriage, maternity, and mutiny in an age better at betrayal than childbirth. . . . At this novel’s core lies a political marriage seen in all its complexity.” ― Publishers Weekly "Replete with intrigue and heartrending drama." ― Booklist “Gregory returns with another sister act. The result: her best novel in years.” ― USA Today “Gregory delivers another vivid and satisfying novel of court intrigue, revenge, and superstition. Gregory’s many fans as well as readers who enjoy lush, evocative writing, vividly drawn characters, and fascinating history told from a woman’s point of view will love her latest work.” ― Library Journal “Gregory is one of historical fiction’s superstars, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter shows why . . . providing intelligent escape, a trip through time to a dangerous past.” ― Historical Novels Review (Editor's Choice Review) “Wielding magic again in her latest War of the Roses novel … Gregory demonstrates the passion and skill that has made her the queen of English historical fiction.…Gregory portrays spirited women at odds with powerful men, endowing distant historical events with drama, and figures long dead or invented with real-life flaws and grand emotions. She makes history … come alive for readers.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Gregory ... always delivers the goods.” ― New York Post “Gorgeous fun.” ― New York Daily News About the Author Philippa Gregory is the author of many New York Times bestselling novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl , and is a recognized authority on women’s history. Many of her works have been adapted for the screen including The Other Boleyn Girl . She graduated from the University of Sussex and received a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where she is a Regent. She holds honorary degrees from Teesside University and the University of Sussex. She is a fellow of the Universities of Sussex and Cardiff and was awarded the 2016 Harrogate Festival Award for Contribution to Historical Fiction. She is an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She was awarded a CBE title for services to literature and charity in 2022. She welcomes visitors to her website PhilippaGregory.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Sheriff Hutton Castle, Yorkshire, Autumn 1485 I wish I could stop dreaming. I wish to God I could stop dreaming. I am so tired; all I want to do is sleep. I want to sleep all the day, from dawn until twilight that every evening comes a little earlier and a little more drearily. In the daytime, all I think about is sleeping. But in the night all I do is try to stay awake. I go to his quiet shuttered rooms to look at the candle as it gutters in the golden candlestick, burning slowly through the marked hours, though he will never see light again. The servants take a taper to a fresh candle every day at noon; each hour burns slowly away, although time means nothing to him now. Time is quite lost to him in his eternal darkness, in his eternal timelessness, though it leans so heavily on me. All day long I wait for the slow rolling in of the gray evening and the mournful tolling of the Compline bell, when I can go to the chapel and pray for his soul, though he will never again hear my whispers, nor the quiet chanting of the priests. Then I can go to bed. But when I get to bed I dare not sleep because I cannot bear the dreams that come. I dream of him. Over and over again I dream of him. All day I keep my face smiling like a mask, smiling, smiling, my teeth bared, my eyes bright, my skin like strained parch- ment, paper-thin. I keep my voice clear and mellow, I speak words that have no meaning, and sometimes, when required, I even sing. At night I fall into my bed as if I were drowning in deep water, as if I were sinking below the depths, as if the water were possessing me, taking me like a mermaid, and for a moment I feel a deep relief as if, submerged in water, my grief can drain away, as if it were the river Lethe and the currents can bring forgetfulness and wash me into the cave of sleep; but then the dreams come. I don’t dream of his death—it would be the worst of nightmares to see him go down fighting. But I never dream of the battle, I don’t see his final charge into the very heart of Henry Tudor’s guard. I don’t see him hacking his way through. I don’t see Thomas Stanley’s army sweep down and bury him under their hooves, as he is thrown from his horse, his sword arm failing, going down under a merciless cavalry charge, shouting: “Treason! Treason! Treason!” I don’t see William Stanley raise his crown and put it on another man’s head. I don’t dream any of this, and I thank God for that mercy at least. These are my constant daytime thoughts that I cannot escape. These are bloody daytime reveries that fill my mind while I walk and talk lightly of the unseasonal heat, of the dryness of the ground, of the poor harvest this year. But my dreams at night are more painful, far more painful than this, for then I dream that I am in his arms and he is waking me with a kiss. I dream that we are walking in a garden, planning our future. I dream that I am pregnant with his child, my rounded belly under his warm hand, and he is smiling, delighted, and I am promising him that we will have a son, the son that he needs, a son for York, a son for England, a son for the two of us. “We’ll call him Arthur,” he says. “We’ll call him Arthur, like Arthur of Camelot, we’ll call him Arthur for England.” The pain, when I wake to find that I have been dreaming again, seems to get worse every day. I wish to God I could stop dreaming. My dearest daughter Elizabeth, My heart and prayers are with you, dear child; but now, of all the times in your life, you must act the part of the queen that you were born to be. The new king, Henry Tudor, commands you to come to me at the Palace of Westminster in London and you are to bring your sisters and cousins. Note this: he has not denied his betrothal to you. I expect it to go ahead. I know this is not what you hoped for, my dear; but Richard is dead, and that part of your life is over. Henry is the victor and our task now is to make you his wife and Queen of England. You will obey me in one other thing also: you will smile and look joyful as a bride coming to her betrothed. A princess does not share her grief with all the world. You were born a princess and you are the heir to a long line of courageous women. Lift up your chin and smile, my dear. I am waiting for you, and I will be smiling too. Your loving mother Elizabeth R Dowager Queen of England I read this letter with some care, for my mother has never been a straightforward woman and any word from her is always freighted with levels of meaning. I can imagine her thrilling at another chance at the throne of England. She is an indomitable woman; I have seen her brought very low, but never, even when she was widowed, even when nearly mad with grief, have I seen her humbled. I understand at once her orders to look happy, to forget that the man I love is dead and tumbled into an unmarked grave, to forge the future of my family by hammering myself into marriage with his enemy. Henry Tudor has come to England, having spent his whole life in waiting, and he has won his battle, defeated the rightful king, my lover Richard, and now I am, like England itself, part of the spoils of war. If Richard had won at Bosworth—and who would ever have dreamed that he would not?—I would have been his queen and his loving wife. But he went down under the swords of traitors, the very men who mustered and swore to fight for him; and instead I am to marry Henry and the glorious sixteen months when I was Richard’s lover, all but queen of his court, and he was the heart of my heart, will be forgotten. Indeed, I had better hope that they are forgotten. I have to forget them myself. I read my mother’s letter, standing under the archway of the gatehouse of the great castle of Sheriff Hutton, and I turn and walk into the hall, where a fire is burning in the central stone hearth, the air warm and hazy with woodsmoke. I crumple the single page into a ball and thrust it into the heart of the glowing logs, and watch it burn. Any mention of my love for Richard and his promises to me must be destroyed like this. And I must hide other secrets too, one especially. I was raised as a talkative princess in an open court rich with intellectual inquiry, where anything could be thought, said, and written; but in the years since my father’s death, I have learned the secretive skills of a spy. My eyes are filling with tears from the smoke of the fire, but I know that there is no point in weeping. I rub my face and go to find the children in the big chamber at the top of the west tower that serves as their schoolroom and playroom. My sixteen-yearold sister Cecily has been singing with them this morning, and I can hear their voices and the rhythmic thud of the tabor as I climb the stone stairs. When I push open the door, they break off and demand that I listen to a round they have composed. My ten-year-old sister Anne has been taught by the best masters since she was a baby, our twelve-year-old cousin Margaret can hold a tune, and her ten-year-old brother Edward has a clear soprano as sweet as a flute. I listen and then clap my hands in applause. “And now, I have news for you.” Edward Warwick, Margaret’s little brother, lifts his heavy head from his slate. “Not for me?” he asks forlornly. “Not news for Teddy?” “Yes, for you too, and for your sister Maggie, and Cecily and Anne. News for all of you. As you know, Henry Tudor has won the battle and is to be the new King of England.” These are royal children; their faces are glum, but they are too well trained to say one word of regret for their fallen uncle Richard. Instead, they wait for what will come next. “The new King Henry is going to be a good king to his loyal people,” I say, despising myself as I parrot the words that Sir Robert Willoughby said to me as he gave me my mother’s letter. “And he has summoned all of us children of the House of York to London.” “But he’ll be king,” Cecily says flatly. “He’s going to be king.” “Of course he’ll be king! Who else?” I stumble over the question I have inadvertently posed. “Him, of course. Anyway, he has won the crown. And he will give us back our good name and recognize us as princesses of York.” Cecily makes a sulky face. In the last weeks before Richard the king rode out to battle, he ordered her to be married to Ralph Scrope, a next-to-nobody, to make sure that Henry Tudor could not claim her as a second choice of bride, after me. Cecily, like me, is a princess of York, and so marriage to either of us gives a man a claim to the throne. The shine was taken off me when gossip said that I was Richard’s lover, and then Richard demeaned Cecily too by condemning her to a lowly marriage. She claims now that it was never consummated, now she says that she does not regard it, that Mother will have it annulled; but presumably she is Lady Scrope, the wife of a defeated Yorkist, and when we are restored to our royal titles and become princesses again, she will have to retain his name and her humiliation, even if no one knows where Ralph Scrope is today. “You know, I should be king,” ten-year-old Edward says, tugging at my sleeve. “I’m next, aren’t I?” I turn to him. “No, Teddy,” I say gently. “You cannot be king. It’s true that you are a boy of the House of York and Uncle Richard once named you as his heir; but he is dead now, and the new king will be Henry Tudor.” I hear my voice quaver as I say “he is dead,” and I take a breath and try again. “Richard is dead, Edward, you know that, don’t you? You understand that King Richard is dead? And you will never be his heir now.” He looks at me so blankly that I think he has not understood anything at all, and then his big hazel eyes fill with tears, and he turns and goes back to copying his Greek alphabet on his slate. I stare at his brown head for a moment and think that his dumb animal grief is just like mine. Except that I am ordered to talk all the time, and to smile all the day. “He can’t understand,” Cecily says to me, keeping her voice low so his sister Maggie cannot hear. “We’ve all told him, over and over again. He’s too stupid to believe it.” I glance at Maggie, quietly seating herself beside her brother to help him to form his letters, and I think that I must be as stupid as Edward, for I cannot believe it either. One moment Richard was marching at the head of an invincible army of the great families of England; the next they brought us the news that he had been beaten, and that three of his trusted friends had sat on their horses and watched him lead a desperate charge to his death, as if it were a sunny day at the joust, as if they were spectators and he a daring rider, and the whole thing a game that could go either way and was worth long odds. I shake my head. If I think of him, riding alone against his enemies, riding with my glove tucked inside his breastplate against his heart, then I will start to cry; and my mother has commanded me to smile. “So we are going to London!” I say, as if I am delighted at the prospect. “To court! And we will live with our Lady Mother at Westminster Palace again, and be with our little sisters Catherine and Bridget again.” The two orphans of the Duke of Clarence look up at this. “But where will Teddy and me live?” Maggie asks. “Perhaps you will live with us too,” I say cheerfully. “I expect so.” “Hurrah!” Anne cheers, and Maggie tells Edward quietly that we will go to London, and that he can ride his pony all the way there from Yorkshire like a little knight at arms, as Cecily takes me by the elbow and draws me to one side, her fingers nipping my arm. “And what about you?” she asks. “Is the king going to marry you? Is he going to overlook what you did with Richard? Is it all to be forgotten?” “I don’t know,” I say, pulling away. “And as far as we are concerned, nobody did anything with King Richard. You, of all people, my sister, would have seen nothing and will speak of nothing. As for Henry, I suppose whether he is going to marry me or not is the one thing that we all want to know. But only he knows the answer. Or perhaps two people: him—and that old crone, his mother, who thinks she can decide everything.” Read more

Storm Cursed (A Mercy Thompson Novel)

Review PRAISE FOR THE MERCY THOMPSON NOVELS “I love these books.”—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author   “An excellent read with plenty of twists and turns…It left me wanting more.”—Kim Harrison, #1 New York Times bestselling author   “The best new urban fantasy series I’ve read in years.”—Kelley Armstrong, #1 New York Times bestselling author   “Patricia Briggs never fails to deliver an exciting, magic and fable filled suspense story.”—Erin Watt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Royals series   “In the increasingly crowded field of kick-ass supernatural heroines, Mercy stands out as one of the best.”— Locus “Action-packed and with more than a few satisfying emotional payoffs...Patricia Briggs at the top of her game.”—The Speculative Herald   “The characters are all realistic and vibrant.”— The Independent “These are fantastic adventures, and Mercy reigns.”—SFRevu   “The world building is incredibly lush and subsuming...a fantastic urban fantasy adventure.”—Fresh Fiction   “Outstanding.”—Charles de Lint, Fantasy & Science Fiction About the Author Patricia Briggs is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series ( Silence Fallen , Fire Touched ) and the Alpha and Omega novels ( Burn Bright , Dead Heat ). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 "So what did you do, Mary Jo?" called Ben in his crisp British accent. Mary Jo shut her car door and started toward us and toward the mountainous metal barn that Ben and I waited beside. She gave Ben a quelling frown, and waited to speak until she had come up to us. She asked, "What do you mean, what did I do?" It was a little chilly, made more so by a brisk wind that blew a bit of hair I'd failed to secure in my braid into my eyes. The Tri-Cities don't cool off at night with quite the thoroughness that the Montana mountains I'd grown up with did, but night usually still kills the heat of day. Ben bounced a little on his toes--a sign that he was ready and eager for violence. I could sense that his attention, like mine, was mostly on the barn, even though his eyes were on Mary Jo. "I killed Mercy three times in a single session of Pirate's Booty the night before last. I think that's why she woke me up to come out hunting tonight." He glanced at me and raised an eyebrow in an open invitation to address the situation. Okay, that's not exactly what he said. As usual he spiced his language with profanity, but unless he spouted something truly amazing I mostly edited it out. "You passed up the opportunity to gain a hundred Spanish doubloons in order to kill me that last time," I told him, unable, even days later, to keep the indignation out of my voice. In the fierce high-seas computer-generated battles the werewolf pack delighted in, a hundred Spanish doubloons was a treasure trove of opportunity for more or better weapons, supplies, and ship repairs. Only a homicidal maniac would give up a hundred doubloons to kill someone. Ben gave me a wicked grin, an expression mostly empty of the bitter edge all of his expressions had once contained. "I was merely staying in character. Sodding Bart enjoys killing more than money, love. That's why his kill score is third on the board, just behind Captain Wolf and Lady Mockingbird." Captain Wolf Larsen, stolen from the titular character of Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, is the nom de guerre of my mate and the pack Alpha. Lady Mockingbird, who was up by fifteen kills on everybody, teaches high school chemistry in her alter ego as Auriele Zao. She is a scary, scary woman. I've been told her high school students think so, too. Ben's gaze, swinging back to Mary Jo, paused on the dark maw that gaped in the front of the huge metal barn, the only building within a mile of where we stood. It was either very late at night or very early in the morning, depending on which side of sleep you were on. Dawn wasn't yet a possibility, but the waxing moon was strong in the night sky. The entrance to the barn was big enough to drive a pair of school buses through at the same time, and at least some of the ambient light should have made its way into the interior of the barn. Ben considered the barn for a second or two, then turned a sharp grin on Mary Jo. "Mercy just confirmed why I'm here. What did you do to win the crappy job lottery?" "Hey," I said, "before you all feel too sorry for yourselves, remember I'm out here, too." "That's because you're in charge," Mary Jo said, her voice distracted, her eyes on the barn. "Bosses need to jump in the outhouse with the grunts occasionally. It's good for morale." Mary Jo wore a T-shirt that read Firefighters Like It HOT, the last word written in red and gold flames. The shirt was loose like the sleep pants she wore, but her clothes didn't disguise her muscular warrior's body. She looked away from the barn, turning her attention to Ben. "Maybe I owe this . . . opportunity to the way I treated her before Adam put his foot down." She tilted her head toward me, a gesture that, like Ben's raised eyebrow, asked for my input. She didn't meet my eyes as she once would have. I was growing resigned to the way the pack dealt with me since my mate had declared me off-limits to anything but the utmost of respect on pain of death. By consensus, they mostly deferred to me, as if I were a wolf dominant to them. It felt wrong and awkward, and it made the back of my neck itch. What did it say about me, I wondered, that I was more comfortable with all the snide comments and personal attacks than with gracious subservience? "Wrong," I told her. I pointed at Ben. "Killing me instead of getting rich is bad. Consider yourself punished." I looked back at Mary Jo. "Ben is a simple problem with a simple solution. You are a stickier mess and this is not punishment. Or not really punishment. This"-I waved around us at the early-morning landscape-"is so you quit apologizing about the past for something you meant wholeheartedly at the time. And would do again under the same circumstances. Your apology is suspect-and annoying." Ben made an amused sound, sounding relaxed and happy-but he was bouncing on the balls of his feet again. "That sounds about right, Mary Jo. If she were really getting back at you for all the trouble you caused her-it might land you on the List of Mercy's Epic Revenge. Like the Blue Dye Solution or the Chocolate Easter Bunny Incident. Getting called out at the butt-crack of dawn doesn't make the grade." "So all I have to do is quit apologizing and you'll stop calling me out at three in the morning to chase goblins or hunt down whatever that freak thing we killed last week was?" she asked skeptically. "I can't promise that," I told her. Mary Jo was one of the few wolves I could count on not to increase the drama or violence of a situation. "But it will . . ." Must be truthful. I gave her a rueful shrug. "It might mean I stop calling you first." "Epic," she said with a wry glance at Ben. "Epic it is. I think I will probably quit apologizing." Then she said, "I suppose I'll find some other way to irritate you." Hah! I'd been right-her apologies had been suspect. I had always liked Mary Jo-even if the reverse was not true. She looked at the barn again and sighed heavily. "Have you spotted the goblin in there?" She didn't bother trying to be quiet-none of us had been. Our prey could hear at least as well as any of us. If he was in there, he'd have heard us drive up. I was still learning about the goblins and what they could do, but I did know that much. "No," I said. "Do you think he's still in there?" she asked. "He's still in there," I said. I held out my arm so they could see the hair rise as I moved it closer to the barn. "If he weren't, there wouldn't be so much magic surrounding it." Mary Jo grunted. "Is it my imagination, or is it too dark in the barn?" "I think I remember this," said Ben thoughtfully, peering into the barn. His clear British accent had the weird effect of making everything he said sound a little more intelligent than it really was, an effect that he conscientiously-I was convinced-canceled by adding the kinds of words responsible for whole generations of people who knew what soap tasted like. "You know-the whole seeing-fuck-all-in-the-dark thing?" "I never was human," I told him. "I've always been able to see pretty well in the dark." After I said it, I had a thought. There was a faint chance that the goblin's magic was affecting our eyesight rather than just spreading an illusion of darkness over the interior of the barn. I looked away from the barn to make sure my eyes were functioning as they should. There was nothing but open fields around us, a couple of old wooden posts set into the ground as if they had once been part of a fence, and in the distance, a few miles away, I could see the new neighborhood of McMansion farmettes that I'd passed driving here. Mesa, where we all now stood, was a little town of about five hundred people that was in real danger of being swallowed in the outward creep of Pasco's ever-growing population. It is flatter than most of the area around the Tri-Cities, with an economy primarily based in growing dryland wheat, hay, and cattle. The town name is pronounced Meesa, not Maysa-which, even after all the years I've lived in the Tri-Cities, still strikes me as wrong. With so many Hispanic people living here, you'd think we would be capable of pronouncing a Spanish word correctly instead of borrowing from the ridiculous dialogue of a Star Wars character, right? But Meesa it is. "Cain's hairy titties," muttered Ben, joining me in my observation of the rural setting. "What hermit was so misguided in life that he was hanging around this peopleless landscape at the bell end of the night and happened to see a freaking goblin disappear into a hay barn? And for that matter, goblins are city denizens like me. What the shagging hell is it doing out here?" "No one living was here when it came," I told him in a sinister voice. He gave me a look. In a confidential whisper I said, "I talk to dead people." Read more

Letters from Paris

Review Praise for Letters from Paris "Best-selling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light....this romantic and picturesque novel shows us that even the most broken people can find what makes them whole again.— Booklist "Blackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh...A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history."— Kirkus Reviews "Blackwell has woven a great tale of mystery, artistry, history, and a little romance. With plenty of backstory and tidbits about Parisian life in the 19th century, there’s something for everyone in this recommended read."— Library Journal Praise for The Paris Key “A charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Lights.”—Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I’ll See You in Paris “A gorgeously-plotted novel woven with luminescent charm.”—Rachael Herron, author of Splinters of Light “[A] witty, warm, winsome novel...[Blackwell’s] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail.”—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One “Blackwell's novel has all of the components that the best novels are made of: an intriguing and compelling storyline, an extremely likable protagonist, a dreamy location and a small dash of suspense and mystery.”— RT Book Reviews “Better than a travel guide because it carries the essence of friendship, food, drink, story, and history that one can only convey through Parisian residents. Delightful and highly recommended!”—The Best Reviews About the Author Juliet Blackwell was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the youngest child of a jet pilot and an editor. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master’s degrees in anthropology and social work. While in graduate school, she published several articles based on her research with immigrant families from Mexico and Vietnam, as well as one full-length translation: Miguel León-Portilla’s seminal work, Endangered Cultures . Juliet taught medical anthropology at SUNY–Albany, was producer for a BBC documentary, and worked as an elementary school social worker. Upon her return to California, she became a professional artist and ran her own decorative painting and design studio for more than a decade. In addition to mainstream novels, Juliet pens the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha Award–nominated Art Lover’s Mysteries series. She makes her home in northern California, but spends as much time as possible in Europe and Latin America. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***Copyright © 2016 Juliet Blackwell Prologue Sabine February 27, 1898 He sleeps. Sabine creeps across the dark studio before dawn, beseeching the silent faces not to betray her. They watch her every move, mute witnesses to her crime. Slipping through the door, she winces at the scraping sound of metal on metal as she pauses to latch it behind her. Fog envelops her, the mist cutting through her threadbare blouse and underthings, wet needles of cold air piercing her skin. Sabine thinks longingly of the two dresses she left behind in the cupboard. He’d bought them for her. They are the finest garments she has ever worn: one blue, one green. Made of the softest lawn, a material so lush and supple it beckoned to her the first time she donned the garments; often she would caress the skirt, reveling in the sumptuous sensations that tickled her palm. He teased her for that. Take nothing with you. She has donned the heavy black skirt and thin gray blouse she wore when they’d met in the square in Pigalle. When she thought he was her salvation. Before. Her feet are clad in her ancient black boots. The dove gray shawl her mother had knit for her sixteenth Christmas is her only defense against the night’s chill. She wears her hair pinned back in the style he likes: an old-fashioned twist on either side of her head. As though she stepped out of another time. Also abandoned is a gold armband, still in its nest of fine black velvet, in a blue box upon the nightstand. The tortoiseshell comb for her hair. Her little hand mirror. The candle stubs and pocket-sized book of sonnets, her sketchbook and charcoal. She even leaves behind the pillowcase in which she had packed her few belongings when she’d fled her childhood home in the countryside so long ago. Before Paris. Before she was an artist’s model. Before Maurice. Before. The damp air stings her cheeks with cold kisses. Dim light from the gas streetlamps casts an amber glow on the cobblestones, glinting off puddles from last night’s rain. They seem to flash a warning: You will never get away with it. You will never get away. Sabine keeps her head down, walking as quickly as she dares. Listening. She hears water dripping from a gargoyle at the side of the church. A horse whinnying a block or two away. A dog barking behind a stout wooden door. The tapping of her boots on the paving stones, echoing the pounding of her heart. Her own harsh breathing is the loudest sound. And . . . something else? She freezes. Holds her breath. Listens. Footsteps. Sabine runs. Runs for her life. She makes it as far as the quai du Louvre. To the Pont Neuf. The bridge that crosses the Seine. Chapter One This was probably a mistake, Claire thought to herself as she wrestled her luggage cart—why did she always choose the one with a wobbly wheel?—out the exit of the New Orleans airport. The sliding glass doors whooshed closed behind her, cutting her off from the terminal’s unnatural coolness and leaving her mired in the soupy atmosphere of July, Louisiana-style. Louisiana. It occurred to Claire that had she been blindfolded and her ears covered, she would still know where she was. She could feel it, smell something achingly familiar in the air. Humid tendrils of heat reached out and wrapped around her, dampness whispering along her skin, greeting her like an old lover. A lover she’d left many years ago with a mix of regret and relief, an abstract fondness tangled up with the fervent desire to move on. Claire took a deep breath of the hot, moist air, blew it out slowly, and searched the vehicles vying for curb access outside of baggage claim. When she’d cosigned the loan for her cousin Ty’s new rig, he’d told her it was “huge, black, and shiny.” One good thing about having more cousins in Plaquemines Parish than she could count: there was always someone to give her a ride to or from the airport. A small group of already inebriated twentysomething tourists, apparently intent on finding Mardi Gras out of season, jostled Claire on their jocular way to the taxi stand; she barely managed to grab her computer case as it was knocked from her shoulder. A drip of sweat rolled down the small of her back. She stood with one hand on her luggage; other than a few boxes of books and souvenirs she had sent through the mail, the two big suitcases, one duffel bag, and huge purse were all she owned in the world. She’d sold or given away the rest before leaving Chicago. This was probably a mistake, Claire thought again. The phrase had become something of a mantra ever since her cousin Jessica had phoned the week before last to say their grandmother was at death’s door. “Mammaw needs you, Chance,” Jessica had said. Claire’s relatives knew her as Chance; their grandmother went by Mammaw. “She’s speaking in Cajun; no one can understand her but Uncle Remy. And you know how he is.” When Claire received the call, she had been sitting in her climate-controlled office in Chicago, wondering what a person wore to the opera. Was her standard black office garb—perhaps dressed up with some chunky ethnic jewelry and a colorful pashmina—enough, or was this more of a sparkles-and-tulle situation? From the vantage point of her desk she could see acres of taupe carpeting and a maze of cubicles, old brick factory walls chicly renovated with skylights, and steel-and-glass dividers for “No-Miss Systems: A Software Company.” She looked out over the muted officescape, imagining Mammaw’s house and thinking: If Jessica’s was a voice from her past, what was her future? A night at the opera? Really? You’re getting pretty big for your britches, Chance Broussard. As her newly ex-boyfriend Sean would say: in this, as in most things, Claire was just the teensiest bit conflicted. Claire finally spotted Ty’s truck, looming large and new in a sea of smaller cars and dented pickups. Ignoring the blare of horns, he double-parked, hopped out, gave Claire a bear hug, then tossed her leaden bags in the bed of the truck like so much kindling. Ty drove toward the small town in Plaquemines Parish where they had been raised. They chatted a little about her life in the “big city,” his new truck, the job situation out on the oil rigs, and the precarious state of Mammaw’s health, but further conversation soon fizzled out. Claire’s relatives worked hard, disdained complainers, saluted the flag, and enjoyed their football. When they started drinking, the young men might get raucous and the old folks were prone to spinning long, involved tales in which layers of fact and fiction, history and fantasy merged and overlapped. But unless they were in storytelling mode, her cousins remained largely silent, their thoughts and hopes and dreams kept locked away under sweat-stained New Orleans Saints or Ragin’ Cajuns ball caps. So Claire was free to watch the scenery—flat, full of brush and low trees and crisscrossed by creeks and bayous—and to ponder. After hanging up with Jessica, Claire had finished up the day’s work, talked to her team supervisor, and hurried to meet Sean for a drink at the latest trendy lounge, a former dive bar that had been revamped with an ironically 1950s décor à la Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. They ordered craft cocktails made with locally sourced ingredients that took about ten minutes apiece for the bewhiskered “mixologists” to produce and that cost easily four times as much as the drinks had in the bar’s former incarnation. After their cocktails arrived, they settled in at a table and Claire told Sean she had given notice at No-Miss and was going home to take care of her grandmother. “Just like that?” Sean asked, a stunned look on his handsome face, grapefruit-bitters-inspired cocktail held aloft halfway to his mouth. “Well, as soon as they can replace me at work.” “But . . . what about me? What about us?” “I . . .” Claire trailed off. The sorry truth was, she hadn’t thought much about Sean’s reaction to her sudden news. Of course he was important to her. Claire cared for Sean. A lot. They’d met not long after graduating college, and Sean—an Evanston native—had introduced Claire to the wonders of city life. Sean took her to fancy restaurants and cocktail parties; he taught her how to hail a cab and gripe about the El and stroll through the Museum of Art while making the appropriately erudite comments. With Sean by her side, Claire developed a taste for Thai food and Ethiopian food and learned to eat raw fish—who knew?—at sushi bars. She even became accustomed to paying the equivalent of an entire breakfast back home for a simple cup of French roast at the chic café on the corner near her downtown office. They were young and well paid; it was fun. But lately Sean had been pushing for more. Their friends were starting to marry, settle down and buy houses, have children. Claire liked Sean and enjoyed being with him. But there was something lacking. For years she’d been driven: first to get out of her small hometown, then to finish college, then to get a job, then to make more money. Now what? Sitting hunched over her keyboard ten hours a day, going out to trendy clubs on the weekend, able to afford a nice place to live and new clothes, and getting her hair done in a salon . . . Was this what she had worked so hard to attain? Claire used to be able to lose herself down the rabbit hole of her work: writing code, beta testing, and resolving glitches. But now she wondered: Did any of it matter in the long run? Is this all there is? And when she tried to picture herself settling down with Sean and starting a family, she felt the waters closing over her head, her lungs screaming for air. She felt like she was drowning. “Tell me what’s going on, Claire.” Sean had covered Claire’s hand with his, squeezed gently. “You get one phone call and suddenly you’re ready to give up your whole life here in Chicago? I’m sorry your grandmother’s not doing well, but she’s getting up there in age, right? It’s not unexpected, is it? Couldn’t you just go for a visit, like a. . . ?” Like a normal person, Claire finished his thought in her mind. But no matter how much she might enjoy expensive cocktails, Claire had never felt normal in Chicago. When she’d first arrived at the University of Chicago, a scholarship kid fresh off the plane from Louisiana, Chance had stuck out like a sore thumb. She wore the wrong clothes, sported a frizzy home perm two decades out of fashion (according to the blunt but sympathetic assessment of her roommate Zoey, who was from New York City and knew about such things), and spoke with an accent as thick as a cloud of moustiques over the bayou on a warm summer evening. At first she had found everything—the chatty students, the scholarly professors, the city traffic—intimidating. Just as she had at home, she spent her nights hiding in her room or studying in the library. But after a few lonely weeks Chance had made a decision. After all, she hadn’t fought her way out of Plaquemines Parish just to let life pass her by. So she applied her formidable study skills to observing the behavior of the other girls: their wardrobes, their intonations, the way they giggled and joked about boys, and about life in general. How easily they reneged on promises, how they said yes when they meant no and no when they meant yes. How they never sat down for a full meal but ate only stalks of celery with peanut butter one day, huge bowls of ice cream the next. She started introducing herself as Claire instead of Chance, and learned to drink and smoke, to flirt and “party.” She told long, rambling stories about her hometown that her friends found hysterical, and made a feature of her “quaint” bayou accent. For the first time in her life, Claire succeeded socially as well as academically. The poor little Cajun girl managed to make some friends, attract a few boys, and still graduate cum laude. She landed a good job as a software engineer in Chicago with a starting salary that was more than she had ever thought possible, a small fortune by the standards of Plaquemines Parish, where everyone had said: That Chance! Just look at her now! She’s the American Dream, that one—coming from nothing and making something of herself. But it had been years now, and Claire no longer felt like she was living the dream. Claire used to ask why she hadn’t died alongside her mother when she was little, when Lizzie Broussard’s ten-year-old Ford veered off the road and landed upside down on its roof in the bayou. And Mammaw always said: The Lord’s got something special planned for you, sha, you mark my words. Your mother’s voice reached out to rescue you—it was a miracle. But now Claire asked herself: other than the size of her paycheck, was she really better off than if she had taken that refinery job back home straight out of high school and grabbed a beer with the gang down at Charlie Bob’s after work? Claire knew what Sean’s answer would be: a resounding yes. And yet. “Mammaw isn’t just a grandmother,” Claire found herself saying to Sean. Trying her best to explain. “She raised me. She saved my life.” “I know how important she is to you,” he said, his voice gentle. “And, of course, you should absolutely go see her. Take a couple of weeks, claim some family time. In fact, I could do the same and go with you.” Claire smiled and sipped her cocktail. “You said my hometown reminded you of that movie Deliverance.” Claire had never seen the film but she understood the reference. “For you, I’d be willing to risk it,” Sean said with a chuckle. Claire knew he was glad to see her smile, that he assumed he’d won the argument. Sean was a nice man, easygoing and thoughtful. But he was used to Claire accommodating his desires. Honestly, she didn’t much care whether they went to the symphony or the opera, or ate Vietnamese or Thai food for dinner, or went to the museum gala or the festival of lights at the harbor. In all these things, Claire was happy to let him choose. But this was different. “I’m not happy in Chicago, Sean. It’s not enough, somehow. It’s hard to explain, but . . . I want something else.” “So you’re going to move back to Plaquemines Parish?” He was getting angry now, pressing his lips together, his words taking on a clipped edge. “You hate it there. How many times have you told me that you never fit in, that you wanted something more out of life? You worked so hard to escape—how can you even think about going back?” “It’s just for a while, so I can be with Mammaw. Jessica says it probably won’t be long now. I’ll figure out something from there. I might even come back to Chicago—I really don’t know. I’m sorry, Sean. You’re a wonderful man. I just—” “This is a mistake, Claire,” Sean cut her off. “You’re making a mistake.” “You may be right,” she’d conceded. Probably it was a mistake. But it was her mistake to make. Ten days later Claire boarded a plane and headed to Plaquemines Parish, where they drank cheap coffee laced with chicory, no one even thought about attending the opera, and Claire—with her fancy college education and big-city ways—now stuck out like a sore thumb. Chapter Two “Why is there a tree on the roof?” Claire asked as Ty pulled up in front of Mammaw’s house. “Storm came through coupla days ago,” said Ty, peering at the greenery atop the little white clapboard bungalow. “Anyway, it’s just a branch.” “Still,” Claire said. “It’s a very large branch.” “First I seen it,” said Ty with a shrug. “I’d take care of it now but gotta get back to work. Prob’ly Remy’s on it.” Uncle Remy came out of the house at that moment, smiling, gray haired and slightly stooped. In photos of him as a young man in his uniform, Remy had a broad smile and kind brown eyes. He had been a gifted mechanic, could fix anything ever since he was a very young boy; everyone said so. But he’d returned from Vietnam with a head injury, and even though it seemed like he’d healed on the outside, inside he had changed. He’d moved in with Mammaw and never left. Mammaw always called him “slow.” She said it right in front of him, and Remy never seemed to take offense. It wasn’t until Claire had gone off to Chicago that she started to think there might be something wrong with saying things like that. Remy’s “slowness” had always seemed a fact of life, like being tall or having curly hair; she had never thought much about it as a girl. He was Chance’s best childhood friend—her only real friend. He was a hide-and-seek champion, and could even be talked into playing Barbies if she promised to play checkers in return. “Hey!” Remy called out, shuffling down the broken concrete path. “Come see! It’s my Chance! We missed you, Chance!” She jumped out of the truck and ran to give Remy a hug, holding on for a long time. He smelled slightly of mothballs and spices, an achingly familiar scent that spoke to her of home and gumbo and family. Sean was probably right; this whole idea was likely a mistake. But this—this moment—was worth the trip. “We’re gonna have to call someone ’bout that roof,” Uncle Remy fretted as soon as she pulled away. So much for the welcome home. Claire wasn’t surprised; Remy lived in the present. He started wringing his hands and shifting from one foot to the other. “Branch went clear through the tar paper, and what if it rains again?” “Don’t worry, Remy,” Claire said. “I’ll take care of it. Isn’t cousin Hog in construction?” “He’s on the shrimpers now,” Remy said, grabbing the duffel bag from the back of the truck. Ty brought the heavier suitcases in through the front door, bade them farewell, and hurried back to work. “They’re all on the shrimpers these days,” Remy continued. “Them that’s not on the rigs.” “I’ll call someone else, then. Don’t worry.” “Jessica’ll know what to do. She knows everything.” “Good idea. Let me say hello to Mammaw, and then we’ll figure it out. Okay?” “Okay.” He nodded and seemed to physically relax. “Glad you’re home, Chance. Sure enough glad you’re home.” As always when stepping through Mammaw’s yellow door, Claire was filled with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia mixed with a panicky urge to flee, to run back to her urban life of overpriced drinks and refined beauty and people who followed the international news. Mammaw had quit smoking a decade ago, but still the house smelled of stale cigarette smoke, old books, and Dr Pepper. An ancient window-mounted air-conditioning unit rattled and spewed out enough cool to take the edge off the heat, but nonetheless the small living room, crowded with furniture and bookshelves, was stuffy. Beyond the front room was the kitchen, and to one side were two bedrooms and a bath. That was it. After Chance had come to live here, she had slept on the couch or, sometimes, with Mammaw in her bed. “She’s awake and waitin’ on you,” said Remy. “She’s only speakin’ Cajun, so it’s good you come. You want a pop?” “No, thanks. I’m okay for now.” Claire was struck with a vivid memory of the first time she had walked into this house, age six, knowing she would be staying. That she wouldn’t have to go back to her father’s. That she was safe. Mammaw had been making salmon croquettes; she met Chance at the door while wiping her hands on a towel, then escorted her into the kitchen, lifted her onto the counter, and poured her a Dixie cup of sweet tea. She’d declared to Chance that, starting the next day, they would speak only Cajun in her home. “But . . . I don’t speak Cajun,” protested Chance, nervous at the thought. “You’ll learn, just like I learned English. When I was little we spoke Cajun at home, and when I went to school they wanted me to speak English, ’cept I didn’t speak no English. If the teachers heard me speakin’ my language they’d make me kneel on rice.” “Kneel on rice?” “Yup,” she said, her gnarled, capable hands mixing canned fish, chopped onions, bread crumbs, egg, and spices for salmon croquettes in a huge periwinkle blue ceramic bowl. Chance watched as the pink goo squeezed through her grandmother’s fingers like lumpy Play-Doh. “Go on now and wash your hands. He’p me make these patties.” “But . . . isn’t rice soft?” Chance had asked, jumping off the counter and pulling the stepstool to the old porcelain farmer’s sink, reaching up to turn on the ancient brass tap, wetting her hands. She picked up the huge bar of strong lye soap Mammaw bought down at the Piggly Wiggly and rubbed it between her hands while she sang the entire song of “Happy Birthday to You” in her mind, the way she’d been taught. Chance was always careful to do as she’d been taught. She rinsed her hands, then dried them on a faded towel, stiff from line-drying. It chafed, and the strong soap made her hands feel dry and raw. Clean, through and through. “I’m not talkin’ ’bout kneelin’ in no cooked rice like in jambalaya, sha,” Mammaw said with a laugh. “That’d be like a pillow. This was raw, hard grains. They dig into your skin, feel like they goin’ right up on under your kneecap. You try it, see how you like it.” “No, thank you, ma’am.” Mammaw laughed again and scooped out a ball of the salmon mixture, slapping it in the palm of her hands to form the croquette. “You a good girl, Chance. Yup, the good Lord’s got somethin’ special in mind for you, sha, mark my words. That’s how come he spared you, helped your mama to speak from beyond the veil.” Claire reached into the bowl, took a handful of the goo, and concentrated on forming it into a patty. She tried as hard as she could, but when she set it on the platter it looked like a raggedy-edged lump next to her grandmother’s smooth discs. Her eyes flew to Mammaw’s. “Now, you hadn’t ought to be so skeered all the time, sha,” Mammaw said, picking up the misshapen wad and smoothing the sides with a quick, practiced movement. “Everybody clumsy when they little. No shame in that. Takes time to learn to do things. Time and practice.” Chance tried harder with the second patty, her tongue planted firmly at the corner of her mouth. “’Sides,” Mammaw continued. “I don’t ’spect the Lord saved you to make you good at cookin’. There’s the rest of us for that. He had ’nother purpose for you. ’Nother purpose entirely.” “What is it?” “Don’t rightly know, sha. None my business, when it come right down to it. But it’s somethin’ special. Mark my words.” Claire stepped into Mammaw’s sky blue room. It was so small it barely fit the double bed with its chunky bedstead, World’s Best Mammaw in childish needlepoint covering one garishly colored pillow. And Mammaw. Jessica had warned Claire that Mammaw wasn’t eating much, but nonetheless it was a shock to see her so tiny, as though she were shrinking in on herself, would continue dissipating until she disappeared into her smooth white sheets. She always used to be stout, her chubby arms and generous bosom a welcome refuge for a scared little girl. Still, Mammaw’s light sherry brown eyes were sharp as always, her smile unwavering. “Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes, sha?” Claire perched on the edge of the bed and hugged her grandmother, afraid to squeeze too tight. She could feel Mammaw’s bones and the rapid thudding of her pulse through the thin pink cotton of her nightgown. Once, in the third grade, Claire found an injured bird on the way home from school. It felt like this in the palm of her hand: tiny, fragile, heart beating wildly. Remy had helped her build a little nest out of newspaper and leaves; they dug up some earthworms but the poor frightened creature ignored their offerings. It hadn’t lasted the day. They buried it in a shoe box behind the old Ford sitting, rusting and useless, next to the garage for as long as she could remember. Remy marked the spot with a crude wooden cross that still stood. Mammaw pulled away, and Claire felt the sting of tears in her eyes. “Don’t you dare be sad for me now, sha,” said Mammaw in Cajun, waving a finger. “I’m ’bout ready to go. All I need is two things: to finish up a few letters, and make the plans for my funeral. And I want to die here at home, ya hear? Don’t take me to no hospital. Promise me.” Claire nodded, unable to speak. Mammaw had never spent much time on sentiment. She took care of business; this was as much a part of her as her quick laugh, the way she ate with her mouth open and believed (and repeated and expounded upon) everything she read in the tabloid newspapers and—as she got older and had trouble moving around—how she would roll across the kitchen linoleum in an office chair, pushing herself off from the table to the counter and back again. “I got some specifications for my funeral,” Mammaw continued. “But first, go help Remy with that tree what fell on the roof so he’ll stop talkin’ about it. I swear that boy could worry the birds out the trees. Move any of my treasures that might be in the way up there, will you, sha?” “Of course I will,” Claire said. “I’ll get right on it. But can’t I get you something first, though? Something to eat, maybe?” “I’ve got a hankerin’ for some gumbo. Maybe you could get the fixin’s for it for tomorrow supper.” “I will. Nothing right now?” She shook her head. “I’m gonna take me a nap. You go on now.” Claire kissed her grandmother’s soft cheek—it smelled almondy, a mix of Jergens lotion and baby powder—and did as she was told. First she called a roofing company that agreed to come out the next day. Then she changed into old jeans and pulled on a T‑shirt. Claire met Remy in his bedroom and asked for his help. She stepped into his closet, shoved her way past the musty army uniforms and the dark blue suit Mammaw insisted he keep for weddings and funerals, and, using her fingertips, pushed gently on one of the panels at the back of the closet until it popped open, revealing a wooden ladder bolted to the rear wall. Claire wondered how she had managed to spend time up in this attic when she was young. It was sweltering. Sweat beaded on her forehead within minutes; it was so hot and close it was hard to breathe as she started moving boxes to the undamaged section of the attic. A few—the ones with correspondence and photographs—she handed down to Remy to stack in a corner of his bedroom. She worked as fast as she could, driven to escape the heat. But when Claire got to a crate shoved up under the eaves, she slowed her frenetic pace. “What’s this old wooden crate from Paris, Remy? Do you know?” she called down the ladder. His head popped up through the trapdoor. “I don’t rightly know. I don’t come up here much. You should ask Mammaw.” As soon as Claire approached the crate, the memories came flooding back. Read more

Vampire Knitting Club Boxed Set Books 7-9: Paranormal Cozy Mystery

Off the Wild Coast of Brittany

Review Praise for The Vineyards of Champagne "A beautifully captivating story of wartime tenacity and tenderness that celebrates the sweetest bonds of human relationships and the courage to love again after loss. So exquisitely rich in detail, you'll feel bubbles on your tongue." --Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Last Year of the War "Blackwell moves effortlessly between present-day France and the battlefields of WWI... The allure of the decades-old mystery of missing letters juxtaposed against the history of the caves of Champagne makes for a satisfying page-turner." -- Publishers Weekly "Blackwell's exquisite talent at interweaving the past with the present is on full display in her latest...telling the universal story of grief, loss, and human resilience." -- Booklist Praise for Juliet Blackwell "Plan your trip to Provence now. In this meticulously researched novel, Juliet Blackwell deftly navigates three time periods, taking us from contemporary California to both the Belle Époque and Nazi-occupied France, as she spins a story as charming as an antique carousel." --Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise "With crystalline imagery, vivid characters, and lively prose, Juliet Blackwell redefines what family means in a way that will touch readers long after they've read the last page....This novel should come with a warning: will cause enormous desire to travel to France." --Stephen P. Kiernan, author of The Baker's Secret "Blackwell seamlessly incorporates details about art, cast making, and the City of Light...[and] especially stuns in the aftermath of the main story by unleashing a twist that is both a complete surprise and a point that expertly ties everything together." -- Publishers Weekly "Bestselling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light." -- Booklist "A charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Light." --Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I'll See You in Paris --This text refers to the paperback edition. About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the New York Times bestselling author of Letters from Paris and The Paris Key . In addition to writing the beloved Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series, she also coauthored the Agatha Award-nominated Art Lover's Mystery series with her sister. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Natalie And we're off, to continue our adventure on the ële de Feme, renovating a historic guesthouse and opening a gourmet restaurant! Because when you grab life with both hands and hold on tight, you never know where it might lead: perhaps even to a rocky island off the Wild Coast of Brittany. Stay tuned. . . . This tale is not over. -last line of the international bestseller Pourquoi Pas? A Memoir of Life, Love, and Food by Natalie Morgen Things are not going according to plan. Natalie Morgen sat at a little metal cafŽ table on the stone terrace outside her guesthouse, watching the latest herd of tourists surge off the ferry. An aroma of anise rose from her glass, melding with the smoke from her cigarette and the scent of the sea: a mŽlange of dead things and salt, of the abundant seaweed and muck that marred the shallows during low tide. Island sounds wafted over on the ocean breezes: the histrionic seagulls squabbling over a bucket of scraps Lo•c had tossed out the back door of Pouce CafŽ, the rhythmic lapping of the waves in the snug harbor, the murmurs of visitors enjoying lunch at outdoor tables, the occasional clacking of a pŽtanque ball hitting its mark. Natalie imagined the newly arrived tourists mistook her for a native sipping her glass of pastis-though most of the actual natives preferred beer or hard cider-and enjoying a sunny day on the beautiful island. And sitting here like this, Natalie could almost convince herself that life was good. That everything was going according to her carefully thought-out plan. Lounging on the terrace of her ancient guesthouse, its rusted iron gates still secured with a heavy steel chain because the Bag-Noz was not yet open to guests even though accommodations were well-nigh impossible to come by on the ële de Feme during tourist season. Bobox strutted by, clucking in contentment. The fluffy white hen had come with the house and had made herself a little nest in the shed. Ridiculously long snowy white feathers on the top of her head quivered and swayed with every confident step, reminding Natalie of stylish Parisian ladies in photographs of yore, parading along the Champs-ƒlysŽes in their feathered chapeaux. Paris. What had Audrey Hepburn said? "Paris is always a good idea"? Maybe for Audrey-she was rich and beautiful. Absentmindedly scratching at a mosquito bite, Natalie realized she was clenching her jaw, willed herself to relax, took another sip of pastis, and turned her attention back to the ferry passengers. Trying to get their bearings, the newcomers weren't talking much as they staggered along the walkway that hugged the thick stone seawall. Some carried inflatables and beach toys; others clutched scraps of paper with instructions directing them to their rented guesthouses or to the Ar-Men, the only hotel on the island. It must have been a rough crossing: Most of the children and more than a few of the adults were decidedly green around the gills. A storm had thrashed the region yesterday, and though to the unpracticed eye the sea today appeared calm, Natalie had lived on the island long enough to have learned a few things from the locals, such as how to read the water. Or, at the very least, when to ask a local to read the water for her. Even after a storm appeared to have passed, waves lingered and surged. The swells rippled out and down, the awesome energy of the sea needing time to settle, to balance, to find its footing once again, lulling sailors and landlubbers alike into a false sense of security only to slam them with choppy water if they dared venture too soon onto open sea. Sounds like a metaphor for life. Natalie made a mental note to post this, or some poetic version of it, on her social media accounts. She should post some photos as well. It had been a while. Too long. She had a lot of followers to keep happy. Her readers loved the snapshots of Natalie's life on an island off Brittany's C™te Sauvage, or "Wild Coast," where she was renovating an ancient guesthouse with the proceeds from her bestselling memoir. In fact, some of the new arrivals lurching off the ferry might well be women of a certain age who had read Natalie's inspirational tome about finding love and self-fulfillment through the art of French cooking, and had decided to come to the ële de Feme in search of love and self-fulfillment themselves. But as Natalie had learned, in a most painful way, the ële de Feme was still an ”le-an island-which meant that if you didn't bring it with you, you weren't likely to find it here. How could she explain that her Prince Charming-le prince charmant-the man she had fallen head over heels for, the reason she had come to Brittany in the first place, had turned out to be a lying, cheating, spendthrift schmuck who left her high and dry in the middle of their guesthouse renovation? Even his name was annoying. Franois-Xavier. Being French, he insisted she say his entire name, every time: Fran-swah Ex-ah-vee-ay. A full six syllables. Six. She once made the mistake of addressing him simply as Franois and he accused her of calling him by another man's name. A classic case of psychological transference, she thought with grim humor, knowing what she now knew. Franois-Xavier claimed it was an American thing to give people nicknames. He was forever blaming her quirks on Natalie's being American, but in this case it might have been true. In college Natalie's roommate had introduced herself as Anastasia-a mere four syllables-and everyone on their hall immediately shortened it to Ana. Natalie had fought her entire childhood against being called Nat because it sounded like the bug, which her sister Alex insisted she was: Nat-the-Gnat, small and annoying, bouncing around ineffectually, her head in the clouds, endlessly searching for some unspecified thing. Natalie had tried to retaliate by calling Alex "Al," but in that irksome way of smug elder sisters, Alex had embraced the name, stomping around the family compound, singing at the top of her lungs, loudly and proudly, the old Paul Simon song "You Can Call Me Al." Which wasn't fair. Nobody wrote songs about gnats. Natalie never managed to outmaneuver her four older sisters, and Alex, the closest to her in age, had been by far the most difficult. Anyway. Franois-Xavier. She supposed two names suited a man with two faces. Still . . . that gorgeous face flashed in her mind: the sloping, intensely blue eyes; the sensual, full lips; the hint of dark golden whiskers glistening along his strong jaw. The way he looked at her as if she were not merely desirable but that he had waited a lifetime to meet her, that he was ready to share his life with her, wanted to create a family with her right here on his native island, where they would play pŽtanque in the sunshine, drink apŽro curled up in front of the hearth, and cook together, transforming classic ingredients into sumptuous dinners through the dedicated application of traditional French techniques. And then they would linger for hours over elaborate meals with friends and extended family and guesthouse visitors. That was the plan. At the moment her cupboard contained half a box of crackers, an open bag of dry-roasted peanuts, and a single fragrant cantaloupe well on its way to rotten. Natalie had forgotten to put an order in with the mainland store that shipped to the island, so today's ferry brought no bundle of supplies with her name on it. She supposed she could buy something from the island's small but well-stocked "general store" that primarily served the tourists, but if she did, then the shop's owner, Severine Menou, would know Natalie's business, which meant soon everyone on the island would know Natalie's business. Better to do what she usually did these days: eat the ample menu du jour at Milo's cafŽ, blaming it on her torn-up kitchen, and stick to peanuts and stale crackers-and plenty of pastis-the rest of the time. Franois-Xavier would be appalled. What was she going to do? Keep your head down and the pretense up. At least until she figured out her next steps. She had told everyone that Franois-Xavier was on a business trip to Paris, scouting for kitchen help for the gourmet restaurant they were supposed to be opening in the large dining room of the Bag-Noz Guesthouse. No one was surprised; he traveled to Paris frequently, after all. This time, though, Franois-Xavier had no intention of coming back. How long would it be until people started asking questions? Also, the construction workers hadn't shown up this week and Natalie was afraid to ask why. It might be because today was le quinze aožt, a national holiday. Or just because it was August, and a lot of French people took the entire month off for vacation. Or maybe the workers hadn't shown up because Natalie hadn't paid her latest round of bills. When he left, Franois-Xavier siphoned off the majority of their shared bank account, leaving her to get by on a few hundred euros and maxed-out credit cards until she received a check from her publisher for the book under contract, a follow-up to Pourquoi Pas? Her jaw tightened again. Her current work in progress was meant to be all about her perfect life with her perfect French chef fiancŽ, and to be accompanied by a liberal smattering of recipes and mouthwatering photos of the meals she and Franois-Xavier prepared-what her agent referred to as "French food porn." Natalie took a deep quaff of her pastis, let out a long sigh, and watched as Bobox scratched the ground in her incessant search for something appetizing in the sandy soil of the weed-strewn courtyard. Franois-Xavier was supposed to run the kitchen, and Natalie was supposed to run the guesthouse, and it was all supposed to be beautiful. But things had not gone according to plan. Chapter Two Alex Why in the world did Nat move to such a godforsaken island? The ële de Feme revealed itself coquettishly, first appearing through the ocean mist like a vague mirage, the kind that shimmered along the highways on the hottest days in the remote Northern California mountains where they had grown up. Alex squinted as she tried to make out the strip of low gray land. On the map the distance between the island and the mainland didn't look that great, but she and her fellow passengers had left the dock at Audierne more than an hour ago. The bobbing ferry had headed north at first, turning to the west only as they passed the Pointe du Raz, no doubt fighting the channel's famous currents and avoiding the perilous reefs that lurked just below the surface, a vast underwater maze protecting the island. According to the travel guide-Alex always did her homework before beginning something new-the jagged rocks had brought catastrophe to legions of sailors and ships over the years. There had been 127 documented shipwrecks in this strait, and that was only since they'd started keeping track, back in the seventeenth century. The danger of shipwreck explained the multitude of lighthouses on the islands and along the coastline of the channel. Perched on rocky outcroppings, the towers appeared lonely and stoic. And hauntingly beautiful. Alex had also read in the travel guide that the French had two words for lighthouses: A phare was a true lighthouse, usually home to a keeper in the days before the lights were automated, while a feu-which meant "fire"-was a smaller tower with a smaller light. The mile-and-a-half-long ële de Feme was equipped with one true lighthouse on its western tip, a large feu on the easternmost point, and two smaller feux dotting the southern coast. Clearly, this region was well acquainted with maritime disasters. Alex found that oddly comforting. She was a bit of a shipwreck herself, these days. Alex climbed the steep set of steps, clinging to the cold metal handrails as the boat pitched sharply. She would be windblown on the open upper deck, but breathing fresh air was preferable to being stuck in the crowded, too-warm cabin below. Upon boarding the ferry, Alex had needed to harness every bit of self-control not to climb onto one of the seats and order everyone to don one of the bright orange life vests stacked in a cupboard. Don't be weird, she reminded herself for the thousandth time. Act like the others. Besides, her very limited French didn't include the vocabulary for "Safety first, folks!" She had contented herself with grabbing a dozen seasickness bags from a little stand next to the first aid cabinet and making a mental note of the location of an inflatable life raft. Just in case. As soon as they left the shelter of the harbor, the sea had become choppy and the boat was tossed about like a child's toy, heaving this way and that, leaving its human inhabitants retching and grasping onto their molded plastic seats for dear life. Alex dug through her backpack for a package of wet wipes and handed them, along with a couple of the seasickness bags, to a young father whose little girl had lost her lunch all over the front of his sweater vest and jacket. She wasn't feeling all that chipper herself, but keeping busy helped. It always had. Father and child taken care of for the moment, Alex made her way to a seat and kept her eyes on the horizon, gazing at a fixed point to quell the nausea. But seriously. Setting aside the "why" for the moment, how had Nat even found this place? Her little sister was forever bragging on social media, posting photos of herself dancing in the clubs of Budapest or shopping the open-air markets of Marrakech as she traipsed around the world "looking for herself." On her blog she posted rambling descriptions of how she spent her days learning classic French cooking, and her nights hobnobbing with chic Parisians in cinematic wine cellars and cabarets. And if all that weren't galling enough, irresponsible, carefree Nat had hit the jackpot when her memoir of finding herself and food-and love-became an international sensation, lingering at the top of the bestseller list week after exasperating week. Even the title annoyed Alex. Pourquoi Pas? Seriously? There were always plenty of reasons why not. But readers hadn't agreed. Which just went to show you that people today were pathetic, casting about for direction in their sad little lives. Was she now doing the very same thing? Alex's stomach heaved at that thought more than the seasickness. An island off the coast of Brittany had sounded so fantastical somehow when the thought first occurred to her back in dusty Albuquerque. It had seemed as if destiny had intervened. Anyway, she didn't need forever. Just a little while, time to regroup, to make a plan. A respite from the convoluted joke that her life had become. --This text refers to the paperback edition. Read more

Darkest Journey (Krewe of Hunters, 20)

Review "With an astonishing ease and facility, this talented writer can cast her stories in any genre." -Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels"Graham is a master at world building and her latest is a thrilling, dark, and deadly tale of romantic suspense." -Booklist, starred review, on Haunted Destiny"Intricate, fast-paced, and intense, this riveting thriller blends romance and suspense in perfect combination and keeps readers guessing and the tension taut until the very end." -Library Journal, starred review, on Flawless"A masterfully created psychological thriller...leaving readers shocked and enthralled." -RT Book Reviews on The Hexed"Dark, dangerous and deadly! Graham has the uncanny ability to bring her books to life, using exceptionally vivid details to add depth to all the people and places."-RT Book Reviews on Waking the Dead, Top Pick"Murder, intrigue...a fast-paced read. You may never know in advance what harrowing situations Graham will place her characters in, but...rest assured that the end result will be satisfying."-Suspense Magazine on Let the Dead Sleep"Graham deftly weaves elements of mystery, the paranormal and romance into a tight plot that will keep the reader guessing at the true nature of the killer's evil."-Publishers Weekly on The Unseen"Suspenseful and dark.... The transitions between past and present flow seamlessly, and the main characters are interesting and their connection to one another is believable."-RT Book Reviews on The Unseen About the Author New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Heather Graham has written more than a hundred novels. She's a winner of the RWA's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Thriller Writers' Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. For more information, check out her websites: TheOriginalHeatherGraham.com, eHeatherGraham.com, and HeatherGraham.tv. You can also find Heather on Facebook.

And Then There Were Nuns (League of Literary Ladies)

Review Praise for the National Bestselling League of Literary Ladies Mysteries “Logan has fun with this unusual story, intimate setting, and feisty characters, and readers will, too.”— Richmond Times-Dispatch “This highly addictive series continues with a clever storyline, quirky characters and an ideal island location. As the mystery evolves and the main character realizes the parallels to Agatha Christie’s famous novel, the suspense intensifies, and the twists and turns keep on coming.”— RT Book Reviews “What could be more fun that a mystery series that is about a reluctant book club? I love how the mysteries run parallel to the book the League of Literary Ladies are reading.”—MyShelf.com“One of my favorite cozy mystery writers...What great characters Kylie Logan has created.”—Fresh Fiction About the Author Kylie Logan is the national bestselling author of The League of Literary Ladies Mysteries, the Button Box Mysteries, the Chili Cook-Off Mysteries, and the Ethnic Eats Mysteries.

The Vineyards of Champagne

Review “A beautifully captivating story of wartime tenacity and tenderness that celebrates the sweetest bonds of human relationships and the courage to love again after loss. So exquisitely rich in detail, you’ll feel bubbles on your tongue.”—Susan Meissner, bestselling author of The Last Year of the War “Blackwell moves effortlessly between present-day France and the battlefields of WWI… The allure of the decades-old mystery of missing letters juxtaposed against the history of the caves of Champagne makes for a satisfying page-turner.”— Publishers Weekly “Blackwell’s exquisite talent at interweaving the past with the present is on full display in her latest…telling the universal story of grief, loss, and human resilience.”— Booklist Praise for The Lost Carousel of Provence "Blackwell uses an outsider’s passion to shine a light into the dark past of a broken family and how a sweet, wooden rabbit can bring them together again."—The Associated Press “Plan your trip to Provence now. In this meticulously researched novel, Juliet Blackwell deftly navigates three time periods, taking us from contemporary California to both The Belle Époque and Nazi-occupied France as she spins a story as charming as an antique carousel.”—Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise “An untrusting American orphan meets a dysfunctional French family—and each turns out to possess wisdom that helps the other to heal from old, old wounds. With crystalline imagery, vivid characters and lively prose, Juliet Blackwell redefines what family means, in a way that will touch readers long after they've read the last page. As Cady points her camera at one antique carousel after another, this novel should come with a warning: Will cause enormous desire to travel to France.”—Stephen P. Kiernan, author of The Baker’s Secret “Narrating from several perspectives, Blackwell weaves together a tale of love lost, repressed passion, and finding a sense of belonging that should utterly charm and delight readers new to her and current fans alike.”— Booklist Praise for Letters from Paris “Blackwell seamlessly incorporates details about art, cast making, and the City of Light...[and] especially stuns in the aftermath of the main story by unleashing a twist that is both a complete surprise and a point that expertly ties everything together.”— Publishers Weekly “Best-selling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light....this romantic and picturesque novel shows us that even the most broken people can find what makes them whole again.”— Booklist “Blackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh...A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.”— Kirkus Reviews “A great tale of mystery, artistry, history, and a little romance. With plenty of backstory and tidbits about Parisian life in the 19th century, there's something for everyone in this recommended read."— Library Journal Praise for The Paris Key “A charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Lights.”—Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I'll See You in Paris “[A] witty, warm, winsome novel...[Blackwell's] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail.”—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Carousel of Provence, Letters from Paris and The Paris Key . In addition to writing the beloved Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series, she also coauthored the Agatha Award-nominated Art Lover's Mystery series with her sister. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One Rosalyn Napa, California Present day There's one major problem with your little plan," said Rosalyn, patting the dossier Hugh had dropped on the desk in front of her. According to the itinerary, she was booked on an AirFrance flight to Paris departing from San Francisco the day after Christmas. She was to stay a couple of nights in Paris, then pick up a rental car that had been reserved in her name and head for Champagne, less than a two-hour drive northeast."What problem? I booked it myself." Hugh nodded and gave her an exaggerated wink. "First class-that's the ticket. Get it? The ticket?""But I don't like France. Or the French. Or champagne, for that matter.""Are you saying you dislike la Champagne, as in the region of France," asked Hugh, "or le champagne, the bubbly nectar that is celebrated the world over?""Both, as you very well know. Not a fan."Hugh's only reaction to her ill humor was a broad smile. Rosalyn's boss was a bear of a man who dwarfed the cramped winery/import office located in the lovingly renovated garage of his sprawling Napa Valley vineyard home. Standing several inches taller than six feet, the ironically named Hugh Small had the well-padded physique of a man who entertained frequently and enjoyed his own excellent cooking - and wine - a tad too much. His graying brown hair was wild and scruffy, and his clothes so sloppy that, if he hadn't been so well-known in the valley, the locals might have assumed he was one of the wanderers who camped among the vines, cruising the highways of Napa and Sonoma for dregs in bottles left on picnic tables by well-to-do tourists on wine-tasting jaunts.Ten years earlier, Hugh had fulfilled a lifelong fantasy by purchasing a vineyard in Napa. He quickly realized just how hard it was to get established in the wine-producing business, and branched out into importing and selling select vintages from France and Spain through his company, Small Fortune Wines.Hugh's favorite joke: "How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? Start out with a large fortune."Today Hugh's light blue pullover sweater sported a moth-eaten hole over his heart. Rosalyn stared at it, pondering its significance. Hugh had more than enough heart for the both of them."Honestly, Hugh," Rosalyn persisted, trying to keep a lid on the vague panic simmering somewhere deep within her, "I know most people would jump at the chance to go to Champagne, all expenses paid, but I really don't enjoy traveling. You're sure you need me to do this?"He nodded. "Andy's still at the hospital with his wife and their preemie; he couldn't possibly leave now.""Couldn't you go? I could stay here and run the office.""I need a wine rep in France," he said. "And you're a wine rep.""Just barely.""And you speak French.""Just barely.""And you've got a palate. Better than mine. Besides," said Hugh as he sorted through a stack of mail, tossing several envelopes into the recycling bin, "it's downright embarrassing that you've never been to France. What self-respecting wine rep has never been to France?""I have been to France.""Once. And if I'm not mistaken you went to Paris, which is no more representative of France than New York City is of the United States. And admit it: You enjoyed your time there."Snowflakes glittering on their scarves as they stood under the lamppost at the corner of Rue des Abbesses and Rue Lepic. Tipsy on wine and after-dinner cognac. Giggling as they watched a man slip silently down the snow-covered cobblestone streets of Montmartre, their breath coming out in wispy clouds, mingling in the frigid air."It's our laughter," says Rosalyn, lifting her mittened hand as if to capture the mist. "Come back!"Dash grabs her hand, warming it with both of his, kissing it. "Plenty more where that came from, Rosie. A lifetime of laughter for my beautiful bride. I promise."Dash had lied."Of course I enjoyed it," Rosalyn said when she realized Hugh was still watching her, awaiting an answer. "It was my honeymoon. That was different.""Dash went to France many times," Hugh pointed out. "He loved it there."Rosalyn felt the usual sharp stab in her gut at the sound of her husband's name. Still, she appreciated that Hugh never hesitated to speak it aloud. It muted the pain, ever so slightly, each time someone talked about Dash as though things were normal; as if invoking his spirit, inviting his presence into this world. Most people tried to avoid any reference to him, or acted chagrined, as though they'd done something awkward and embarrassing by bringing him up."I like it right here," insisted Rosalyn, gazing out the window at the twisty grapevines that marched along the rolling hills, their undulating lines interrupted only by an occasional oak tree. The sight of the parallel rows was soothing, as if a Zen master had pulled a giant rake through sand. "I defy anyone to come up with a more beautiful place than Napa.""There's nothing wrong with seeking a refuge for a while, Rosalyn," said Hugh, his voice dropping, its gentle sincerity grating on her nerves. "But it isn't a life plan. If you decide to settle in Napa, it should be just that: a decision. Not an attempt to hide from life."Rosalyn's eyes stung; nausea surged at the base of her throat. One hand fiddled with the silver locket that hung around her neck while the other reached for the travel dossier as she pretended to study the itinerary, hoping to distract herself, to stem the tears, to quell the incipient panic.Breathe, she reminded herself. Ten slow, deep breaths . . . "As you can see," said Hugh, his voice regaining its cheery tone as he pointed to a few items highlighted in bold script on the agenda, "you'll be representing Small Fortune Wines in Champagne for the festival of Saint Vincent, patron saint of vintners, which is held on the twenty-second of January. Until then, you'll meet with vintners, make nice, tour the caves-""Like I need to see any more wine caves in my life.""You do need to see more wine caves in your life, Rosalyn," Hugh insisted. "The champagne caves are unlike any you've seen before; there are two hundred kilometers worth of crayères under Reims alone. An entire city, underground. Do you know the French moved whole schools and businesses down into the caves during the First World War?""Fascinating," Rosalyn said. "But is that why you want me to go? To attend a wine festival and tour some caves? That doesn't sound terribly cost-effective to me.""No, no, no, you're also going to sign some new, smaller producers. It's the foundation of my vision.""Your . . . what, now?"Hugh returned her smile. "My vision to get people to stop thinking of champagne as a luxury, get them to drink a glass with appetizers as they do in France. Americans equate champagne with the big, expensive houses, Mumm and Taittinger. I want you to find and sign a few of the small champagne houses, the ones that don't charge a fortune for their wine. Step one is reconfirming our commitment with Gaspard Blé - you'll be staying at his vineyard. I've known Blé for years, but I heard through the grapevine - get it? - that Bottle Rocket's sending someone to the festival. I wouldn't want to lose Blé to the competition."Bottle Rocket was the Big Bad Wolf, Hugh's biggest competitor for the products of family-run French wineries.Rosalyn nodded. Of course she would go to represent Small Fortune Wines in Champagne. She couldn't refuse Hugh anything; she owed him too much. Besides . . . maybe he was onto something. Maybe a change of pace was what she needed to pull out of the tailspin. Nothing else seemed to be working."So, how's Andy doing? And his wife?" Rosalyn belatedly thought to ask. "Is the baby out of the NICU yet?""Baby and mamma are doing just fine," said Hugh. "I brought them a gift basket yesterday, signed the card from all of us.""That was nice of you." Rosalyn cringed inwardly. She used to be the one who bought the gifts, sent the cards, visited friends in the hospital. The Rosalyn-That-Was thought of other people, organized impromptu parties, never forgot a friend's birthday. Another unexpected indignity of grief: It had rendered her self-absorbed."It was no problem - any excuse to buy baby things," said Hugh. "Those little outfits are so tiny; hard to believe a human can come in a package that small, isn't it? Did you know they arrive in this world complete with teensy fingernails?"Rosalyn smiled at the note of wonder in his voice. "I've heard that.""Anyway, Andy's not happy that he's missing out on this trip - that's for sure.""I'll bet. I'll give him a call and check in before I leave."Hugh tilted his head and fixed Rosalyn with a look. "Make the most of this, Rosie. Seriously. Sometimes a trip can shake off the cobwebs, open your eyes to new possibilities.""I just got back from Paso Robles, remember?""Paso has its charm, but it's not exactly the French countryside.""And yet Paso Robles has 7-Elevens, which, contrary to their name, are open twenty-four hours. That's a true gift to humankind, if you ask me.""Champagne's the ticket, Rosie. Dash loved it there; I have a feeling you will, too." Read more

Relatively Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 1)

Review "This book kept me hooked until the very end, and even then I wanted more of it. The storyline . . . is original and fun." ---Simply Bookish --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Sheila Connolly is the New York Times bestselling, Anthony and Agatha Award-nominated author of the Orchard Mysteries, the Museum Mysteries, and the County Cork Mysteries, in addition to several stand-alone titles. She is married and has one daughter and three cats. Visit her online at sheilaconnolly.com.Emily Durante has been narrating audiobooks for over ten years and is also an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook director. She has been acting since the age of seven and has performed in a number of stage productions at the professional, collegiate, and regional levels. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

THE MANOR HOUSE MURDER an addictive crime mystery full of twists (Monica Noble Detective Book 3)

Gone With the Witch (Wishcraft Mystery)

Review Praise for the Wishcraft Mysteries “A charming story.”—Denise Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of the Scumble River Mysteries “Successfully blends crime, magic, romance, and self-discovery.”— Publishers Weekly “[Blake] keeps the suspense high, your interest piqued, and your brain churning.”—Crimespree Magazine “Certainly spellbinding.”—Fresh Fiction “Full of charm, magic, and delightfully humorous and entertaining characters.”—Kings River Life Magazine About the Author Heather Blake is the national bestselling author of the Wishcraft mysteries as well as the Magic Potion mysteries. She’s a total homebody who loves to be close to her family, read, watch cooking-competition TV shows, drink too much coffee, crochet, and bake cookies. Heather grew up in a suburb of Boston but currently lives in the Cincinnati area with her family.

A Morbid Taste for Bones (The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael)

Review “Irresistible and makes for compelling reading throughout. It is a delightful, pleasantly romantic medieval whodunit with a vein of humor underlying its quiet drama.” — The Washington Post Praise for the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael “A pleasing, and unusual, mixture of suspense and historical fiction.” — London Evening Standard “Cadfael must surely become a cult figure of crime fiction.” — Financial Times “You’ll love Brother Cadfael, wily veteran of the Crusades. . . . This was England before the age of tea and crumpets.” — Los Angeles Times About the Author Ellis Peters is a pseudonym of Edith Mary Pargeter (1913–1995), a British author whose Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are credited with popularizing the historical mystery. Cadfael, a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey in the first half of the twelfth century, has been described as combining the curious mind of a scientist with the bravery of a knight-errant. The character has been adapted for television, and the books drew international attention to Shrewsbury and its history. Pargeter won an Edgar Award in 1963 for Death and the Joyful Woman , and in 1993 she won the Cartier Diamond Dagger, an annual award given by the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She was appointed officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1994, and in 1999 the British Crime Writers’ Association established the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger award, later called the Ellis Peters Historical Award.

The Unforgiven (Krewe of Hunters Book 33)

About the Author Heather Graham , also known as Shannon Drake, is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than two hundred novels and novellas. She is a recipient of the Romance Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Thriller Writers' Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. Roger Wayne served in the Air Force as a radio and television broadcast journalist in South Korea and won several awards before obtaining a BA degree in communications and journalism. He is an actor living in New York, narrating audiobooks, working on independent film projects, performing off Broadway, and auditioning for major network shows. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

The New Witch

Review “ The New Witch" grabs you and lets you be that fly on the wall as the abused wife meticulously plots her escape and covers her trail on her way to her new hideout in New Orleans. Gibson is a master of engagement of the reader and will not turn you loose until she takes you on a ride. She is wonderful story teller who will throw you in the current of her words and wash you down- stream to the end of the book.”— Chap Harper, author of Beer, Bait, and Ammo . “In The New Witch Nancy Smith Gibson stirs up a variety of fascinating characters to make the perfect blend of magic, romance and New Orleans soul.”— Carole Katchen, Artist and author of The Menopause Murders and I Was a Lonely Teenager. “The New Witch by Nancy Gibson begins with an affluent lady with a plan — a plan to dump an abusive husband and leave him in the dust. Next, she introduces other characters; to me reminiscent of Carl Hiaasen’s Stormy Weather — where he presents several seemingly unrelated threads and in the end skillfully ties them together in the plot tapestry. Get a good grip and hang on for the twists and turns Gibson provides.” — John Achor, author of Casey Fremont mysteries and Alex Hilliard thrillers . “Nancy Gibson Smith has conjured up yet another great book in The New Witch . It is full of mystic, magic and love. The Good Witch is alive with the taste of New Orleans, flavored with a dash of mystic, a pinch of magic and stirred together with love.”— Sherri McDuffie, author of An Unexpected Rescue. “A masterfully woven tale, full of rich characters and language. The New Witch weaves together the everyday lives of its characters into this fascinating story. A great and fun read!”— John E Seymore, filmmaker. Seymore Films. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

She Believed She Could, So She Did Insight Cards (Deck of 50 Empowering Inspirational Cards)

Of Blood and Bone: Chronicles of The One, Book 2 (Chronicles of The One, 2)

Review "Roberts continues her apocalyptic Chronicles of The One with a mesmerizing follow-up that is bold and breathtaking...meeting the next generation and watching the heroine grow into her powers and leadership is enthralling." -- Kirkus "[Of Blood and Bone] can be read on its own and will appeal to fans of fast-paced dystopian tales with a strong heroine." -- Publishers Weekly "Roberts narrates the tale with such passion, that you visualize every sentence you read. With the ability to transcend time and space, and with shadowy figures who may represent good or evil, it makes Of Blood and Bone the perfect book to advance this trilogy." - Shelf Life About the Author NORA ROBERTS is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 230 novels, including Legacy, The Awakening, Hideaway, Under Currents, The Chronicles of The One trilogy, and many more. She is also the author of the bestselling In Death series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Of Blood and Bone By Nora Roberts St. Martin's Press Copyright © 2018 Nora RobertsAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-12299-5 Contents Title Page, Copyright Notice, Dedication, The Choice, Prologue, Becoming, Visions, The Sword And The Shield, Journeys, Epilogue, Titles by Nora Roberts, About the Author, Copyright, CHAPTER 1 On the farm where she'd been born, Fallon Swift learned how to plant and grow and harvest, to respect and use the land. She learned how to move through fields and forests, silent as a shadow, to hunt and fish. To respect the game, and take no more than needed, to take none at all for sport. She learned to prepare food grown or taken from the land in her mother's kitchen or over a campfire. She learned food was more than eggs fresh from the henhouse or a well-grilled trout. Food meant survival. She learned to sew — though she disliked the time spent sitting still plying a needle. She learned how to tan leather, far from her favorite lesson, and could, if given no choice, spin yarn. Clothes, she learned, weren't simply something to wear. They protected the body, like a weapon. She respected weapons, and had learned from a young age how to clean a gun, sharpen a knife, string a bow. She learned how to build, with hammer and saw, to keep the fences in repair, to make repairs on the old farmhouse she loved as much as the woods. A strong fence, a sound wall, a roof that held back the rain offered more than a happy home. They, too, meant survival. And, though she often simply knew, she learned magicks. How to light the flame with a breath, how to cast a circle, how to heal a small wound with the light inside her, how to look, and how to see. She learned, though she often simply knew, magick was more than a gift to be treasured, a craft to be honed, a weapon to be used with great care. It was, and would be, survival. Even with food, with shelter, with clothing and weapons, even with magicks, not all had survived. Not all would in the times to come. She learned of a world that had existed before her birth. A world crowded with people, a world of huge cities with towering buildings where people had lived and worked. In that world people had traveled routinely by air and sea and road and track. Some had even traveled into space, and to the moon that hung in the sky. Her mother had lived in a great city, in the City of New York. Fallon knew from the stories told, from the books she devoured, it had been a place full of people and noise and light and dark. A wonder of a place to her, one she vowed to see someday. She imagined it often at night when she lay awake watching the faeries dance outside her window. There had been war in that world, and bigotry and cruelty, just as there was now. She knew of the wars that had been from the books, from the stories. And she knew of the wars that were still raging from visitors who stopped at the farm. Her father had been a soldier once. He had taught her to fight — with her hands, her feet, her mind. She learned how to read maps and how to make them, and imagined following them one day on the journeys she knew, had always known, she would take. She had no attachment, as her parents did, to the world that had been before the Doom had killed so many. Billions, it was said. Many remembered when those great cities fell to the burning, the mad things, the dark magicks. The cruelty and greed of men still swam in the minds and the blood of those who'd lived through it. When she caught glimpses of tomorrows, she knew there would be more burning, more blood, more death. And she would be part of it. So she often lay awake at night, cuddling her teddy bear, a gift from a man she'd yet to meet. If those tomorrows weighed too heavy, she sometimes slipped out of the house while her parents and siblings slept, to sit outside while the little faeries flickered like fireflies. Where she could smell the earth, the crops, the animals. Most often she slept the quiet and innocent sleep of a child with loving parents and three annoying little brothers, a healthy child with a questing mind and an active body. Sometimes she dreamed of her sire, the man her mother had lived with in New York, the man she'd loved. The man, Fallon knew, who had died so she would live. He'd been a writer, a leader, a great hero. She bore his name, just as she bore the name of the man who brought her into the world, who raised her, who taught her. Fallon for Max Fallon, her sire. Swift for Simon Swift, her father. Two names, Fallon thought, equally important. Just as her mother wore two rings, one from each man she'd loved. And though she loved her father as deeply and truly as any child could love, she wondered about the man who'd given her the color of her eyes and hair who, along with her mother, had passed powers to her with their mating. She read his books — all books were gifts — and studied the photo of him on the back of them. Once, when she was only six, she'd curled up in the library with one of Max Fallon's books. Though she couldn't understand all the words, she liked that it was about a wizard, one who used magicks and brains to fight against evil forces. When her father came in, a stab of guilt had her trying to hide the book. Her dad had no magicks, but he had a lot of brains. He'd plucked her and the book up, then sat to hold her on his lap. She loved how he smelled of the farm — the earth, the animals, the growing things. Sometimes she wished she had eyes like his that changed from sort of green to sort of gold or just mixed those colors together. When she wished it, she felt guilty about Max. "It's a good book." "You read it?" "Yeah. My mom really liked to read. It's why she and my dad made this room for books. You don't have to hide anything from me, baby. Not anything." "Because you're my daddy." She turned into him, pressed her face to his heart. Beat, beat, beat. "You're my daddy." "I'm your daddy. But I wouldn't have gotten the chance to be if it wasn't for Max Fallon." He turned the book over so they could both look at the picture of the dark, handsome man with strong gray eyes. "I wouldn't have my most beautiful girl if he hadn't loved your mom, and she hadn't loved him. If they hadn't made you. If he hadn't loved her and you enough, been brave enough, to give his life to protect you. I'm real grateful to him, Fallon. I owe him everything." "Mama loves you, Daddy." "Yeah, she does. I'm a lucky guy. She loves me, and she loves you, and Colin and Travis." "And the new baby that's coming." "Yeah." "It's not a girl." This on a huge, sorrowful sigh. "Is that so?" "She has a boy in her, again. Why can't she make a sister for me? Why does she always make brothers?" She heard the laugh in his chest as he cuddled her. "Actually, that's supposed to be my job. I guess it's the way it goes." He stroked her long black hair as he spoke. "And I guess that means you'll just have to go on being my favorite girl. Have you told your mom it's a boy?" "She doesn't want to know which kind. She likes the wondering." "Then I won't tell her, either." Simon kissed the top of her head. "Our secret." "Daddy?" "Hmm?" "I can't read all the words. Some are too hard." "Well, why don't I read the first chapter to you before we go back to chores?" He shifted her so she could curl up, then opened the book, turned to page one, and began. She hadn't known The Wizard King had been Max Fallon's first novel — or perhaps some part of her had. But she would remember, forever, that her father had read it to her, chapter by chapter, every night before bed. * * * So she learned. She learned about goodness from her father, generosity from her mother. She learned about love and light and respect from the home and family and life given to her. She learned of war and hardship and grief from travelers, many wounded, who came to the farm or to the village nearby. She had lessons on politics, and found them annoying, as people talked too much, did too little. And what good were politics when reports claimed the government — such a vague word to her — had begun to rebuild in the third year after the Doom, only to fall again before the end of Year Five? Now, in the twelfth year, the capital of the United States — which didn't seem united to Fallon, then or now — remained a war zone. Factions of the Raiders, groups of the Dark Uncanny, and those faithful to the cult of the Purity Warriors battled for power, for land, for the smell of blood. Against each other, it seemed, and against those who sought to rule or govern. Even though Fallon wanted peace, wanted to build, to grow, she understood the need, the duty to fight to protect and defend. More than once she'd seen her father arm himself and leave the farm to help protect a neighbor, to help defend the village. More than once she'd seen his eyes when he'd come home again, and had known there'd been blood, there'd been death. She'd been raised to fight, to defend, as had her brothers. Even as the farm basked in summer, as the crops ripened and fruit hung heavy, as the woods ran thick with game, bitter battles raged beyond the fields and hills of home. And her time, her childhood, she knew, was counting down like the ticks of a clock. She was The One. On days when her brothers deviled her — why had she been plagued with brothers? — when her mother understood nothing and her father expected too darn much, she wanted that countdown to hurry. Other times she raged. Why should she have no choice? No choice? She wanted to hunt and fish, to ride her horse, to run in the woods with her dogs. Even with her brothers. And often she grieved for what something beyond her, something beyond her parents, demanded she become. Grieved at the thought of leaving her family, her home. She grew tall and strong, and the light within her burned bright. The thought of her thirteenth birthday filled her with dread. She stewed about it — about all that was unfair in her world, all that was unfair in the world outside — as she helped her mother prepare the evening meal. "We're going to get a storm tonight, I can feel it." Lana pushed at the butterscotch-blond hair she'd bundled on top of her head before cooking. "But it's a perfect evening for eating outside. Go ahead and drain those potatoes I've got parboiling." Fallon sulked over to the stove. "Why do you always have to do the cooking?" Lana gently shook a covered bowl. Inside slices of peppers fresh from the garden marinated. "Your dad's grilling tonight," she reminded Fallon. "You made everything first." With that stuck in her craw, Fallon dumped chunks of potatoes into the colander in the sink. "Why doesn't Dad or Colin or Travis make it all?" "They help, just like you. Ethan, too — he's learning. But to answer the point of your question: I like to cook. I enjoy making food, especially for my family." "What if I don't?" Fallon whirled around, a tall, long-limbed girl currently all stormy-gray eyes and defiant scowl. "What if I just don't want to cook? Why do I have to do things I don't want to do?" "Because we all do. Lucky for you, on next week's rotation you move from under chef to cleanup. I need you to season those potatoes for the grill basket. I already chopped the herbs." "Fine, great." She knew the drill. Olive oil, herbs, salt, pepper. Just as she knew they had the oil and spices because her mother and a witch from a neighboring farm had culled out three acres, and had cast a spell to turn it into the tropics. They'd planted olive trees, Piper nigrum for pepper, coffee beans, banana trees. Figs, dates. Her dad had worked with others to construct olive presses for the oils, dryers for the fruits. Everyone worked together, everyone benefited. She knew that. And still. "Why don't you go ahead and take those out, tell your dad to start the chicken?" Leading with her foul mood, Fallon stomped out of the house. Lana watched her daughter, her own summer-blue eyes clouding. She thought: More than one storm's coming. They ate at the big outdoor table her father had built, using colorful plates, with bright blue napkins and wildflowers in little pots. Her mother believed in setting a pretty table. She let Ethan light the candles with his breath because it always made him laugh. Fallon plopped down beside Ethan. She didn't consider him as much a pain in her butt as Colin or Travis. Then again, he was only six. He'd get there. Simon, his mop of brown hair streaked from the sun, took his seat, smiled at Lana. "It looks great, babe." Lana lifted her wine, made from their own grapes. "Credit to the grill master. We're grateful," she added, with a glance at her daughter, "for the food grown and made by our own hands. We hope for the day when no one goes hungry." "I'm hungry now!" Colin announced. "Then be grateful there's food on the table." Lana set a drumstick — his favorite — on his plate. "I helped Dad with the grill," he claimed as he added potatoes, vegetables, an ear of just-shucked corn to his plate. "So I shouldn't have to do the dishes." "That's not going to fly, son." Simon filled Travis's plate as Lana did Ethan's. Colin waved his drumstick in the air before biting in. He had his father's eyes, that hazel that blurred gold and green, hair a few shades darker than his mother's going bright from the summer sun. As usual, it stood up in tufts that refused taming. "I picked the corn." Travis, already eating steadily, elbowed Colin. "We picked it." "Irrelement." " Vant, " Simon corrected. " Irrelevant — and it's not." "I picked most of the corn. It should count." "Instead of worrying about the dishes — which you will do — maybe you should eat the corn," Lana suggested as she helped Ethan butter his ear. "In a free society, everybody has a vote." "Too bad you don't live in one." Simon gave Colin a poke in the ribs that had Colin flashing a toothy grin. "The corn is good!" Ethan, though he'd lost a couple of baby teeth, bit his way enthusiastically down the ear. He had his mother's blue eyes, her pretty blond hair, and the sunniest of dispositions. "Maybe I'll run for president." Colin, never one to be deterred, pushed forward. "I'll be president of the Swift Family Farm and Cooperative. Then the village. I'll name it Colinville and never wash dishes again." "Nobody'd vote for you." Travis, nearly close enough in looks to be Colin's twin, snickered. "I'll vote for you, Colin!" "What if I ran for president, too?" Travis asked Ethan. "I'd vote for both of you. And Fallon." "Leave me out of it," Fallon rebuked, poking at the food on her plate. "You can only vote for one person," Travis pointed out. "Why?" "Because." "'Because' is dumb." "This whole conversation is dumb." Fallon flicked a hand in the air. "You can't be president because, even if there were any real structure of government, you're not old enough or smart enough." "I'm as smart as you," Colin tossed back, "and I'll get older. I can be president if I want. I can be anything I want." "In your dreams," Travis added with a smirk. It earned him a kick under the table, which he returned. "A president is a leader, and a leader leads." When Fallon surged to her feet, Simon started to speak, to shut things down, but caught Lana's eye. "You don't know anything about being a leader." "You don't know anything about anything," Colin shot back. "I know a leader doesn't go around naming places after himself. I know a leader has to be responsible for people, make sure they have food and shelter, has to decide who goes to war, who lives and dies. I know a leader has to fight, maybe even kill." As she raged, shimmers of light sparked around her in angry red. "A leader's who everybody looks to for answers, even when there aren't any. Who everyone blames when things go wrong. A leader's the one who has to do the dirty work, even if it's the damn dishes." She stalked away, trailing that angry light into the house. Slamming the door behind her. "Why does she get to act like a brat?" Colin demanded. "Why does she get to be mean?" Ethan, tears swirling in his eyes, turned to his mother. "Is Fallon mad at us?" "No, baby, she's just mad. We're going to give her a little time alone, okay?" She looked over at Simon. "She just needs some space. She'll apologize, Colin." He only shrugged. "I can be president if I want. She's not the boss of the world." Lana's heart tore a little. "Did I mention I made peach pie for dessert?" Pie, she knew, was a no-fail way to turn her boys' moods around. "That is, for anyone who clears his plate." "I know a good way to work off that pie." In tune with Lana, Simon went back to his meal. "A little basketball." Since he'd created a half court on the side of the barn, basketball had become one of his boys' favorite pastimes. "I wanna be on your team, Daddy!" Simon grinned at Ethan, gave him a wink. "We'll wipe the court with them, champ." "No way." Colin dived back into the meal. "Travis and I will crush." Travis looked at his mother, held her gaze a long moment. He knows, Lana thought. And so did Colin, even if anger and insult blocked it away. Their sister wasn't the boss of the world, but she carried the weight of it on her shoulders. * * * Fallon's temper burned out in a spate of self-pity tears. She flung herself on her bed to shed them — the bed her father had built to replicate one she'd seen in an old magazine. Eventually the tears died away into headachy sulks. It wasn't fair, nothing was fair. And Colin started it. He always started something with his big, stupid ideas. Probably because he didn't have any magicks. Probably because he was jealous. (Continues...) Excerpted from Of Blood and Bone by Nora Roberts . Copyright © 2018 Nora Roberts. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

Harry Potter: The Dark Arts (Tiny Book)

About the Author Celebrated for its unwavering dedication to quality, Insight Editions is a publisher of innovative books, journals, and collectibles that push the boundaries of creativity, design, and production. Through its acclaimed film, television, and gaming program, Insight strives to produce unique books and products that provide new ways to engage with fan-favorite characters and stories. Under the program, Insight has published books covering the worlds of Star Wars, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Destiny, Assassin's Creed, Halo, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and the Harry Potter films, among many others. Insight's award-winning art, photography, and sports titles celebrate the artistry and legacy of a wide range of subjects that include John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Cash, and The Rolling Stones. By combining rich subject matter, striking visuals, and exclusive content with imaginative design and production, Insight Editions strives to create unique keepsakes that celebrate the best in pop culture and make one-of-a-kind gifts for fans of all ages.

The Reincarnationist

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Best known as an author of erotic thrillers, Rose ( Lip Service ) delves into religious myth and past-life discovery in her well-paced ninth novel. In present-day Rome, a terrorist bomb explosion triggers flashbacks of pre-Christian Italy in photographer Josh Ryder. Josh experiences the memories as Julius, a pagan priest defending the sacrosanct monuments of his gods and the life of his vestal virgin lover against the emperor-mandated onslaught of Christianity in A.D. 391. Six months later, Josh has teamed with the Phoenix Foundation, an institute specializing in past-life memories in children, to explore a newly excavated tomb that may contain pagan memory stones that incite past-life regressions and will, by proving the existence of reincarnation, challenge the church. The stakes rise after it becomes clear that dangerous outside forces also want the stones. In a series of memory lurches, the narratives of Josh and Julius slowly wind together to reveal a Da Vinci Code –esque tale of intrigue that's more believably plotted and better meets its ambitions than Dan Brown's ubiquitous book. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist After a bomb explosion nearly kills photojournalist Josh Ryder, he begins experiencing flashbacksor, perhaps, memoriesof events that seem to have happened to him 1,600 years earlier, in another life. Convinced these episodes aren't figments of his imagination, he enlists the aid of the Phoenix Foundation, a group that specializes in past-life research. Later, when he becomes involved in the unearthing of an ancient tomband experiences a connection with its long-buried residentJosh realizes he has a chance to right a wrong that happened a millennium and a half ago, not to mention an opportunity to solve a series of modern-day murders. This is one of those books that succeeds in spite of itself: even though the writing is merely competent, the story itself is so appealing that you can't stop reading. Josh Ryder is a difficult character to pull off (among other things, he's a man in love with a woman who lived 1,600 years ago), and at times he comes off a little loopy. But for the most part he, like the novel itself, is surprisingly well grounded in the real world. Pitt, David Review "A breakneck chase across the centuries. Fascinating and fabulous." -- David Morrell, author of Creepers "A compelling, ferocious read, an intelligent thrill ride, intricately plotted, with enough twists to keep the reader firmly in M.J. Rose's grasp." -- Robert Ferrigno, author of Prayers for the Assassin "One of the most original and exciting novels I've read in a long time, with a premise so delicious I'm sick with envy I didn't think of it myself. It will open your mind to some of the incredible mysteries of the past and the greatest secrets of existence. The Reincarnationist is more than a page-turner-it's a page-burner. Don't miss it." -- Douglas Preston, author of The Book of the Dead "Packed with unforgettable characters, breath-taking drama, and fascinating research, The Reincarnationist cements M.J. Rose's reputation as a master storyteller. Pick your millennium, folks. You're in for a timeless ride." -- Gayle Lynds, author of The Last Spymaster Starred Review. The exploding bomb in Rome that nearly took news photographer Josh Ryder's life triggered in him a series of wildly strange historical flashbacks. Determined to find the cause, he turned to the New York-based Phoenix Foundation, a scientific group dedicated to the possibilities of reincarnation. Memories of his past lives in ancient Rome as Julius, a pagan priest in a desperate mission to save his love, and in Victorian New York as Percy Talmage, son of the Phoenix Foundation founder, haunt Josh as he tries to bring his episodes under control. The foundation's interest in the excavation of a fourth-century tomb sends him back to Rome. But at the tomb, the Memory Stones are stolen, flinging Josh and archaeology professor Gabriella Chase into a race to recover these powerful artifacts. Rose's engrossing thriller effortlessly leaps to and fro through the centuries. Dramatic suspense and intriguing characters expertly set the stage for this first in a series. Strongly recommended for all popular fiction collections. -- From Library Journal About the Author M.J. Rose is the international bestselling author of eleven novels, including The Reincarnationist , The Memorist , and The Hypnotist . She is a founding member and board member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors: AuthorBuzz.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. They will come back, come back again, As long as the red earth rolls.He never wasted a leaf or a tree.Do you think he would squander souls? ?Rudyard Kipling Rome, Italy?sixteen months ago Josh Ryder looked through the camera's viewfinder, focusing on the security guard arguing with a young mother whose hair was dyed so red it looked like she was on fire. The search of the woman's baby carriage was quickly becoming anything but routine, and Josh moved in closer for his next shot.He'd just been keeping himself busy while awaiting the arrival of a delegation of peacekeepers from several superpowers who would be meeting with the pope that morning, but like several other members of the press and tourists who'd been ignoring the altercation or losing patience with it, he was becoming concerned. Although searches went on every hour, every day, around the world, the potential for danger hung over everyone's lives, lingering like the smell of fire.In the distance the sonorous sound of a bell ringing called the religious to prayer, its echo out of sync with the woman's shrill voice as she continued to protest. Then, with a huge shove, she pushed the carriage against the guard's legs, and just as Josh brought the image into that clarity he called "perfect vision," the kind of image that the newspaper would want, the kind of conflict they loved captured on film, he heard the blast.Then a flash of bluish white light.The next moment, the world exploded.In the protective shadows of the altar, Julius and his brother whispered,reviewing their plans for the last part of the rescue and recovery. Each of them kept a hand on his dagger, prepared in case one of the emperor's soldiers sprang out of the darkness. In Rome, in theYear of their Lord 391, temples were no longer sanctuaries for pagan priests. Converting to Christianity was not a choice, but an official mandate. Resisting was a crime punishable by death. Blood spilled in the name of the Church was not a sin, it was the price of victory.The two brothers strategized?Drago would stay in the temple for an hour longer and then rendezvous with Julius at the tomb by the city gates. As a diversion, that morning's elaborate funeral had been a success, but they were still worried. Everything depended on this last part of their strategy going smoothly.Julius drew his cape closed, touched his brother's shoulder, bidding him goodbye and good luck, and skulked out of the basilica, keeping to the building's edge in case anyone was watching. He heard approaching horses and the clatter of wheels. Flattening himself against the stone wall, Julius held his breath and didn't move. The chariot passed without stopping.He'd finally reached the edge of the porch when, behind him, like a sudden avalanche of rocks, he heard an angry shout split open the silence: "Show me where the treasury is!"This was the disaster Julius and his brother had feared and discussed, but Drago had been clear?even if the temple was attacked, Julius was to continue on. Not turn back. Not try to help him. The treasure Julius needed to save was more important than any one life or any five lives or any fifty lives.But then a razor-sharp cry of pain rang out, and ignoring the plan, he ran back through the shadows, into the temple and up to the altar.His brother was not where he'd left him. "Drago?"No answer. "Drago?"Where was he?Julius worked his way down one of the dark side aisles of the temple and up the next. When he found Drago, it wasn't by sound He pulled him closer to the flickering torches. Drago's skin was already deathly pale, and his torn robe revealed a six-inch horizontal slash on his stomach crossing a vertical gash that cut him all the way down to his groin.Julius gagged. He'd seen eviscerated carcasses of both man and beast before and had barely given them a passing glance. Sacrifices, felled soldiers or punished criminals were one thing. But this was Drago. This blood was his blood."You weren't?supposed to come back," Drago said, dragging every syllable out as if it was stuck in his throat. "I sent him?to look in the loculi?for the treasures. I thought?Stabbed me, anyway. But there's time?for us to get out?now?now!" Drago struggled to raise himself up to a sitting position, spilling his insides as he moved.Julius pushed him down. "Now?we need?to go now." Drago's voice was weakening. Trying to staunch the blood flow, Julius put pressure on the laceration, willing the intestines and nerves and veins and skin to rejoin and fuse back together, but all he accomplished was staining his hands in the hot, sticky mess."Where are the virgins?" The voice erupted like Vesuvius without warning and echoed through the interior nave. Raucous laughter followed.How many soldiers were there? "Let's find the booty we came here for," another voice chimed in. "Not yet, first I want one of the virgins. Where are the virgin whores?""The treasury first, you lecherous bastard."More laughter.So it wasn't one man; a regiment had stormed the temple. Shouting, demanding, blood-lust coating their words. Let them pillage this place, let them waste their energy, they'd come too late: there were no pagans to convert, no treasure left to find and no women left to rape, they'd all already been killed or sent into hiding."We have to go?"Drago whispered as once again he fought to rise.He'd stayed behind to make sure everyone else got out safely. Why him, why Drago?"You can't move, you've been hurt?" Julius broke off, not knowing how to tell his brother that half of his internal organs were "Then leave me.You need to get to her?Save her and the treasures?. No one?no one but you?"It wasn't about the sacred objects anymore. It was about two people who both needed him desperately: the woman he loved and his brother, and the fates were demanding Julius sacrifice one of them for the other. I can't let her die and I can't leave you to die. No matter which one he chose,how would he live with the decision? "Look what I found," one of the soldiers shouted.Screams of vengeance reverberated through the majestic hall. A shriek rang out above all the other noise. A woman's cry.Julius crawled out, hid behind a column and peered into the nave. thrashing under the brute as the soldier pumped away so roughly that blood pooled under her. Who was the poor woman? Had she wandered in thinking she'd find a safe haven in the old temple, only to find she'd descended into hell? Could Julius help her? Take the men by surprise? No, there were too many of them. At least eight he could see. By now the rape had attracted more attention, drawing other men who forgot about their search to crowd around and cheer on their compatriot.And what would happen to Drago if he left his side?Then the question didn't matter because beneath his hands, Julius felt his brother's heart stop. He felt his heart stop. Julius beat Drago's chest, pumping and trying, trying but failing to stimulate the beating. Bending down, he breathed into his brother's mouth,forcing his own air down his throat,waiting for any sign of life.Finally, his lips still on his brother's lips, his arm around his brother's neck, he wept, knowing he was wasting precious seconds but unable to stop. Now he didn't have to choose between them?he could go to the woman who was waiting for him at the city gates. He must go to her. backed up, found the wall and started crawling. There was a break in the columns up ahead; if he could get to it undetected, he might make it out.And then he heard a soldier shout for him to halt.If he couldn't save her, Julius would at least die trying, so, ignoring the order, he kept moving.Outside, the air was thick with the black smoke that burned his lungs and stung his eyes. What were they incinerating now? No time to find out. Barely able to see what lay ahead of him, he kept running down the eerily quiet street. After the cacophony of the scene he'd just left, it was alarming to be able to hear his own footsteps. If someone was on the lookout the sound would give him away, but he needed to risk it.Picturing her in the crypt, crouched in the weak light, counting the minutes, he worried that she would be anxious that he was late and torment herself that something had gone dangerously wrong. Her bravery had always been as steadfast as the stars; it was difficult even now to imagine her afraid. But this was a far different situation than anything she'd ever faced, and it was all his fault, all his shame.They'd risked too much for each other. He should have been stronger, should have resisted.And now, because of him, everything they treasured, especially their lives, was at stake.Tripping over the uneven, cracked surfaces, he stumbled. The muscles in his thighs and calves screamed, and every breath irritated his lungs so harshly he wanted to cry out. Tasting dirt and grit mixed with his salty sweat as it dripped down his face and wet his lips, he would have given anything for water?cold, sweet water from the spring, not this alkaline piss. His feet pounded the stones and more pain shot up through his legs, but still he ran.Suddenly, raucous shouting and thundering footfalls filled the air. The ground reverberated, and from the intensity he knew the marauders were coming closer. He looked right, left. If he could find a sheltered alcove, he could flatten himself against the wall and pray they'd run past and miss him. As if that would help. He knew all about praying. He'd relied on it, believed in it. But the prayers he'd offered up might as well have been spit in the gutter for the good they'd done."The sodomite is getting away!""Scum of the earth.""Scared little pig.""Did you defecate yourself yet, little pig?"They laughed,trying to outdo each other with slurs and accusations. Their chortles echoed in the hollow night, lingered on the hot wind, and then, mixed in with their jeers, another voice broke through."Josh?" No,don't listen.Keep going.Everything depends on getting to her in time. A heavy fog was rolling in. He stumbled, then righted himself. He took the corner.On both sides of him were identical colonnades with dozens of doors and recessed archways. He knew this place! He could hide here in plain sight and they would run by and?"Josh?"The voice sounded as if it was coming to him from a great bluegreen distance, but he refused to stop for it. She was waiting for him?to save her?to save their secrets?and treasures?. "Josh?"The voice was pulling him up, up through the murky, briny heaviness."Josh?"Reluctantly, he opened his eyes and took in the room, the equip and blood pressure monitor flashing its LED numbers, the IV drip and the EKG machine, he saw a woman's worried face watching him. But it was the wrong face.This wasn't the woman he'd been running to save. "Josh? Oh, thank God, Josh. We thought?"He couldn't be here now. He needed to go back.The taste of sweat was still on his lips; his lungs still burned. He could hear them coming for him under the steady beat of the machines, but all he could think about was that somewhere she was alone, in the encroaching darkness, and yes, she was afraid, and yes, she was going to suffocate to death if he didn't reach her. He closed his eyes against the onslaught of anguish. If he didn't reach her, he would fail her. And something else, too. The treasures? No. Something more important, something just beyond his consciousness, what was it?"Josh?"Grief ripped through him like a knife slitting open his chest, exposing his heart to the raw, harsh reality of having lost her. This wasn't possible. This wasn't real. He'd been remembering the chase and the escape and the rescue as if they had happened to him. But they hadn't. Of course they hadn't.He wasn't Julius.He was Josh Ryder. He was alive in the twenty-first century. This scene belonged sixteen hundred years in the past.Then why did he feel as if he'd lost everything that had ever mattered to him? Read more

Seeing the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 2)

About the Author Sheila Connolly is a New York Times bestselling author and the Anthony and Agatha Awardnominated author of over thirty titles, including the Museum Mysteries, the Orchard Mysteries, and the County Cork Mysteries as well as a number of short stories in various anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three cats, and visits Ireland as often as she can. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Review Seeing the Dead is an engaging story that's easy to become absorbed in.-- "Crime Fiction Lover" --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

The Atlantis Gene: A Thriller (The Origin Mystery, Book 1)

Review "...reads like a superior collaboration between Dan Brown and Michael Crichton."--The Guardian on Pandemic An Exclusive Excerpt From The Atlantis Gene PROLOGUE Research Vessel Icefall Atlantic Ocean 88 Miles off the Coast of AntarcticaKarl Selig steadied himself on the ship's rail and peered through the binoculars at the massive iceberg. Another piece of ice crumbled and fell, revealing more of the long black object. It looked almost like... a submarine. But it couldn't be."Hey Steve, come check this out."Steve Cooper, Karl's grad-school friend, tied off a buoy and joined Karl on the other side of the boat. He took the binoculars, scanned quickly, then stopped. "Whoa. What is it? A sub?""Maybe--""What's under it?"Karl grabbed the binoculars. "Under it..." He panned to the area under the sub. There was something else. The sub, if it was a sub, was sticking out of another metallic object, this one gray and much larger. Unlike the sub, the gray object didn't reflect light; it looked more like heat waves, the kind that shimmer just over the horizon of a warm highway or a long stretch of desert. It wasn't warm, though, or at least it wasn't melting the ice around it. Just above the structure, Karl caught a glimpse of some writing on the sub: U-977 and Kriegsmarine . A Nazi sub. Sticking out of... a structure of some sort.Karl dropped the binoculars to his side. "Wake Naomi up and prepare to dock the boat. We're going to check it out."Steve rushed below deck, and Karl heard him rousing Naomi from one of the small boat's two cabins. Karl's corporate sponsor had insisted he take Naomi along. Karl had nodded in the meeting and hoped she wouldn't get in the way. He had not been disappointed. When they had put to sea five weeks ago in Cape Town, South Africa, Naomi had brought aboard two changes of clothes, three romance novels, and enough vodka to kill a Russian army. They had barely seen her since. It must be so boring for her out here , Karl thought. For him, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.Karl raised the binoculars and looked again at the massive piece of ice that had broken off from Antarctica nearly a month ago. Almost ninety percent of the iceberg was underwater, but the surface area still covered forty-seven square miles--one and a half times the size of Manhattan.Karl's doctoral thesis focused on how newly calved icebergs affected global sea currents as they dissolved. Over the last four weeks, he and Steve had deployed high-tech buoys around the iceberg that measured sea temp and salt-water/fresh-water balance as well as took periodic sonar readings of the iceberg's changing shape. The goal was to learn more about how icebergs disintegrated after leaving Antarctica. Antarctica held ninety percent of the world's ice, and when it melted in the next few centuries, it would dramatically change the world. He hoped his research would shed light on exactly how.Karl had called Steve the minute he found out he was funded. "You've got to come with me--No, trust me." Steve had reluctantly agreed, and to Karl's delight, his old friend had come alive on the expedition as they took readings by day and discussed the preliminary findings each night. Before the voyage, Steve's academic career had been as listless as the iceberg they were following, as he floated from one thesis topic to another. Karl and their other friends had wondered if he would drop out of the doctoral program altogether.The research readings had been intriguing, and now they had found something else, something remarkable. There would be headlines. But what would they say? "Nazi Sub Found in Antarctica"? It wasn't inconceivable.Karl knew the Nazis had been obsessed with Antarctica. They'd sent expeditions there in 1938 and 1939 and even claimed part of the continent as a new German province--Neuschwabenland. Several Nazi subs were never recovered during World War II and were not known to have been sunk. The conspiracy theorists claimed that a Nazi sub left Germany just before the fall of the Third Reich, carrying away the highest ranking Nazis and the entire treasury, including priceless artifacts that had been looted and top-secret technology.At the back of Karl's mind, a new thought emerged: reward money. If there was Nazi treasure on the sub, it would be worth a huge amount of money. He would never have to worry about research funding again.The more immediate challenge was docking the boat to the iceberg. The seas were rough, and it took them three passes, but they finally managed to tie off a few miles from the sub and the strange structure under it.Karl and Steve bundled up and donned their climbing gear. Karl gave Naomi some basic instructions, the long and short of which were "don't touch anything," and then he and Steve lowered themselves to the ice shelf below the boat and set off.For the next forty-five minutes, neither man said anything as they trudged across the barren ice mountain. The ice was rougher toward the interior, and their pace slowed; Steve's more than Karl's."We need to pick it up, Steve."Steve made an effort to catch up. "Sorry. A month on the boat has got me out of shape."Karl glanced up at the sun. When it set, the temperature would plummet and they would likely freeze to death. The days were long here. The sun rose at 2:30 A.M. and set after 10 P.M., but they only had a few more hours. Karl picked up his pace a little more.Behind him, he heard Steve shuffling his snow-shoes as fast as he could, trying desperately to catch up. Strange sounds echoed up from the ice: first a low drone, then a rapid hammering, like a thousand woodpeckers assaulting the ice. Karl stopped and listened. He turned to Steve and their eyes met just as a spider web of tiny cracks shot out across the ice below Steve's feet. Steve looked down in horror, and then ran as hard as he could toward Karl and the untouched ice.For Karl, the scene was surreal, unfolding almost in slow motion. He felt himself run toward his friend and throw a rope from his belt. Steve caught the rope a split second before a loud crack filled the air and the ice below him collapsed, forming a giant chasm.The rope instantly pulled tight, jerking Karl off his feet and slamming him belly first into the ice. He was going to follow Steve into the ice canyon. Karl scrambled to get his feet under him, but the tug of the rope was too strong. He relaxed his hands, and the rope slid through them, slowing his forward motion. He planted his feet in front of him, and the crampons beneath his boots bit into the ice, sending shards of ice at his face as he came to a halt. He squeezed the rope, and it pulled tight against the ledge, making a strange vibrating sound almost like a low violin."Steve! Hang on! I'm going to pull you up--""Don't!" Steve yelled."What? Are you crazy--""There's something down here. Lower me, slowly."Karl thought for a moment. "What is it?""Looks like a tunnel or a cave. It's got gray metal in it. It's blurry.""Okay, hold on. I'm going to let some slack out." Karl let about ten feet of rope out, and when he heard nothing from Steve, another ten feet."Stop," Steve called.Karl felt the rope tugging. Was Steve swinging? The rope went slack."I'm in," Steve said."What is it?""Not sure." Steve's voice was muffled now.Karl crawled to the edge of the ice and looked over.Steve stuck his head out of the mouth of the cave. "I think it's some kind of cathedral. It's massive. There's writing on the walls. Symbols--like nothing I've ever seen. I'm going to check it out.""Steve, don't--"Steve disappeared again.A few minutes passed. Was there another slight vibration? Karl listened closely. He couldn't hear it, but he could feel it. The ice was pulsing faster now. He stood up and took a step away from the edge. The ice behind him cracked, and then there were cracks everywhere--and spreading quickly. He ran full speed toward the widening fissure. He jumped--and almost made it to the other side but came up short. His hands caught on the ice ledge, and he dangled there for a long second. The vibrations in the ice grew more violent with each passing second. Karl watched the ice around him crumble and fall, and then the shard that held him broke free, and he was plummeting down into the abyss.* * *On the boat, Naomi watched the sun set over the iceberg. She picked up the satellite phone and dialed the number the man had given her."You said to call if we found anything interesting.""Don't say anything. Hold the line. We'll have your location within two minutes. We'll come to you."She set the phone on the counter, walked back to the stove, and continued stirring the pot of beans.* * *The man on the other end of the satellite phone looked up when the GPS coordinates flashed on his screen. He copied the location and searched the satellite surveillance database for live feeds. One result.He opened the stream and panned the view to the center of the iceberg, where the dark spots were. He zoomed in several times, and when the image came into focus, he dropped his coffee to the floor, bolted out of his office, and ran down the hall to the director's office. He barged in, interrupting a gray-haired man who was standing and speaking with both hands held up."We've found it." From the Inside Flap About the Author A.G. Riddle spent ten years starting internet companies before retiring to pursue his true passion: writing fiction.His debut novel, The Atlantis Gene , is the first book in The Origin Mystery , the trilogy that has sold over two million copies in the US, has been translated into 23 languages, and is in development to be a major motion picture.His recently released fourth novel, Departure , follows the survivors of a flight that takes off in the present and crash-lands in a changed world. HarperCollins published Departure in hardcover in the fall of 2015, and 20th Century Fox is developing the novel for a feature film. Riddle grew up in a small town in North Carolina (Boiling Springs) and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. During his sophomore year of college, he started his first company with a childhood friend. He currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife, who endures his various idiosyncrasies in return for being the first to read his new novels. They welcomed their first child, a daughter, on September 2, 2016.No matter where he is, or what's going on, he tries his best to set aside time every day to answer emails and messages from readers. You can reach him at: ag@agriddle.com ** For a sneak peek at new novels, free stories, and more, join the email list at: agriddle.com/email If you don't want to miss any Riddle news, you can:Like the A.G. Riddle Facebook page: facebook.com/agriddleFollow A.G. Riddle on Twitter: twitter.com/riddlistFor more, please visit:AGRiddle.com* * * Read more

The Winter Sea (The Scottish series, 1)

Review "The story was deliciously romantic and the writing style matched the brooding, haunting tale very well. Definitely well worth reading!" ― All About Romance "Kearsley’s novel is highly reminiscent of Barbara Erskine’s Lady of Hay and Mary Stewart’s works: evocative novels that lift readers straight into another time and place to smell the sea, feel the castle walls, see history and sense every emotion. These are marks of a fantastic storyteller. 4 1/2 Stars, Top Pick of the Month" ― RT Book Reviews "The rich history and the historical aspect of this novel made it a book that was hard to put down. " ― The Romance Studio "Skillful writing and research... Readers will not be disappointed in Sophia’s enthralling story. Highly recommended." ― Historical Novels Review "Reading this book was pure magic. " ― Queen of Happy Endings "I loved The Winter Sea . It drew me in from the start and I found myself reading faster and faster just to find out what would happen next... " ― Starting Fresh "A creative tour de force... Brilliant!" ― New York Journal of Books "Scotland past and present comes vividly alive in this superior piece of historical fiction - the rugged countryside, salty sea air and rich heritage are the perfect setting for this tale of love, loss and destiny. " ― Thoughts From Lady Tess "This is historical fiction at its best!" ― Library of Clean Reads "Vivid... One of those books that you remember long after the last page has been turned." ― Debbie’s Book Bag " A perfect blend of romance, real history and what if... " ― At Home with a Good Book and the Cat "A beautiful work of historical fiction ." ― Rundpinne "The Winter Sea is a beautiful story... It will transport you to another time and place. " ― A Buckeye Girl Reads "This book has everything: historical romance, contemporary romance, rebellion, tragedy. All the good stuff... A+ storytelling!" ― Readin’ and Dreamin’ "From the moment I picked up this novel I was intoxicated by the idea of finding not just a muse but true love by pure accident.. A book not to be missed." ― Pencil Pushers and Ink Splotches "An excellent "time-travel" story with alternating chapters set in modern time and in the past. I would definitely recommend this book to those who love an epic story rich in historical detail. " ― In the Hammock "A wonderful book to escape into for a couple of days with fabulous characters, and an engaging story." ― In Spring it is the Dawn "A well written, engaging historical novel with a dash of romance... it’s a page turner. " ― A Work in Progress "Beautiful, clear writing, a believable storyline, adventure and romance." ― Bookfoolery and Babble "A breathtaking novel... Kearsley’s writing style beautifully spells out the mood for this novel. " ― Luxury Reading "One of the most enchanting romance novels of the decade, The Winter Sea will find a home on everyone's bookshelf. " ― Romance Fiction on Suite101.com "Each page I devoured only made me want to read the next one and the next one... highly engaging. " ― The Royal Reviews "Absolutely phenomenal... A stunning, gorgeous and heart-wrenching tale. " ― Psychotic State "The Winter Sea was an emotionally poignant, gripping tale of adventure both in the past and the present with characters full of life, and conflicts that tug at the heart strings. A definite read!" ― History Undressed "If you are a fan of Mary Stewart and Barbara Erskine, this is a must for your bookcase." ― Celtic Lady’s Reviews "What a gifted writer Ms. Kearsley is! This is one book that I wish had gone on... T" ― Books by the Willow Tree "This book had it all: romance, intrigue, mystery, historical fiction, kick-ass location, and a storyline that made me not want to put the book down." ― Life in the Thumb "A beautiful and engrossing story... The Winter Sea will appeal in spades to fans of Mary Stewart and Diana Gabaldon. " ― Angieville " I loved how the author wove the past and the present together as Carrie dreamed of the Jacobite invasion, finding inspiration for her novel, and then in her research discovered that her dreams were more than just dreams." ― Let Them Read Books "Marvelous and flawless... " ― Read All Over Reviews "Beautifully written... A book to be read carefully and savored." ― DearAuthor.com "The Winter Sea is one of those novels that a reader doesn't come across too often." ― Midwest Book Review About the Author New York Times , USA Today , and Globe and Mail bestselling author Susanna Kearsley is a former museum curator who loves restoring the lost voices of real people to the page, often in twin-stranded stories that interweave present and past. Her award-winning novels have been published in translation in more than 25 countries. She lives near Toronto. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Chapter 1 It wasn't chance. There wasn't any part of it that happened just by chance. I learned this later; though the realization, when it came, was hard for me to grasp because I'd always had a firm belief in self-determination. My life so far had seemed to bear this out―I'd chosen certain paths and they had led to certain ends, all good, and any minor bumps that I had met along the way I could accept as not bad luck, but simply products of my own imperfect judgment. If I'd had to choose a creed, it would have been the poet William Henley's bravely ringing lines: I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. So on that winter morning when it all began, when I first took my rental car and headed north from Aberdeen, it never once occurred to me that someone else's hand was at the helm. I honestly believed it was my own decision, turning off the main road for the smaller one that ran along the coastline. Not the wisest of decisions, maybe, seeing as the roads were edged with what I'd been assured was Scotland's deepest snow in forty years, and I'd been warned I might run into drifting and delays. Caution and the knowledge I was running on a schedule should have kept me to the more well-traveled highway, but the small sign that said 'Coastal Route' diverted me. My father always told me that the sea was in my blood. I had been born and raised beside it on the shores of Nova Scotia, and I never could resist its siren pull. So when the main road out of Aberdeen turned inland I turned right instead, and took the way along the coast. I couldn't say how far away I was when I first saw the ruined castle on the cliffs, a line of jagged darkness set against a cloud-filled sky, but from the moment I first saw it I was captivated, driving slightly faster in the hope I'd reach it sooner, paying no attention to the clustered houses I was driving past, and feeling disappointment when the road curved sharply off again, away from it. But then, beyond the tangle of a wood, the road curved back again, and there it was: a long dark ruin, sharp against the snowbound fields that stretched forbiddingly between the cliff 's edge and the road. I saw a parking lot ahead, a little level place with logs to mark the spaces for the cars, and on an impulse I pulled in and stopped. The lot was empty. Not surprising, since it wasn't even noon yet, and the day was cold and windy, and there wasn't any reason anyone would stop out here unless they wanted to walk out to see the ruin. And from looking at the only path that I could see that led to it―a frozen farm lane drifted deep with snow that would have risen past my knees―I guessed there wouldn't be too many people stopping here today. I knew I shouldn't stop, myself. There wasn't time. I had to be in Peterhead by one o'clock. But something in me felt a sudden need to know exactly where I was, and so I reached to check my map. I'd spent the past five months in France; I'd bought my map there, and it had its limitations, being more concerned with roads and highways than with towns and ruins. I was looking so hard at the squiggle of coastline and trying to make out the names in fine print that I didn't see the man till he'd gone past me, walking slowly, hands in pockets, with a muddy-footed spaniel at his heels. It seemed a strange place for a man on foot to be, out here. The road was busy and the snow along the banks left little room to walk beside it, but I didn't question his appearance. Any time I had a choice between a living, breathing person and a map, I chose the person. So I scrambled, map in hand, and got my car door open, but the salt wind blowing off the sea across the fields was stronger than I'd thought it would be. It stole my voice. I had to try again. 'Excuse me...' I believe the spaniel heard me first. It turned, and then the man turned too, and seeing me, retraced his steps. He was a younger man than I'd expected, not much older than myself―mid-thirties, maybe, with dark hair whipped roughly by the wind and a close-trimmed dark beard that made him look a little like a pirate. His walk, too, had a swagger to it, confident. He asked me, 'Can I help you?' 'Can you show me where I am?' I held the map towards him. Coming round to block the wind, he stood beside me, head bent to the printed coastline. 'Here,' he said, and pointed to a nameless headland. 'Cruden Bay. Where are ye meant to be?' His head turned very slightly as he asked that, and I saw his eyes were not a pirate's eyes. They were clear grey, and friendly, and his voice was friendly too, with all the pleasant, rolling cadence of the northern Scot. I said, 'I'm going north, to Peterhead.' 'Well, that's not a problem.' He pointed it out on the map. 'It's not far. You just keep on this road, it'll take you right up into Peterhead.' Close by his knee the dog yawned a complaint, and he sighed and looked down. 'Half a minute. You see that I'm talking?' I smiled. 'What's his name?' 'Angus.' Bending, I scratched the dog's hanging ears, spattered with mud. 'Hello, Angus. You've been for a run.' 'Aye, he'd run all the day if I'd let him. He's not one for standing still.' Neither, I thought, was his master. The man had an aura of energy, restlessness, and I'd delayed him enough. 'Then I'll let you get going,' I said as I straightened. 'Thank you for your help.' 'Nae bother,' he assured me, and he turned and started off again, the spaniel trotting happily ahead. The hardened footpath stretched ahead of them, towards the sea, and at its end I saw the castle ruin standing stark and square and roofless to the swiftly running clouds, and as I looked at it I felt a sudden pulling urge to stay―to leave the car parked where it was and follow man and dog where they had gone, and hear the roaring of the sea around those crumbled walls. But I had promises to keep. So with reluctance, I got back into my rental car, turned the key and started off again towards the north. Read more

Wind Rider: Tales of a New World (Tales of a New World, 3)

Review "...Series fans will be happy to read this entry and hang on for more." – Booklist on Wind Rider "A mind-blowing and imaginative story ...Cast’s imagination knows no bounds and it will be interesting to see what new ideas arise when she puts pen to paper next." -- Romantic Times on Sun Warrior “Cast’s spectacular new series kicks off with a unique tale suitable for fans of fantasy both young and old. Earth has completely changed, and the author grants readers a chance to use their imagination as the engaging storyline rapidly unfolds.” – Romantic Times, 4 stars! "While many fantasy series style themselves as epic, this one may actually be worthy of the description. Fantasy lovers who are fans of Cinda Williams Chima's "Seven Realms" novels will fall in love with Mari and Nik." – School Library Journal “Cast's fans should find much to be pleased with in this new venture” – Kirkus “…engaging characters and a fast-paced narrative” – Publishers Weekly About the Author P.C. Cast is the author of the House of Night novels, including Marked , Betrayed , Chosen , and Untamed . Ms. Cast is a #1 New York Times and USA Today Best-Selling author and a member of the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. With more than 20 million copies in print in over 40 countries, her novels have been awarded the prestigious Oklahoma Book Award, YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award, the Prism, Holt Medallion, Daphne du Maurier, Booksellers’ Best, and the Laurel Wreath. Ms. Cast was born in the Midwest and grew up being shuttled back and forth between Illinois and Oklahoma, which is where she fell in love with Quarter Horses and mythology. After high school she joined the United States Air Force and began public speaking and writing. After her tour in the USAF, she taught high school for 15 years before retiring to write full time. She now lives in Oregon surrounded by beloved cats, dogs, horses, and family. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Wind Rider Tales of a New World By P. C. Cast St. Martin's Press Copyright © 2018 P. C. CastAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-250-10078-8 CHAPTER 1 THREE YEARS IN THE PAST — PLAINS OF THE WIND RIDERS — RENDEZVOUS SITE Dawn was teasing the horizon and causing the sky to blush when River made her way silently from the crowded tent she shared with her mother, her two aunts, five cousins, three younger sisters, her mother's mare and the two geldings who had many years ago chosen her aunts as their Riders. As Rider of the Lead Mare of Herd Magenti, her mother's tent was situated close to the center of the spiral of stone monoliths that marked the Rendezvous Site as a place of layline power, but even had the stones not been there, positioned like ancient, mute guardians, the cavernous underground opening that lay in the center of them was evidence of the destructive power of the sun that was so great that centuries ago it had opened the earth and utterly changed the world. River glanced at the mouth of the cave, trying to get a glimpse of the herd of weanlings that waited within, but all she could see were shadows thrown by torches, though she could hear their restless nickers and nervous movements. River resisted the draw of the weanlings. It was against Herd law for any Candidate to interact with the young horses after they'd arrived at the Rendezvous Site — one reason they remained hidden away in the cave that usually housed entire Herds within the safety of its depths. Today is the Choosing. I only have a couple of hours left to wait for something I've been dreaming about since I was old enough to dream. River felt light-headed with nervous excitement. Even this early in the glooming before sunrise the huge campsite was already beginning to hum with activity. She turned her back on the cave and continued to wind her way through camp quickly, keeping her head ducked down — hoping not to be recognized. "A mare's luck to you today, River!" called a vaguely familiar voice. River didn't pause, but she did wave briefly in acknowledgment as she picked up her pace. She wanted just a few moments to herself before the day began and she became the center of attention. Don't be so dramatic. Not everyone will be watching you — just everyone from your Herd, River chided herself with silent sarcasm as she wove her way through the rest of the bright purple tents that spiraled from her mother's and marked the boundary of Herd Magenti. Her Herd. Her life. And, today, the source of her nervousness. Purple tents gave way to the differing shades of blue that marked Herd Indigo. River smiled to herself. Unlike her Herd, who valued one true, deep shade of purple to represent them, the Indigo Riders took pride in how many different blues they could create. It annoyed her mother, but River thought the variety was refreshing and beautiful. This early morning she didn't stop to admire the array of colors as she would normally, but instead skirted Herd Indigo. She turned to her left and kicked into a jog, passing the yellow and red tents of Herds Jonquil and Cinnabar until she came to a gentle rise in the land as prairie met the cross timber line that meant a creek was nearby. Relieved that this section of the clear, swiftly moving Weanling Creek was currently empty of other visitors, River rushed down the grassy rise to the sandy bank. She used one of the long, purple strips of cloth she'd grabbed from the pile of specially dyed and decorated ribbons that would very shortly be woven into her hair, and used it to tie back her unruly mass of ebony curls. Then she knelt in the soft sand and dipped her hands in the creek, ladling the crystal water over her face. River sucked in her breath at how cold it was, as it was too early in the spring for the prairie to have heated up enough to take any of the chill off the mountain-fed creek. But River ignored the cold and washed her face carefully before pulling off her nightdress and, naked, wading into the creek, carefully choosing her steps over the smooth rocks, until she was waist deep. Without hesitation, she submerged herself to her neck and closed her eyes. Wash away my nervousness and doubts. Help me to make Herd Magenti and my mother proud. Great Mother Mare and Father Stallion, please let me be found worthy and Chosen as a Rider today. Chosen today ... Those two words filled River's mind as she remained submerged, ignoring the cold of the water. It was finally the day, and if it happened — if she was Chosen — after today her life would irrevocably change. And, of course, should she not be Chosen her life would change as well. Oh, there would be other Rendezvous. Every child of the Herd who had known sixteen winters was Presented at a Rendezvous three times — given three opportunities to be Chosen in consecutive years — and those who were never Chosen were still valuable members of their Herd. But they were not Wind Riders. Sure, they could ride — everyone born into the Herd could ride — but there was a vast difference between being seated on the back of a horse as a passenger and being bonded mind, body, and spirit to a horse who Chose you as his or her Rider, Companion, and life partner. River had grown up observing the bond between her mother and her beautiful mare, Echo, and she craved that incredible, unbreakable, indescribable connection. Preparing herself for today had been her focus for as much of her sixteen years of life as she could remember, and for the last year it had been her obsession. "I don't care if the weanling who Chooses me is a contender for Lead Mare or Herd Stallion. I'd be happy with any horse — a sweet gelding would be wonderful. Just please, please let me belong to one of them. Let me be a weanling's Choice today." "You shouldn't be worried. You know you have your mother's seat, and Echo Chose her at the very first Rendezvous she was Presented." Slowly, River turned to face the voice behind her that drifted across the creek. He was standing on the bank, holding her nightdress and smiling at her. His hair had gotten so long! And it was braided with scarlet ribbons that matched his vest, which left his wide, muscular chest mostly bare and made him look more than just two short years older than her. River felt a rush of happiness that surprised her — she hadn't realized she'd missed him that much. "Clayton! When I didn't see you the past few days I thought you wouldn't make the Rendezvous. I'm glad you did — even if it means you eavesdropped on my prayers." "I didn't eavesdrop. I just showed up and you were already praying — loudly." "Riiiight. I'll try to remember next time to pray more quietly. What are you doing out here anyway?" She grinned mischievously at him. "Want to join me bathing?" Clayton snorted. "No! I missed you and I was out here looking for you, but I choose to bathe like civilized people — in a tub heated by a hearth-fire — or, better yet, in a steaming hot spring." "Still a baby," River teased, her full lips turning up. "Still a brat," Clayton countered. "You should come out of there before you turn blue and have to petition Herd Indigo to join them. Plus, I have a good luck gift for you — though you don't really need it." "A gift?" With no sense of modesty or seduction, River stood and made her way to the bank and Clayton, who handed her the abandoned nightdress. She dried herself using the end of the skirt as she looked up at her friend. "You got tall." "Tall er, " he corrected. "And vain er as well?" "Nah. I'm pretty sure I'm still as vain as I've always been," he teased. She slid the nightdress on and studied him. "You look stronger, too. I think you have more muscles. Herd Cinnabar must have kept you and Bard busy this winter. Where is your colt?" River glanced behind Clayton, expecting the three-year-old to be waiting in the lightening shadows that clung stubbornly to the grassy area beneath the verdant post oaks and willows that lined Weanling Creek. "My mother insisted on taking out the red ribbons from his mane and tail and is currently braiding them with what she calls the proper color. " "Herd Magenti's purple, of course." "None other." "Um, did she not see that you're wearing these?" River reached up and tugged on one of the scarlet ribbons in his hair. "Or this?" And tapped a finger on the blood-colored vest. This close to him she could see that it was intricately decorated with rearing horses in a deep sorrel thread made from a horse's mane. "She did. She told me to take them out and change into a decent vest and then she shooed me away when she began cooing to Bard about how much she missed him and how it was well past time his mane was braided properly." "Hey, want to see real cooing? Watch how everyone treats Echo." She laughed softly as she rolled her eyes. But instead of laughing with her, Clayton's expression sobered. "Well, sure, everyone coos over Echo. She's Lead Mare, the wisest, strongest, soundest, most beautiful equine in Herd Magenti — many say in all the Five Great Herds." River's shoulders slumped. "You're right. I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to sound bitter about Echo. She is magnificent and I love her as much as I love Mother." "Then who did you mean to sound bitter about?" She answered his question with two of her own. "Clayton, would you say Echo is an extension of my mother? That Mother reflects Echo's qualities?" He didn't hesitate with his answer. "Yes, I would. Everyone would — in our Herd and the others." "I would, too. My fear is that I don't." "You don't what?" "Reflect her qualities." She met Clayton's gaze. "I don't want to disappoint Mother or our Herd." "You won't. You couldn't. Unless you've changed drastically over the six months I was gone?" His raised brows challenged her. "No. I'm still me." "Then you're the most dedicated Rider I know. Hey, don't let all the people and the talk get inside your head. You know weanlings can sense your nerves. Focus on being yourself and on being open to accepting any horse that comes to you today — that's all you need to do." "Oh, that's all ?" River rolled her eyes. "Well, almost all. If you're Chosen you'll have the weight of the Herd's expectations on your shoulders, especially if a filly chooses you. And if you don't get Chosen you'll have the weight of the Herd's expectations on your shoulders as they worry about who will be Rider to our next Lead Mare ..." He grinned at her. "There. Did that help?" "Absolutely not," she said. Then the two friends grinned at each other and Clayton opened his arms. "Come here, worrier. I missed you a lot." River stepped into his embrace, finding it strange and familiar at the same time. He hugged her tightly and she clung to him as well. Then, as was her right as a daughter of the Herd, River chose to break the embrace, stepping back to look up at Clayton. "I hoped you missed me, too," he said. "I did!" She could see in his eyes that he wanted to say more and she held her breath, hoping he wouldn't make their reunion awkward. And, thankfully, he didn't. Instead he reached into his pocket and took out something concealed in his fisted hand. "For you." She opened her hand and Clayton dropped the crystal into her palm. It fitted perfectly there — a long finger of glistening quartz. It was warm from his touch, but as it connected with her skin it heated even further, syncing with the Magenti Crystal Seer blood that ran strong through her veins. River could feel it — feel the sleeping power of the crystal — and though she wasn't even a Wind Rider yet, the stone began to wake and harmonize with her, calming the firefly-like thoughts that had nervously been flitting through her mind since she'd arrived at the Rendezvous Site two days before. Instinctively, her breathing slowed and her shoulders relaxed, and for the first time in days they stopped burning with tension. River opened her mouth to thank Clayton for the amazing gift, and then her thanks turned into a shocked gasp as the soft light of dawn caught the crystal's faceted surface, revealing what was within. "Clayton! It's a phantom!" "Keep looking. It's not just a phantom." River lifted the crystal, squinting to study it, and her eyes widened. "Oh, Mother Mare! It's an amethyst phantom! Clayton, I can't accept this. It's way too valuable." Clayton gently closed her hand around the crystal. "Not to me it isn't. To me it's just beautiful. It takes a female Wind Rider of Herd Magenti to wake its secrets." "You could trade this for so many things — a whole tent of your own. Seriously, Clayton, take it back." "I believe it's too late for that. You look relaxed — or at least you did before you noticed it was a phantom. It woke for you, didn't it?" River couldn't help herself. She opened her palm and stared at the glistening gift. She could feel the rhythm of her heartbeat echoing through the crystal. "Well? It's awake, isn't it?" he prodded. "Yes." She couldn't take her eyes from the stone. "It's definitely awake." "I knew it! You have more than your mother's seat. You're also a Crystal Seer!" Her gaze snapped up from the crystal. She glanced around them as she told him, "Ssh! We can't know that for sure unless I'm Chosen by a weanling. You know it would be looked at as pure arrogance if anyone heard either of us say something like that." "But it's the truth — you're holding the proof in your hand." "All I'm holding in my hand is an extremely unusual, powerful crystal that recognized and resonated with my blood." "Blood that has a history of producing powerful Seers," Clayton added. "Do you know what property the amethyst phantom signifies? After I found it I didn't want to ask anyone. I didn't know exactly what it was, but I knew it was a phantom and that was enough to make me keep it hidden until I got it to you." River's gaze went back to the crystal, warm and pulsing in her open palm. "The amethyst phantom allows Seers to see the beginnings of each life cycle." "Wow. But, uh, what does that mean?" "It means that this crystal can be used to see what life lessons a person was meant to learn each life cycle, and knowing that, the Seer can help the person understand what he or she was meant to accomplish." River looked from the crystal into Clayton's dark eyes. "For instance, if you were depressed — I mean really depressed, not just a little sad — a Seer could use this phantom to look at your lives and see what it is that you haven't accomplished in this life that your soul is aching for." Clayton nodded. "There was a girl in Herd Cinnabar who was like that. So, so sad. She and her mare went over a cliff — purposefully. No one could stop them. No one could help her. Do you mean this crystal could've saved her?" "In the hands of a Crystal Seer, yes, probably. But don't be too hard on yourself. You didn't have any way of knowing that." "It happened before I found the crystal. But I'm glad I know now, and I'm glad I found the stone and put it in your hands." Clayton reached out and cupped one of those hands in both of his, rubbing his thumb in a slow, sensual caress across the skin of her wrist. "Use it to help others, Crystal Seer." "I'm not a Seer," she said automatically, though she could feel the crystal echoing her heartbeat. "Not yet you aren't. Let's see what happens later this morning, though. At least it has helped relax you a little." "More than a little," River said. Impulsively she tiptoed, hugged him, and then kissed him softly on his cheek. "Thank you! This is a wonderful gift." As she pulled away he caught her face in his hands gently. "River, I thought about you every day I was gone." "Every day for six months is a lot of thinking," she said. "I'm pretty sure you're exaggerating." "I'm not exaggerating and I'm also not kidding around. I'd show you how serious I am if you'd give me the chance." Slowly, River stepped back so that Clayton had to stop cupping her face. "Clayton, all I'm thinking about right now is the Choosing." "That's all you ever think about." Her gaze remained steady on his. "You're right. Becoming a Wind Rider is now, and has been for as long as I have memories, the most important thing in my life." (Continues...) Excerpted from Wind Rider by P. C. Cast . Copyright © 2018 P. C. Cast. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more

The Forbidden (Krewe of Hunters Book 34)

About the Author Heather Graham, also known as Shannon Drake, is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than two hundred novels and novellas. She is a recipient of the Romance Writers of Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and the Thriller Writers Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Queen Hereafter: A Novel of Margaret of Scotland

Review “Powerful and lyrically written . . . with riveting authenticity, King weaves a tapestry of love, friendship, and the eternal search for truth.” —Mary Jo Putney, New York Times bestselling author of Never Less Than a Lady “King is adept at pulling the reader into uncharted historical territory and making it real.  A story of love, women’s friendship, and suspense—this epic tale and its larger-than-life characters linger in the mind and heart.” —Karen Harper, author of Mistress Shakespeare “A captivating tale of the devout girl forced by fate to become queen to a passionate king.  As successor to Lady Macbeth and the most powerful woman in Scotland, Margaret earns love, hate—and lasting friendships. Susan Fraser King carries her readers through the Scots courts as if she’d lived there herself.” —Patricia Rice, New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked Wyckerly “Through a combination of assured scholarship and powerful storytelling, Susan Fraser King brings alive the complex, vivid world of Margaret of Scotland. With vibrant characters and lyrical description, this is a wonderful evocation of eleventh-century Britain in all its fierce splendor.” —Nicola Cornick, USA Today bestselling author   “She: a pious, educated foreigner; he: a hirsute warrior king—yoked together in matrimony for political expedience. Based on actual events, Susan Fraser King paints a vivid portrait of Margaret and Malcolm, a forced royal marriage that beat all odds and developed into one of mutual love and respect.” —Leslie Carroll, author of Notorious Royal Marriages “Susan Fraser King’s books, Lady Macbeth and now Queen Hereafter , are such delights—she lets us explore where normally we historians are not permitted to go. And what a wonderful pleasure that is, for she brings the scholar’s eye for authentic detail and evokes all the smoky atmosphere of medieval Scotland. Oh, I am jealous—and grateful.” —John C. Hartsock, professor of literary journalism and author of Seasons of a Finger Lakes Winery “Susan Fraser King’s Queen Hereafter transports the reader back to through the mists of Celtic history to the people behind the legends. In this story, as in the historical reality, love and romance jostle side by side with political manipulation and the horrors of war.  Ms. King presents a human Queen Margaret of Scotland and places her believably in a world known to us only through brief anecdotes in ancient manuscripts. Based on her extensive research, the author takes us back to early Scotland with its royal court, habitués, and their schemes.” —Ben Hudson, Ph.D., professor of Celtic and medieval studies, Penn State About the Author With graduate degrees in art and art history, former college lecturer SUSAN FRASER KING is the author of several bestselling novels praised for lyrical style and historical accuracy. Raised in upstate New York and a frequent visitor to Scotland, she lives in Maryland with her family. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One  My lady mother was so sure the English king planned to be rid of us the moment we set foot on his Saxon shores that she refused to sail there from Denmark. But we had been journeying for months after leaving Hungary, the lot of us: Papa, Mama, my sister and small brother, and a few servants. We were exhausted and sore in need of a home. Papa said we belonged in England, after all. I heard my parents arguing it at night.  My father, born a prince of England, had been exiled to the kingdom of Hungary as a small boy. Lately King Edward, his royal andchildless uncle, had summoned Papa-another Edward-home to England to restore his birthright and name him heir to the throne. Mama groused that while our uncle-king had beckoned, he would not pay our traveling costs, and she feared he might lay claim to the priceless treasures we hauled about in crates and chests. My mother, Agatha, was Russian and Hungarian by birth and blood, and little liked the English. Her warrior husband she excused; he had left England at a young age.  My father was Saxon royalty of the old Wessex line, and so were his children, harking back to wise King Alfred, to unready Aethelred and stubborn Edmund Ironside, my grandfather. Our brighter future lay in England. Lady Agatha would be queen there, according to both Edwards. Dignified if stubborn, she acquiesced.  The year I turned ten, we left Hungary, where my two siblings and I had been born. Traveling with a Magyar escort over high mountains into Russia, carrying heavy packed chests in carts the whole way, we stayed weeks in Kiev with my mother's kin, then sailed northward to winter among the Danes, my father's cousins. That place was dull and smoky indoors, but splendid outside. I saw how much we resembled the Danes and the Rus, too, for we were long limbed and golden fair, with taut cheekbones and sky-colored eyes. Only my sister Cristina took after the dark and stocky Magyars, the tough bloodline of our mother's maternal kin; she had a bold temperament, too, outspoken where I was acquiescent, hot and impulsive where I was cool and devout as I tried to emulate my pious mother and grandmother.  We crossed the wide, pitching North Sea, while my mother murmured of impending doom and prayed over her black-beaded rosary. Despite her worrying, the Danish vessel skimmed the waves like a winged dragon and brought us swiftly to English shores.  In London town, we were welcomed by lords who spoke the Saxon language that my father knew and we did not. The king was away, but we were housed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke German, our preferred tongue, with us. We were dined, entertained, and assessed by a parade ofbishops, priests, and notable lords and ladies; servants, too, I suppose. Assured that he would be king eventually, my father gently teased his wife that her fears were unfounded.  A week after our arrival, he fell dead at my feet.  A few of us were walking in the archbishop's gardens after supper with some of England's earls and thanes when my father collapsed on a path. We could not rouse him. To this day, years on, I can recall my disbelief and shock, my father's gray face, my mother's paleness, and the scents of calendula and thyme.  Poison was the rumor, denied and dismissed. The king's physician said Edward Aetheling had a weak heart, though my father had been a lion of a warrior, with spare habits and good health. Tainted food was suggested by others, though no one else had fallen sick that night.  Taint or poison, I alone knew the truth: I had killed him.  At my insistence, he had eaten sweetmeats from a golden tray set on the table before him. At first he had refused, intent on his discussion with a Saxon bishop. But with girlish silliness, I pushed the tray toward him, saying he must obey Princess Margaret. Distracted, smiling, he downed the treats in a fistful or two. Within the half hour, he was dead. Likely there was strong poison in those honeyed almonds and hazelnuts-and my father would not have eaten them that night but for my urging.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, but I never confessed my deed to a priest, only adding to the heinous sin. Fear kept me silent. I wore bruises into my knees praying self-imposed penances, while my lady mother approved my pious grieving, mistaking what moved me so. I could not tell her and hurt her even more.  At court, some whispered of the ambitious men who would have benefitted from the death of Edward the Exile: Harold Godwinson was one, brother of the queen and son of an ambitious Saxon earl, and William of Normandy was another. King Edward, rumor said, had bargained his crown to both men secretly and then gave the heir's right to my father. Whether one of them had ordered Edward the Exile killed or some other had done it, my own hand had aided the killer. I shared the sin.  That gnawed at me, crept into my dreams, perched on my shoulder like a demon.  Overnight we transformed from exalted royal family to the foreign wards of a king who took little interest in us yet would not permit usto return to Hungary. My siblings and I were educated as befitted our status in that formal, refined court. But we were in effect hostages housed as king's wards, our little freedom spent witnessing the hunt, hawking, or taking the short and frequent journey between the London and Winchester palaces. Often my sister and I refused to ride in the canopied van that carried the women, delighting in a chance for the saddle. We had been partly raised by Magyar kin,after all.  At five years old, my brother Edgar was named king's heir in a ceremony, while the other claimants for the English throne remained avid and interested. The year I turned twenty and Edgar thirteen, our aged royal uncle died, leaving Edgar the Aetheling, Harold Godwinson, and William of Normandy each believing in his own right to be king.  Harold was quickly chosen by the witanagemot and duly crowned. England needed a warrior-king, not a stripling boy, that year. Had Harold taken hawk's wings to soar over the cliffs of England, he would have seen two threats at once: the Danes sweeping in from the east and the Normans coming from the south.  Within months, in the autumn of anno domini 1066, the mail-clad warriors of Normandy slid their boats, silent and lethal, onto our English shore. Harold died on Hastings field and William took us for his wards-but as soon as we could get away, my kin and I fled. Read more

A Secret History of Witches: A Novel

Review " I loved it. A beautiful generational tale, reminiscent of Practical Magic if it had been set in various time periods, but much more expansive in scope. Grounded and real, painful and hopeful at the same time." - Laure Eve, author of The Graces " Historical fiction at its absolute finest .... Deliciously absorbing." - Boston Globe"At once sprawling and intimate, A Secret History of Witches deftly captures the greatest magic of all: the love between mothers and daughters ." - Jordanna Max Brodsky, author of The Wolf in the Whale" Fresh and unpredictable.... [Morgan] depicts with visceral impact the roles of women in a male-centered world." - Historical Novel Society " A moving multigenerational saga about strong women who work behind the scenes to save the world from tyranny. A deeply satisfying and magical work of great craft." - Carol Goodman, author of The Lake of Dead Languages" Epic in scope and heartbreakingly tender in its portrayal of mothers and daughters... Recommended for fans of Nora Roberts and readers of feminist fantasy. " - Booklist "A Secret History of Witches examines the bonds between mothers and daughters, and the power of hidden magic to quietly save the world, particularly as the world braces for another global war." - Brit + Co" A Secret History of Witches is an epic family saga that speaks to the strength of all women and the difference that one true heart can make, not only for herself, but for the world." - Marci Jefferson, author of Girl on the Golden Coin"Morgan's transportive words will sweep you away to a time of magic, love, and loss. Simply hold on and enjoy this mesmerizing ride. " - Tish Thawer, award-winning author of The Witches of BlackBrook series "Epic relay race that gripped me from start to finish . Fiercely uncompromising and unsentimentally poignant, A Secret History of Witches will transfix you." - Michael Bishop About the Author Louisa Morgan is a pseudonym for award-winning author Louise Marley. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she and her Border Terrier, Oscar, ramble the beaches and paths of Washington State. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Death at an English Wedding: An English Village Murder Mystery (Murder on Location Book 7)

About the Author Sara Rosett is the author of the Ellie Avery mystery series. She is a military spouse and a professional organizer who finds mystery and mayhem as she moves around the country. Her articles and essays have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Military Wifes Soul, Georgia Magazine, Mystery Scene Magazine, and RT Book Reviews. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Antiquarian Bookplates: 55 Bookplates to Personalize Your Library

About the Author Potter Style , an imprint of the Crown Publishing group, is a high-end gift book and stationery line, specializing in lifestyle, design, art, fashion, humor, and DIY.

Witches' Wisdom Oracle Cards

Depraved Heart: A Scarpetta Novel (Kay Scarpetta)

Review “Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who keeps us coming back to Patricia Cornwell’s sprawling crime novels, is one tough broad. … Once Scarpetta decides to ferret out Lucy’s secrets, the novel becomes more of a psychological thriller.” — New York Times Book Review “Scarpetta’s current case, Lucy’s troubles with the Feds, and Carrie’s spooky blast from the past are all on an inevitable collision course, and Cornwell shows surprising restraint in reining in her plot and keeping it tightly focused on her well-developed core characters.” — Publishers Weekly “Another gritty, world-weary tale of mayhem by masterful mysterian Cornwell. . . . Terse and tangled, messy and body-fluidy, and altogether satisfying.” — Kirkus Reviews “Dark and cleverly plotted.” — Booklist “Cornwell’s demonic plot shifts and changes almost page by page, so the reader’s spun round not knowing what to believe… This intense rush of a mystery will keep you guessing up until the very scary conclusion.” — Providence Journal “Another gritty, world-weary tale of mayhem by masterful mysterian Cornwell. . . . Terse and tangled, messy and body-fluidy, and altogether satisfying.” — Kirkus Reviews “Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who keeps us coming back to Patricia Cornwell’s sprawling crime novels, is one tough broad. . . . Once Scarpetta decides to ferret out Lucy’s secrets, the novel becomes more of a psychological thriller…” — New York Times Book Review “Heart-stopping, paranoia-fueled, propulsively readable, viscerally suspenseful, disconcertingly shifty… Cornwell’s demonic plot shifts and changes almost page by page, so the reader’s spun round not knowing what to believe… This intense rush of a mystery will keep you guessing up until the very scary conclusion.” — Providence Journal From the Back Cover Dr. Kay Scarpetta is working a highly suspicious death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when an emergency alert sounds on her phone. A video link seems to be from her niece Lucy. But how can it be? It’s clearly a surveillance film of Lucy taken almost twenty years ago. As Scarpetta watches she comes to grips with frightening secrets about her niece. That first clip and others sent soon after raise dangerous implications that increasingly isolate Scarpetta and leave her confused, alarmed, and not knowing where to turn. The diabolical presence and singularly “depraved heart” behind what unfolds seems obvious—but strangely, not to the FBI. Certainly that’s the message they send when they start harassing Lucy and begin building a case that could send her to prison for the rest of her life. In the latest novel in her bestselling series featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell captivates readers again with the jolting twists, high-wire tension, and cutting-edge forensic detail for which she is renowned, proving yet again why she is the world’s number one bestselling crime writer. About the Author Patricia Cornwell is recognized as one of the world’s top bestselling crime authors with novels translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. Her novels have won numerous prestigious awards including the Edgar, the Creasey, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Prix du Roman d’Aventure. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Patricia has written a definitive book about Jack the Ripper, a biography, and three more fiction series among others. Cornwell, a licensed helicopter pilot and scuba diver, actively researches the forensic technologies that inform her work. She was born in Miami, grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston. Read more

A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers

From Publishers Weekly The Newbery Medal-winning, Caldecott Honor book about an imaginary inn belonging to William Blake, where remarkable guests are attended by an even more remarkable staff. Ages 4-8. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. About the Author Nancy Willard has loved William Blake’s poetry from the day she first heard it. While writing the poems in this book, she built a six-foot model of the inn, decorating it with moons, suns, stars, and prints of Blake’s paintings. The model with its residents—the characters that appear in this volume—stands in her living room. Nancy Willard published her first book when a high school senior—an inset in the Horn Book, which was called A Child’s Star. Formerly a lecturer in the English department at Vassar College, she is the author of a number of well-received children’s books, including Sailing to Cythera: And Other Anatole Stories and The Island of the Grass King: The Further Adventures of Anatole, both winners of a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. Alice and Martin Provensen have been honored by the Art Books for Children Citation of the Brooklyn Museum, by the Gold Medal for illustration of the Society of Illustrators, by exhibitions at the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and by being included on the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of the Year list on nine occasions.

Synchronized Sorcery (Witchcraft Mystery Book 11)

About the Author Juliet Blackwell is the pseudonym for the author of several historical novels, including The Vineyards of Champagne, The Lost Carousel of Provence, Letters from Paris, and The Paris Key. In addition to writing the beloved Witchcraft Mystery series and the Haunted Home Renovation series, she also coauthored the Agatha Award-nominated Art Lover's Mystery series. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master's degrees in anthropology and social work. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Review Lind deftly combines a smart and witty sleuth with entertaining characters. -- "Romantic Times, praise for the seires" --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 "I'm worried about Oscar," I said, twisting in my seat as I tried to get settled. The San Francisco-bound flight was still loading passengers, and the newest arrivals were doing that crablike shuffle down the narrow center aisle that was unique to modern air travel. The aisle seat to my right was occupied by a polite Parisian woman whose headphones discouraged conversation, at least with this chatty Texan. Fortunately for me, sitting on my left, by the window, was a sexy psychic named Sailor. Even though we in economy class were jammed elbow-to-elbow into cramped spaces with inadequate leg room, I didn't mind. I would have happily rested in Sailor's lap all the way from Paris, so enamored was I with my new husband. Husband. I still found that hard to believe. "And exactly why are you worried about Oscar?" Sailor asked with the strained patience of a private school headmaster. I gave him credit for refraining from rolling his dark, beautiful eyes. Sailor had been less than enthusiastic that Oscar, a shapeshifting pig and my ersatz witch's familiar, had accompanied us on our honeymoon. There was a reason I had invited Oscar along, of course: I had promised to help him search for his mother, who suffered under a curse that had turned her into a stone gargoyle. It's a long story, but the upshot was that I spent my honeymoon traipsing around Europe, checking out gargoyles adorning castles and cathedrals and manors, and mediating between the two most important fellas in my life-who had a habit of vying for my attention. "How is he going to get home?" I asked. "I would imagine the same way he got to Barcelona, to Paris, and to Budapest, as well as every other destination on our mind-bogglingly complicated honeymoon itinerary." Sailor intertwined his long, graceful fingers with mine, and I took a moment to gaze at our interlocked hands. The crystals in my antique druzy engagement ring sparkled, and our matching wedding bands-wrought of tiny intertwined vines of silver-gleamed in the overhead lights. "Hey, wife," Sailor said in a low, grumbly voice. "Remember Prague?" "Prague," I breathed, closing my eyes. "And the turret room?" "The turret room," I repeated, blushing at the memory of the beautiful, round room at the top of the medieval castle, with its ancient stone walls, plush window seat, and tall windows looking out across the red-tiled roofs of Prague. Not to mention what all had gone on beneath the down comforter in the turret's king-sized canopy bed. "Not easy cleaning up all those rose petals you manifested." Sailor gave me a barely-there smile and a smoldering look, and for a moment I forgot all about Oscar and the hustle and bustle of the boarding airplane. He continued, "Or that tapas bar in the market in Barcelona our first night?" "What about last night in Paris, in that little bistro with the carousel on the corner . . . ?" I sighed. "I loved everything we saw, and ate . . ." "And ate, and ate . . ." I laughed. Having spent several weeks touring Europe, I truly understood the phrase "the honeymoon period." It had been a glorious, romantic, blissful adventure to start our new life as a married couple. We weren't technically married, at least as far as the law was concerned, because my friend Bronwyn had not been able to get licensed in time to officiate, and Sailor's several-years-in-the-making divorce had not yet been finalized. But our handfasting, held in a redwood fairy circle, had been witnessed by our closest friends and family and sanctified by the woods-folk. We would legalize our union at city hall eventually, but regardless, ours was a true marriage in my witchy book. "It was a great honeymoon," I said. "It was. Would have been better without our porcine companion, but otherwise . . ." Sailor let out a soft "oof" as I poked him in the ribs. He chuckled. "All I'm saying is that it would have been nice not having to explain the presence of our 'pet pig' everywhere we went. I thought that poor bellboy at the Parador in Spain was going to run right off the parapet." The Parador was a tenth-century Moorish fortress turned castle turned hotel, perched atop a hill overlooking the city of Tortosa and the Ebro River. We stayed at a number of wonderful old castles in our travels, and the experience never lost its charm. Each and every one had made me feel like a princess. Except for the annoyance of lingering ghosts haunting those stone walls, but that was par for the course for me. My paranormal skill set does not include the ability to communicate with spirits, but they tend to sense my presence and often reach out. It's disconcerting for me, and I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for them. "It's hard to believe we're heading back to real life," I said. "I guess this means the honeymoon's over. Shall I start to nag you now?" "I think it's required. And I'll start scratching and making weird bodily noises." "Please don't." "I won't if you won't." "Deal." We kissed and sealed the deal. "I wonder how Calypso has handled things in my absence . . ." I said. "I sure hope Aidan is doing better." My last encounter with Aidan Rhodes, the head of the San Francisco Bay Area's magical community, had been horrifying: He had been covered in blood from terrible injuries sustained in a fight with a demon, wounds that required the kind of treatment modern medicine could not provide. I forced myself to take a deep breath and concentrate on the positives: Aidan was now under the care of my grandmother's skilled colleagues near Michoac‡n, Mexico, his recuperation aided by drawing upon the energy of the salt caves. Or at least I hoped so. Aidan and I did not always see eye to eye on things, but he understood my complicated past in a way few could, and had become a true friend. "Your grandmother told us last week that he's healing well, so it shouldn't be too much longer," said Sailor. Unlike me, Sailor carried a cell phone, which had made it possible for us to enjoy the occasional FaceTime with friends and colleagues while we were in Europe. "And just think: In the meantime you get to fulfill your egomaniacal ambition to be the Grand Poobah of Bay Area witches." "I have no such ambition," I scoffed. He raised one eyebrow. "I'm serious. I have no desire, none at all, to be a Grand whatever-you-said. I have no interest in being in charge. Really." I could hear that I protesteth a mite too much and added: "I do think I might handle certain things better than Aidan, but that's not the same thing as wanting to take over." "Sure about that?" Sailor looked amused. "Positive." I paused. "It's just that . . . running the San Francisco Bay Area magical community seems like a job for a woman." Sailor raised his eyebrow again. "Resorting to sexist arguments now, are we?" "No. But there's a reason the vast majority of witches are women," I said. "It's an energy thing. I simply think a woman should be in charge, that's all." "Well, that's good, because it seems you've inherited the job." "Temporarily inherited the job. I'm just filling in, remember." I sighed. "The worst part is there's always a lot of bureaucratic paperwork, and people wanting me to fix things all the time." "Repeat after me: 'I'll see what I can do.' Works every time." I laughed. "I'll keep that in mind." "And just for the record: When you do become the Bay Area's Grand Poobah, I'll be happy to fulfill my obligations as First Gentleman. I imagine there will be a lot of cocktail parties involved. I'm quite partial to a lovely platter of canapŽs." I ignored that. "Anyway, I can't wait to see Selena, and Bronwyn, and Maya, and Conrad, and all the others. . . . I wonder how business has been." "Didn't Bronwyn say your grandmother's coven has been helping out at the shop?" "She did, and that's what worries me," I said with a smile. "What do you want to bet there's not a sparkly garment left on the racks? Those old women are a flock of magical magpies." Most of the passengers had finally finished stowing their luggage and taken their seats, and the flight attendants began one last sweep through the cabins, shutting the overhead bin doors and soothing nervous fliers. I was reaching for the in-flight magazine in the seat pocket in front of me when the medicine bag I always wore around my waist started to hum. I looked up to see a late arrival burst onto the airplane. He was of average height and weight, with an olive complexion, dark eyes, and longish near-black hair, approximately my age. He wore a gleaming gold earring in his left ear, but otherwise there was nothing especially remarkable about him, certainly nothing to explain the sudden conviction that I knew him from somewhere. I wondered whether I might have met him years ago in Germany when I visited my father-a visit I could still only vaguely recall. If this fellow were somehow connected to my father, he might very well spell trouble. Our eyes locked as he proceeded down the aisle. He was some form of magical practitioner, I would bet my boots on it. My heart started to pound, the tingling at my waist still issuing its warning. Not that it was all that unusual for me to encounter another witch; after all, there were a lot more of my ilk walking around than most cowans-nonmagical folk-realized. But there was something about this mystery man that put me on edge. He averted his intense gaze as he passed our row. I craned my neck to follow his progress down the aisle, but there was nothing more of note: he proceeded to the rear of the plane, stowed his bag in an overhead compartment, and took a seat, disappearing from view. "Everything okay?" Sailor asked, following my gaze. He didn't miss much. "Sure," I said, and shook my head as if to clear my thoughts. By now the aircraft door had been shut, the flight attendants were in the aisle doing a choreographed dance demonstrating the use of seatbelts and flotation devices ("in the unlikely event of a water landing"), and the pilots behind the cockpit door were spinning up the engines as they prepared the airplane for departure. "Why do flight attendants always demonstrate how to put on a seatbelt?" I asked. "Is there a person alive who doesn't know how to operate a seatbelt?" "Hard to imagine, but once it's a rule, I guess they're compelled to tell us." Sailor glanced at me. "Feeling antsy?" "A bit. As anxious as I am to get back, it will be hard to return to real life." "We have a lot to do," agreed Sailor. "But we're very fortunate, all things considered." "Oh, I agree," I said. "Still. It's much more fun to travel and be waited on in restaurants and sleep in castles than to go to work and do laundry and pay bills." "Can't argue with you there. Among other things, we need to address the living situation, you and I." "And Oscar." "And Oscar," Sailor agreed in a weary voice. "Poor guy still hasn't found his mother, despite all those gargoyles we saw. I wonder if he'll ever stop looking." "All in good time, as your grandmother Graciela would say." "She also says: 'Just 'cause you put your boots in the oven don't make 'em biscuits.' I never figured out what that meant, either." He chuckled, and as the plane taxied into position on the runway I tried, without luck, to catch another glimpse of the mystery man. So I gazed instead at Sailor's hand, intertwined with mine, and wondered what our return to "real life" in San Francisco might hold, and how Sailor and I, as a couple, would transition from our glorious, carefree honeymoon back to real life, with all its cares and responsibilities. The plane's engines roared as we started down the runway and picked up speed, the rumbling of the wheels suddenly going silent as we lifted off of European soil. ÒWhat is that?Ó I asked eleven hours later as we circled San Francisco, preparing to land. "What 'that'?" "That shape, down there," I said, pointing at a brightly lit rectangle in the dark expanse of the bay waters below us. Sailor and I had exchanged seats halfway through the flight, so now he had to lean over me to look out the small window. "Must be a cargo ship of some kind," he said. "It's too big to be a cargo ship-look at it in comparison to the others. It looks more like an island, but which could it be?" "It's not Alcatraz, that's for sure," said Sailor, and our eyes met. Not long ago we had survived a series of harrowing encounters within the walls of the old federal penitentiary on the island. Both of us preferred not to be reminded of those experiences. I knew there were other islands in San Francisco Bay: Angel Island, Yerba Buena Island, Station Island, Belvedere, Alameda, plus a few lesser-known rocks poking out of the water. But none of them resembled what I was looking at. "Besides," I said. "Why would a cargo ship be lit up like a Christmas tree?" "All good questions," said Sailor, wrapping an arm around me and giving me a hug. "Perhaps you could look it up on the Internet, if you ever learn how to use the computer. So, how does it feel to come back to the City by the Bay?" "Truthfully? Like coming home." "Even though it's not Europe?" "Do I sound silly?" "Not at all," Sailor continued. "It sounds like you love where you live, and your friends and community. I'd say you're very lucky." "We're very lucky." I laid my head on his shoulder and gazed out the window as we flew past the city, skirted the bay, and finally set down on the soil of my adopted state. I was coming home to good friends and family. To my Haight Street vintage clothing shop, Aunt Cora's Closet, and to the temporary (I hoped) role as the head of the San Francisco Bay Area magical community. I was returning with scads of gifts for everyone, a few spellcasting items and souvenirs for myself, and one disappointed familiar. As well as a mysterious fellow passenger, a dozen rows behind us, who might just spell trouble. My medicine bag had continued to hum throughout the flight. The man with one gold earring might be out of sight, but he was most definitely not out of mind. --This text refers to the mass_market edition. Read more

Crucible: A Thriller (Sigma Force, 14)

Buttons and Blows: A Ghostly Fashionista Mystery (Ghostly Fashionista Mystery Series Book 4)

Power Thought Cards: A 64 Card Deck (Box Set)

About the Author Louise Hay was an inspirational teacher, incredible visionary, and self-help pioneer who educated millions since the 1984 publication of her bestseller, You Can Heal Your Life , which has more than 50 million copies in print worldwide and spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and many other TV and radio programs both in the U.S. and abroad. Renowned for demonstrating the power of affirmations to bring about self-healing and positive change, Louise was the author of more than 30 books, including the bestsellers The Power Is Within You and Heal Your Body . In addition to her books, Louise produced numerous audio and video programs, card decks, online courses, and other resources for leading a healthy, joyous, and fulfilling life. Louise was dubbed “the closest thing to a living saint” by the Australian media and in 1985, Louise began her famous support group, “ The Hayride ,” with six men diagnosed with AIDS. By 1988, the group had grown to a weekly gathering of 800 people and had moved to an auditorium in West Hollywood. In 1987, what began as a small venture in the living room of her home turned into Hay House, Inc. : the largest publisher of self-help books, events, and courses. Hay House has sold millions of books and products worldwide and now has offices in California, New York, London, Sydney, Johannesburg, and New Delhi. The non-profit Hay Foundation , established by Louise in 1986, continues to support organizations that enhance the quality of life for people, animals, and our environment. Websites: www.louisehay.com, www.hayhouse.com, and www.hayfoundation.org Facebook page: www.Facebook.com/LouiseLHayInstagram page: @hayhouseinc

Buried to the Brim (A Hat Shop Mystery)

Review “Fancy hats and British aristocrats make this my sort of delicious cozy read.” —Rhys Bowen , New York Times bestselling author of the Royal Spyness Mysteries, on the Hat Shop Mysteries   “A delicious romp through my favorite part of London with a delightful new heroine.” —Deborah Crombie , New York Times bestselling author, on the Hat Shop Mysteries   “The sharp writing and smart plotting are outstanding, and the surprising reveal and even more suspenseful chase will have readers at the edge of their seats. This stellar mystery sets a high bar for mysteries.” — Kings River Life Magazine , on the Hat Shop Mysteries   “Brimming with McKinlay’s trademark wit and snappy one-liners, Anglophiles will love this thoroughly entertaining new murder mystery series. A hat trick of love, laughter, and suspense, and another feather in [Jenn McKinlay’s] cap.” —Hannah Dennison , author of the Vicky Hill Exclusive! Mysteries, on the Hat Shop Mysteries About the Author A true Anglophile, New York Times bestselling author Jenn McKinlay loves all things British. In her idea of a perfect world, every day would include high tea or wearing a fabulous hat, or both. This adoration of all things U.K. inspired her to write the Hat Shop Mysteries, which are set in London, one of her most favorite cities in the world. She now gets to visit there regularly--for research purposes, of course. In addition to being the author of the Hat Shop Mysteries, Jenn also writes the Cupcake Bakery Mysteries, the Library Lover's Mysteries, the Bluff Point Romances, and the Happily Ever After Romances. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1  If I held my left hand just so, I could see the diamonds catch and scatter the light, even the dreary February light in London, into a million tiny rainbows. I, Scarlett Parker, was engaged to be married. Harry, excuse me, my fiancé, Harrison Wentworth, proposed to me a few months ago when we were visiting my parents in Connecticut, and I don't think my feet have touched terra firma ever since. And it's not just because of my spectacular ring, although this cushion cut Harry Winston did add a little something to the proposal, but rather because after dating all the wrong men, I finally found my Mr. Right.I held my hand over my heart and sighed."She's doing it again," Fee said. She was standing behind the counter in the middle of the hat shop."It's like a trance," Viv said. "Or perhaps a fit. It'll pass."I turned away from the front window, where I'd been arranging a new display of spring hats before I got distracted by my ring, and glanced at my cousin, Vivian Tremont, and her assistant, Fiona (Fee) Felton. They were both looking at me as if they were convinced I'd lost my mind.Viv's blue eyes, the only feature we shared, were narrowed and her lips pursed. Her long blond curls were piled on top of her head in a messy bun and she was dressed for warmth in a long pale green tunic sweater over charcoal tights and black boots. If I didn't love her so much, I'd loathe her for being so fairy-tale-princess pretty, but I did love her. She was the closest thing I had to a sister and when my life had imploded a few years ago, she was the one who sent for me, insisting I take my place as her partner in the hat shop that our grandmother Mim had bequeathed to us.Fee, Viv's assistant, had her head tipped to the side. Her chin-length corkscrew curls, highlighted with vibrant streaks of purple, bounced as she nodded in agreement with Viv's assessment. A beautiful woman, Fee was tall and lithe, with dark eyes and skin, and cheekbones you could slice cucumbers on. She'd been Viv's millinery apprentice while in fashion school but had become a full-time employee once she graduated. It was a good thing I adored her, too, because honestly, hanging out with these two knockouts could damage even the most well-adjusted girl's self-esteem.Despite a rocky start, I'd been in London for almost three years, and I couldn't imagine spending my days anywhere but our quaint little hat shop, Mim's Whims, on Portobello Road in Notting Hill. Being an American, the hat thing had always been a curiosity for me. Even when I came over to stay with Mim during my school holidays, I never quite understood the passion for hats that exists in Britain. Mim told me that wearing a hat is woven into the social fabric of being British. For the royal family, in particular, protocol dictates that they wear hats to all royal occasions. Royal and upper-class women rarely showed their hair in public before the 1950s, Mim explained, and so the hat remains relevant in British society.Personally, even though I love the beautiful hats Viv and Fee create, I still don't quite get it. Although, I have to admit, there is no better cure for a bad-hair day than one of Viv's exceptional designs."I'm not having a fit," I protested. I tossed my straight red hair over my shoulder in my most diva manner and tipped my nose up in the air. "I'm just happy. Can't a girl be happy without everyone thinking she's bonkers?"Viv and Fee exchanged a glance and then they broke into matching grins."We're just teasing you, yeah?" Fee said. Her nose ring caught the light as she turned her head to the side. She jerked her chin in the direction of the front door and said, "And if I'm not mistaken, here comes the reason you're so daft."I whirled around and my heart gave a flutter at the sight of the tall man with wavy brown hair and bright green eyes who was approaching our shop. Harry! I was so delighted to see my fiancé; I didn't realize he had someone with him until Viv let out a huff of disgust."Is that a dog?" she cried. "Is he bringing it into our shop?"Harry grinned at me as he pulled open the door, and it took all of my brain power to glance away from him and take in the petite woman and the adorable corgi who had entered the shop beside him."Yes, that's definitely a dog," Fee said. "Aw. Look. It's wearing galoshes and a mac."I glanced down. It was! As giddy as I was about seeing Harry, the sight of the stubby-legged canine in a raincoat about did me in. Totes adorbs! I hurried from the window and dropped to the floor beside the pup."Well, aren't you just the cutest thing?" I asked. I held out my hand so we could become acquainted and a cold, wet nose nuzzled my fingers."She used to greet me like that," Harry said. His tone was dry, and when I glanced up he was smiling ruefully at the woman beside him."By letting you sniff her hand?" the woman asked. She grinned. "That's odd. Is that a new thing you young kids do?"Harry laughed. "You're a regular card, Aunt Betty."Aunt Betty! I'd heard stories about her from Harry's parents. Mostly his father since Betty was his little sister. Everyone doted on Aunt Betty.She was a petite woman but very stylish in a later-year Audrey Hepburn sort of way with her long burgundy wool coat, a jaunty navy and white polka-dot scarf and large sunglasses. Harry gave her a one-armed hug. The obvious affection between them made me smile."Aunt Betty, may I introduce you to my friends? Vivian Tremont and Fiona Felton." He gestured to Viv and Fee behind the counter and then said, "And this is my beautiful fiancée, Scarlett Parker. Ginger, this is my absolute favorite aunt in the whole wide world, Betty Wentworth.""Delightful to meet you," I said. I stood up and shook her gloved hand.Aunt Betty gave Harry a side-eye. "I'm your only aunt.""That doesn't make it not true," he said. She laughed and swatted his arm."And who is your handsome companion?" I asked."She's not talking about me," Harry said. He sounded aggrieved."Well, you can't honestly expect to compete with my Freddy, now, can you, dear?" Aunt Betty asked Harrison. "I mean, look at his bum, it's shaped like a heart."A laugh came out my nose. I took a discreet peek at Freddy's behind underneath the bright yellow raincoat-yup, definitely in the shape of a fuzzy heart. Aw. I felt Harry's gaze upon me and tried to save myself."Let me clarify to salvage your self-esteem." I winked at him and turned to Betty. "Who is your handsome four-legged companion?"Aunt Betty smiled and turned to Harry. "I like her.""Everyone does," Harry said."His full name is Freddy Darling Wentworth, and he is handsome, isn't he?" Aunt Betty asked. "I mean, just look at him, all honey-colored with ears and a good snout. He's a perfect specimen of a corgi. He's descended from the same line as the Queen's dogs, you know.""Is he?" Fee asked. She came out from behind the counter and knelt in front of Freddy. A cold wet nose poked out from under the large yellow rain hat, and Freddy licked her fingers."Yes, he's a Pembroke Welsh corgi from the same lineage as the Queen's beloved Susan," Aunt Betty said."That's incredible," I said. "It's like having royalty in the shop. Last time we were so graced was when the Duchess of Sussex and the Duchess of Cambridge came for wedding hats.""You did not just compare a dog to the royals," Viv said. She looked utterly appalled.Viv is a monarchist and the royal family is sacrosanct. Probably because they buy a lot of her hats. Not that I'm saying her loyalty could be bought but there was definitely a fiscal relationship there, if you know what I mean. After all, when the Duchess of Sussex wore a particularly cute confection of Viv's, a pale pink cap with matching feathers and Swarovski crystals, the shop got hammered with orders for the same. I swear Viv made that identical hat for a month straight."No," I protested. I glanced at the others-only Harry looked like he was trying not to laugh. "Of course not. I just meant he's very much like a royal-you know, he's royal adjacent given that his family tree forks right into Buckingham Palace and all." They stared at me, not moved by my argument in the least. I felt compelled to add, "You know Queen Elizabeth would agree with me."Fee blew an errant curl out of her eyes. "She does have a point there. The Queen is absolutely mad about her dogs.""Howling mad, you might say," Harrison said with a mischievous grin.That seemed to break the tension."Pawsitively smitten." Viv chortled."She absolutely hounds people about them." Fee laughed.The three of them were in stitches while Aunt Betty looked at them in dismay. Naturally, I felt obliged to contribute, too, because I can be punny."We should call her Queen Elizabark," I said. I chuckled pretty hard. No one else did. Instead, they all went serious. Viv shook her head and Fee sighed. I glanced at Harry, the man who is supposed to have my back, and he winked at me. It was a pity wink. Honestly!"Nice effort, Ginger," he said."Nice effort?" I planted my hands on my hips. "Queen Elizabark-aw, come on, you know that's funny."Harry looked at Aunt Betty and said, "Americans." Then he shrugged. I swatted his shoulder, knowing it was all in good fun. At least, I'm pretty sure it was. I'd been trying to mix it up in their oh-so-droll British puns for years but with no real success as yet."There, there, dear." Aunt Betty patted my arm. "Not everyone has the gift of humor."I rolled my eyes. Someday I was going to have the last laugh."This is all very . . . whatever it is," Viv said. She gestured to us and then to Freddy. "But why is there a dog in my shop, potentially getting hair on my hats?""Funny you should ask, Viv," Harry said.I glanced at him. I knew that tone. This was the voice he used when he was feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Of course, being British, this meant most of the time. I honestly think part of the reason Harry loved me so much was because, being American, I do not have the same overdeveloped sense of unease about all things social."The thing is . . ." he began and paused. He put his hand on the back of his neck. I knew this tactic. It was a stalling maneuver Harry used when he was trying to think of exactly how to say something so that it wouldn't come out the wrong way. I crossed my arms. This was sure to be good. "The fact of the matter is, well, we were-""The point, dear," Aunt Betty said to Harry. "Get to the point."Harry looked from her to Viv. "Aunt Betty was hoping you could help Freddy out with his next run at the PAWS dog show.""The what?""PAWS dog show," Aunt Betty repeated. "Freddy's a contender."Viv frowned. She glanced down at the dog, who was looking up at her from under the brim of his bright yellow hat. "Me? Help Freddy?""That's right," Aunt Betty said. She nodded and clapped her hands in front of her chest. Her soft brown eyes sparkled with enthusiasm. "Harry says you're the best milliner in London.""Well, it would be bad form to argue with the truth, wouldn't it?" Viv asked.She attempted to look modest but it was a wasted effort. If there was one thing that was true about Viv, it was that she really was the best milliner in London, and I'm not biased because I'm her cousin and we're in business together. She really is extra special. And I can say this as the person who works with the clients and has to convince them that the giant birdcage Viv put on their Ascot hat really will light up their mentions in the society pages in the best possible way."Freddy has been runner-up in the PAWS dog show for three years running," Aunt Betty said. "This is his year, I know it. But he needs a little boost.""Well, given the lack of length in his legs, I can see that," Viv said. "But I'm not sure where I come in."Fee blew a curl out of her eyes and said, "Don't be thick, Viv, they clearly want you to design a hat for Freddy.""What?" Viv asked. Her frown stretched into a look of surprise. "I've never designed a hat for a dog before. I don't even know how it would stay on his head.""Chin strap," I said. She glanced at me. "Sorry, just thinking out loud.""I don't make hats with chin straps," Viv said. She looked insulted at the thought."Sure you do," Fee said. "Remember the darling lace-trimmed bonnets for the youngest flower girls in the royal . . ."Fee's voice trailed off under the power of Viv's glare.I figured I'd better mediate the situation before Viv hurt Aunt Betty's feelings and we ended up in an incident. I swear, my job was mostly to mitigate "incidents," which was ironic because it was an incident of my own that landed me here. Thankfully, I wasn't worried about Freddy's feelings, figuring he had enough self-esteem to manage a rejection from Viv."Come and sit down," I said to Harry and Aunt Betty. "Maybe if we hear more about what you need, we can help you."Viv shot me a dark look, which I ignored. I led both Harry and Aunt Betty over to the dark blue easy chairs we had grouped around a glass coffee table on the far side of the shop. This was where Viv did her consultations with clients, over tea and scones, going through our catalog to see what they required for an upcoming event, be it a wedding, funeral, graduation, garden party, you name it.Freddy trotted after his mama, sitting right at Aunt Betty's feet when she sat on the love seat. Harry sat beside her while Viv and I took the remaining chairs. Read more

The Shadowy Horses

Review "If you'd like a book to put you in mind of the Mary Stewarts of yesteryear, but which has a poetic style and energy all its own, I recommend The Shadowy Horses . Lass, I don't ken what more you could ask for." ― All About Romance "This was a fun enjoyable read, that sucked me on the first few pages. Easy to lose yourself in, and nicely paced." ― Jenny Loves to Read "If you have read Kearsley's books before and enjoyed them, you will enjoy this one as well. It is an entertaining book that I had a hard time putting down. For those who have not read a book by Susanna Kearsley yet, I highly recommend starting with this one, it is a great book!" ― The Book Garden "The last 30 pages were intense, heartbreaking, and wonderfully satisfying; I couldn’t have asked for a better conclusion." ― Luxury Reading "This one is going in my keeper pile" ― Burton Book Review "Research, detailing, description, and dialogue blend together seamlessly, none intrudes on the other, but each enriches the storytelling style of author Susanna Kearsley. I'm pleased to give this book five stars!" ― Between the Pages "THE SHADOWY HORSES is going on my favorites list for this year, and I'm so pleased to have discovered Susanna Kearsley's amazing writing talent." ― Book of Secrets "The characters are well rounded, from the mad Quinnell to Verity herself, as the ‘looking for adventure’ girl." ― Stephen C. Ormsby "One of the loveliest books ever written. Susanna Kearsley is a gifted story teller who will leave readers wanting more." ― Cayocosta72 Book Reviews "This story will not disappoint." ― Historical Novel Review Blog "The Shadowy Horses unfolds slowly and beautifully, combining mystery, history, romance, and the supernatural into an entrancing novel." ― Independent Publisher "I’ll be sure to read more books by her in the near future!" ― Quirky-Gurl Media "This is an author who is very talented with crafting believable characters, with creating an atmospheric setting, and with making the past come to life. Well done and I can't wait for my next Kearsley read!" ― Ageless Pages Reviews "A bit of everything, romance and a ghost that can't rest in peace." ― Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell "This plot is superbly constructed with wonderful prose." ― La Deetda Reads "I loved it." ― Kaetrin’s Musings "Ms. Kearsley writes in a very easy to read style that brings her places very much to life." ― Broken Teepee "I recommend this one without hesitation" ― The Eclectic Reader "This poetic novel will seduce readers with its beautiful prose and lush, vivid descriptions of the Scotland shore." ― RT Book Reviews "Kearsley’s tale is lush with romantic and ghostly threads." ― Kirkus Reviews "I have enjoyed Ms. Kearsley’s books and this one did not disappoint." ― My Book Addiction Reviews "Kearsley’s The Shadowy Horses is a decadent treat which goes down smoothly and leaves you begging for more." ― The Modern Mnauscript "Do you love romantic suspense? Do you ever feel nostalgic about the Victoria Holt and Mary Stewart books you read in your girlhood? Are you apt to re-read Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca once a year? If so, you will very likely enjoy Susanna Kearsley's fine new novel, The Shadowy Horses ." ― The Romance Reader "The Shadowy Horses is a great novel and one that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to my friends! I can’t wait to read more from Susanna Kearsley!" ― Peeking Between the Pages "So a smooth, descriptive style, characters who breathe on the page, attention paid to the details of the action and the characters’ professions, a little humor, an intense growing love, a willingness on my part to believe the paranormal, they all lead to a great reading experience." ― Dear Author "I look forward to reading it and collecting this author's back list" ― Obsessed with Books "The story was captivating, the plot intriguing, and I could not put it down." ― Laugh Love Write "Kearsley’s lyrical prose brings the pages vividly alive with a breathtaking view into history and a captivating tale of romance, mystery, and ghostly apparitions" ― sherimelnick "You could probably call me a Kearsley fangirl, and this is the best one yet in my opinion." ― Lunatic Ramblings "Kearsley hooked me with just a few lines this spring when I read Mariana and it was the same with Shadowy Horses . She does an amazing job building the tension and suspense in her plots, setting up a gothically tinged atmosphere, spicing it up with a little romance, and completely enthralling the reader in the tale." ― No More Grumpy Bookseller "If you’re looking for an enjoyable, historical read with an equally good plot, give this book a try." ― Dear Olympia "One of the loveliest books ever written. Susanna Kearsley is a gifted story teller who will leave readers wanting more." ― Caycosta 72 - Book Reviews "I eagerly anticipated this novel and was not disappointed." ― Under the Boardwalk "I really liked the writing style in this book. Kearsley paints a vivid picture of the setting." ― Palmer’s Picks for Reading "The Shadowy Horses is a keeper that can be enjoyed again and again. It has layers and layers of actions, relationships, and emotions to be pondered." ― Long and Short Reviews About the Author New York Times , USA Today , and Globe and Mail bestselling author Susanna Kearsley is a former museum curator who loves restoring the lost voices of real people to the page, often in twin-stranded stories that interweave present and past. Her award-winning novels have been published in translation in more than 25 countries. She lives near Toronto. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 The bus had no business stopping where it did. We should have gone straight on across the Coldingham Moor, with Dunbar to the back of us and the English border drawing ever nearer, but instead we stopped, and the shaggy-faced cattle that lifted their heads on the far side of the fence appeared to share my surprise when the driver cut the engine to an idle. A fierce blast of wind rocked the little ten-seater bus on its tires and drove a splattering of cold spring rain against the driver's windshield, but he took no notice. He shook out a well-thumbed newspaper and settled back, humming tunelessly to himself. Curious, I shifted in my seat to peer out my own fogging window. There seemed, at first glance, nothing to stop for, only the cattle and a few uninterested sheep, picking their way across a ragged landscape that was turning green reluctantly, as if someone had told it only yesterday that spring had come. Beyond the moor, lost somewhere in the impenetrable mist, rose the wild, romantic Lammermuir Hills I'd read about as a child. And in the opposite direction, although I couldn't see it either, the cold North Sea bit deep into the coastal line of cliffs. The wind struck again, broadside, and the little bus shuddered. I sighed, and watched my breath condense upon the chattering window glass. Impulsiveness, my mother always said, was one of my worst flaws, second only to my habit of speaking to strangers. After twenty-nine years I'd grown accustomed to her heavy sighs and shaking head, and to her firm conviction I'd end up a sad statistic on the nightly news. But now, as I squinted out at the bleak, unwelcoming scenery, I grudgingly admitted that my mother had a point. It had been impulse, after all, that had brought me from my London flat to Scotland in the first place. Impulse, and the slick, persuasive writing style of Adrian Sutton-Clarke. He knew me too well, did Adrian, and he had phrased his summons craftily―his promise of "the perfect job" set like a jewel at the center of a long letter that was so deliciously mysterious, so full of hints of grand adventure, that I couldn't possibly resist it. Adrian, for all his faults, had rarely steered me wrong. And if today was anything to go by, I decided, he hadn't been lying about the adventure. Not that one could really blame British Rail for what had happened. My train had certainly set out from King's Cross cheerily enough, and even after we'd spent twenty minutes on a siding waiting for a points failure to be corrected, the engine had pushed ahead with vigor, determined to make up the time. It was only after our second delay north of Darlington, because of sheep on the line, that the train had begun to show signs of weariness, creaking and rolling from side to side in a rocking motion that lulled me instantly to sleep. I had stayed sleeping right through Durham, then Newcastle, and finally Berwick upon Tweed, where I was meant to get off. When the train lurched to a stop at Dunbar, I'd scrambled down onto the platform with the familiar resigned feeling that told me I was lost. Well, not so much lost, really, as diverted. And the fact that my train had been an hour late coming into Dunbar proved something of a complication. "You might have taken the 5:24," the stationmaster had informed me, in an effort to be helpful, "or the 5:51. But they've both gone. There'll not be another train to Berwick now till 7:23." "I see." Nearly an hour and a half to wait. I hated waiting. "I don't suppose there's a bus?" "To Berwick? Aye, there is, at..." he'd searched his clockwork memory for the time, "...6:25. Just round the corner, there, and up the road a ways―that's where it stops." And so I'd wrestled my suitcase round the corner and up the road to the small bus shelter, my spirits lifting somewhat as I read the posted timetable telling me the bus to Berwick traveled via Cockburnspath and Coldingham and Eyemouth. Eyemouth, Adrian had written in his letter, pronounced just as it looks, and not like Plymouth, if you please. You'd love it here, I think―I remember how you waxed rhapsodic about the north coast of Cornwall, and this is rather better, a real old-fashioned fishing town with smugglers' ghosts round every corner and the added lure of... but no, I shan't give the secret away. You'll just have to come and find out for yourself. I'd have been only too happy to oblige, I thought wryly, but for the fact that I was now stuck in the middle of Coldingham Moor, with the bus idling on and the driver still reading his newspaper. There seemed little point in questioning the stop; apart from a couple of love-struck kids fondling each other at the rear of the bus, I was the only passenger. And the driver was bigger than me. Still, my curiosity had almost reached breaking point when he finally folded his paper with a decisive rattle, sat himself upright, and pulled on the lever to open the door. A man was coming across the moor. It might have been the fogged window, or the wild weather, or the rough and rolling landscape that, like all the Scottish Borderlands, held traces of the harsh and violent past―the echoed din of charging hooves, of chilling battle-cries and clashing broadswords. Whatever it was, it tricked my senses. The man, to my eyes, looked enormous, a great dark giant who moved over bracken and thorn with an effortless stride. He might have been a specter from a bygone age, a fearless border laird come to challenge our rude intrusion on his lands―but the illusion lasted only a moment. The stranger pulled his collar tighter against another punishing blast of wind and rain and jogged the final few steps to the bus door. No border laird, just a rather ordinary-looking man in his mid-thirties, fit and broad-shouldered and thoroughly modern in jeans and a leather jacket. Well, I amended as he smoothed back his curling black hair and grinned at the bus driver, maybe not exactly ordinary-looking... "Heyah," he greeted the driver, swinging himself up the final step. "Saw me coming, did you?" "Aye, well, ye do stick out, lad. Thought I might as well wait for ye, save ye the walk back." The doors swung shut and, joy of joys, the bus sprang forward once again as the new passenger dropped into the seat across from me, planting his feet wide apart on the floor to brace himself. He and the driver chatted on like old friends, which I supposed they were, about the state of the weather and the latest rebellion of the bus driver's daughter and the health of the younger man's mother. It had been some years since I'd spent time in Scotland, and I'd forgotten just how musical the accent was. This was a thicker accent than I was accustomed to, and I couldn't catch each word as it was spoken, but I did my level best to follow the conversation. Just for practice, I told myself. Not because I was interested. The bus rattled noisily over the moor, dipped into Coldingham town and stopped for a moment to let off the teenagers. Shifting round in his seat, the bus driver sent me a courteous glance. "You're for Eyemouth, lass, aren't ye?" "Yes, that's right." The man from the moor lifted an eyebrow at my accent, and glanced over. For a moment, my mother's face rose sternly in my mind. Never talk to strangers... But I pushed the image back and sent the man a friendly smile. The bus driver carried on speaking, over his shoulder. "Are ye up here on holiday?" Having received little response from the man opposite, I turned my smile on the driver instead. "Interviewing for a job, actually." "Oh, aye?" He'd politely modified his speech, as most Scots did when talking to a non-Scot, and though the accent was still there I found him easier to understand. "What kind of job?" Well, that was just the question, wasn't it? I didn't really know, myself. "Museum work, of sorts," I hedged. "I'm interviewing with a man just outside Eyemouth―" The dark man from the moor cut me off. "Not Peter Quinnell, surely?" "Well, yes, but..." "Christ, you don't mean to say you're Adrian's wee friend from London?" He did smile then, and the simple act transformed his rugged face. "We'd not expected you till tomorrow. David Fortune," he held out his hand by way of introduction. "I work with Quinnell as well." I shook his hand. "Verity Grey." "Aye, I ken fine who you are. I must say," he confessed, leaning back again, "you're not at all as I pictured you." Everyone said that. Museum workers, I had learned, were supposed to be little old ladies in spectacles, not twenty-nine-year-olds in short skirts. I nodded patiently. "I'm younger, you mean?" "No. It's only that, with Adrian recommending you, I'd have thought to find someone... well, someone..." "Tall, blonde, and beautiful?" "Something like that." I couldn't help smiling. I was, to my knowledge, the only dark-haired woman who'd ever received so much as a dinner invitation from Adrian Sutton-Clarke, and I'd held his interest only until the next blonde came along. But while our romance had proved temporary, our separate paths, by virtue of our work, kept crossing and re-crossing like some fatalistic web. Truth be told, I probably saw more of Adrian now than I had when we were dating. When one wasn't actually in love with the man, he could be a quite enjoyable companion. Adrian, at least, understood the restless, independent streak that had made me chuck my British Museum job and strike out on my own to freelance. And he'd learned I never could resist a challenge. I studied the man across from me with interest, bringing all my powers of deduction to bear. I had already assumed, since Adrian was involved, that the job for which I was being interviewed involved some sort of archaeological dig. Adrian was one of the best surveyors in the business. I glanced at David Fortune's hands, and ventured to test my theory. "How large is the excavation, then?" I asked him. "How many field crew members are on site?" "Just the four of us, at the moment." "Oh." For a moment I was tempted to ask what they were all digging for, and why, but I held my tongue, not eager to let on that I'd come all this way not knowing. He looked down, at my single suitcase. "You've just come up from London, then?" "Yes. I'm a day early, I know, but the job did sound intriguing and I really couldn't see the point in waiting down in London when I could be waiting here, if you know what I mean..." His eyes held understanding. "Aye. I wouldn't worry. Quinnell's an impatient man himself." The sea was close beside us now. I could see the choppy froth of waves beyond the thinning wall of mist, and the jutting silhouettes of jagged rocks. The rain had stopped. Between the racing clouds a sudden gleam of sunlight flashed, and disappeared, and flashed again, and finally stretched a searching finger out to touch the clustered houses curving round the coast ahead of us. The town of Eyemouth looked to me like a postcard view of a fishing village, its buildings tumbling in a tight cascade down to the sea wall while a gathering of gulls wheeled and dipped above the rooftops, marking the place where the harbor, yet unseen, cut back into the greening cliffs. The sunbeam, I decided, held a pleasant sort of promise. And somewhere, not too far away, the mysterious Peter Quinnell was looking forward to meeting me. I leaned forward as the bus dived in among the houses. "Where would you recommend I stay?" I asked my new acquaintance. "Is there a guest house, or a nice hotel?" "You'll not be staying in the town?" He raised his eyebrows, clearly shocked. "Christ, Quinnell wouldn't hear of it. He's had a room made up for you at Rosehill, at the house." I stared at him. "Oh, but I couldn't..." "You want the job?" "Yes." "Then don't offend the management," was his advice. He softened it with a smile. "Don't worry. They're all nice people, out at Rosehill. They'll make you feel at home." The bus driver flicked a glance up at his mirror, met my eyes, but didn't say anything. I frowned. "It's just that I prefer to stay on my own, that's all. I don't like to impose..." "You'll not be imposing. Quinnell loves his company." "I'm sure he does. But if he doesn't hire me, it might prove awkward." "Oh, he'll hire you," said David Fortune, with a nod of certainty. "That is, he'll offer you the job, make no mistake. Whether you accept or not, well... that's for you to say." Something in the offhand way he said that made me tilt my head, suspicious. "Why wouldn't I accept?" "Have you eaten, yet?" he asked, as if I hadn't spoken. "You haven't, have you? And it's Thursday night, this―Jeannie's night off. There'll be no supper on at the house." He turned to the bus driver, who was following our exchange with interest. "Danny, do us a favor, will you, and drop us at the harbor road?" "The Ship Hotel?" the driver checked, and glanced again at me. "Aye, it'd be no trouble. It widnae do for the lass to face old Quinnell on an empty stomach." My suspicions growing, I slowly turned to look at David Fortune, but his expression was charmingly innocent. So charming, in fact, that I scarcely noticed when the bus stopped moving. It wasn't until I felt the sudden blast of chill from the open door that I finally stirred in my seat. Gathering up my suitcase, I tossed a word of thanks to the driver and clambered down the steps to solid ground. The wind had grown colder. It struck me like a body blow and might have knocked me over if the man at my side hadn't taken the suitcase from me, placing a large hand at my back to guide me up along the harbor's edge. The tide was very high, and the fishing boats creaked at their moorings, masts and rigging swaying with the motion of the water. If my mother saw me now she'd have a heart attack, I thought. She'd always had a thing about the seamy side of harbor life―a half-imagined paranoiac world of smugglers, cutthroats, pirates, and white-slavers. I took another look up at the great dark figure walking at my shoulder. David Fortune did look a shade piratical, come to think of it, with his black unruly hair curling in the wind and the flat gray light of early evening sharpening the line of his stubborn jaw. His nose, in profile, was not quite straight, as though it had been broken in a fight. And I had only his word for it, after all, that he had anything to do with Peter Quinnell, or with Adrian Sutton-Clarke, or with... "Here we are," he told me, as a sprawling white pub rose at the next corner to welcome us. He had leaned down so that his voice would carry through the wind, and I caught the swift warmth of his cheek close by my face. Oh, well, I thought. Pirate or no, he was easy to look at, and I was, to be honest, in need of a drink and a plate of hot food. There were two doorways into the Ship Hotel―one that led into the main public bar, and the other to the dining lounge. David Fortune steered me through the latter. I felt instantly warmer, out of the wind, with the light bursting clear and inviting from rose-tinted fixtures hung high on the cream stuccoed walls. Round wooden tables hugged the wainscoting and nestled in padded alcoves that enticed one to sit and relax. Through an open door behind the bar I could just glimpse a larger, less fancified room where coarse cheerful voices competed with piped-in music, but on this side of the door even the bar held a touch of elegance, its gleaming rows of bottles artistically illumined by a line of recessed lights. A few of the tables were already occupied. David Fortune plucked a menu from the bar and chose a table for us in a window alcove. Leaning back against the padded bench, he stretched his legs out so his feet disappeared under the bench on my side. "Take a look at that, then," he offered, handing the menu over. "And order what you like; the bill's on Quinnell. He'd not want to see you starve." The mention of Peter Quinnell's name brought my earlier misgivings sharply into focus. "Listen," I began, frowning slightly, "there isn't anything wrong with the job, is there?" He raised his eyebrows, but before he could respond the barmaid came through from the other side and sent us a welcoming smile. "Heyah, Davy. How's your mum?" "As much of a witch as she ever was." His tone was indulgent. "Is Adrian about?" "Upstairs, I think. Do you want me to fetch him?" "Aye, if you would. But first, give us a..." He paused, looked at me, eyes enquiring. "What'll you have?" "Dry white wine, please." "And a pint of Deuchers for me, there's a love." As the barmaid departed, I gave in to my curiosity. "Adrian's upstairs?" "Oh, aye. We both have rooms here. There's just the one spare room at Rosehill, and Quinnell wanted to save that for you, so he's put us both up here instead." Our drinks arrived. I watched him down a mouthful of the dark foaming beer, and frowned again. "Isn't that rather inconvenient?" He shook his head. "It's only a mile out to the house. I like the walk." I tried to imagine Adrian Sutton-Clarke walking a country mile to work each morning, and failed. Adrian, I knew, would use his car. A door from the corridor opened and closed and a tall, lean-faced man with mahogany hair shook his head and came, smiling, toward us. "Verity, my dear, you really must learn some respect for schedules," he teased me, bending down to brush my cheek with an affectionate kiss of greeting. "Friday, last time I checked, comes after Thursday, and you did say Friday." "Hello, Adrian." It always took me a moment to adjust to the sheer impact of his handsome face, even now. Each time I met up with him I kept hoping, rather foolishly, that he'd have chipped one of his teeth, or that his dark, long-lashed eyes would be puffy and bloodshot, but each time he turned up just as perfect as ever, a six-foot-two package of pure sex appeal, and invariably knocked me off center. Only for a moment, and then memory reasserted itself and I was fine. David Fortune had misinterpreted the involuntary change in my expression. He drained his pint and rose politely. "Look, I'll leave you to it, shall I? I could do with a shower and a lie-down, myself. See you both tomorrow." Slanting a brief look down at me, he stabbed the menu with a knowing finger. "Try the lemon sole, it's magic." Adrian slid into the vacant seat opposite and favored me with a curious stare. "Just how," he asked me, when we were alone, "did you come to meet Fortune? Or do I want to know?" "We were on the same bus. We got talking." "Ah." He nodded. "The bus from Berwick." "Dunbar, actually." The waitress came. I closed my menu, and ordered the lemon sole. Adrian leaned back, contentedly. "I know I'm going to regret asking this," he said. "But how, if you came up from London, presumably on the train, did you end up on a Berwickshire bus from Dunbar?" I explained. It took some time, and I was nearly finished with my meal by the time I'd told him everything, beginning with the sheep on the line at Darlington. Adrian shook his head in disbelief and reached for his cup of coffee. "You see? If you'd waited until tomorrow, like you were supposed to, none of that would have happened." I shrugged. "Something worse might have happened. You never know." "True. Confusion does rather seem to follow you around, doesn't it?" "So tell me," I changed the subject, balancing my knife and fork on my empty plate, "what exactly is this job you've recommended me for?" Adrian folded his arms and smiled like the devil. "As I recall, I told you I'd explain everything on Friday." "When I arrived, you said." "On Friday. And today's only Thursday." "Oh, give it up..." "But I'm sure Quinnell will be happy to tell you anything you want to know, when you meet him." "That's hardly fair," I pointed out. "I'm meeting him tonight." "So you are. Finished with that, have you? Good. Then let's get you out to Rosehill so you can settle in." "Rat," I called him, holding back my smile. Ten minutes later, seated in his car and speeding inland from the harbor, I tried again. "The least you can do," I said evenly, "is tell me what's wrong with the job." "Wrong with the job?" He flashed me a quick sideways glance, eyebrows raised. "Nothing's wrong with the job. It's a great opportunity, wonderful benefits―Quinnell's a disgustingly wealthy man, so the pay is obscene. And you get room and board with it, holidays, travel allowances... it's a marvelous job." "You're certain of that?" "Lord, yes. You don't think I'd have lured you up here otherwise, do you?" Again the rapid glance. "Why the sudden lack of trust?" I shrugged. "Just something your Mr. Fortune said, in passing." "Oh, yes?" "He was sure that I'd be offered the job," I explained. "He wasn't so sure I'd accept." Adrian digested this thoughtfully. We were well out of town, now, and the road was dark. I couldn't see his eyes. "I suppose," he said slowly, "that he might have been thinking of Quinnell himself. Of how you'd react." "React to what?" "To Quinnell." I sighed, tight-lipped. "Adrian..." "Peter Quinnell," he told me, "is a fascinating old character―well-read, intelligent, one of a kind." He turned his head so I could see the half-apologetic smile. "But I'm afraid that he's also quite mad." Read more

THE VICARAGE MURDER an addictive crime mystery full of twists (Monica Noble Detective Book 1)

The Cracked Spine: A Scottish Bookshop Mystery (A Scottish Bookshop Mystery, 1)

Review “Move over Claire Fraser; American bibliophile Delaney Nichols is about to take Scotland-and legions of cozy mystery readers-by storm! As warm and inviting as a cup of tea and a serving of fresh-from-the-oven shortbread. Readers will fall in love with The Cracked Spine .” ― Ellery Adams, New York Times bestselling author of the Books By The Bay Mysteries “Shelton pens a perfectly twisty-turny puzzler of a mystery in The Cracked Spine . With the engagingly bookish, amateur sleuth Delaney Nichols leading the way around the richly detailed city of Edinburgh, the reader is fully immersed in her world as she tries to expose the lies and deceptions that hide the brutal truth behind a murder. Full of wit and whimsy, with a clever plot and delightful characters, this mystery is a fantastic read!” ― Jenn McKinlay, New York Times bestselling author of the Cupcake Mysteries “A great read for book lovers, mystery seekers, and anyone who enjoys a determined new heroine. Sure to be a winning series.” ― Erika Chase, nationally bestselling author of Read and Buried “Kilts, killers, and a keen sleuth ... oh my! Ms. Shelton has crafted a foolproof plot, endearing characters, and prose that immediately transports readers to enchanting Edinburgh ... and leaves them eager for a return trip. Readers will be delighted with this new series.” ― Lucy Arlington, New York Times bestselling author of the Novel Idea Mysteries “With a wee bit of the brogue, Paige Shelton weaves a Scottish tale of mystery and intrigue filled with a quirky cast of characters, including the clever Delaney Nichols, an American fish-out-of-water who believes in the magic of books. You will want to make repeat visits to The Cracked Spine .” ― Daryl Wood Gerber, nationally bestselling author of The Cookbook Nook Mysteries About the Author PAIGE SHELTON had a nomadic childhood, as her father's job as a football coach took her family to seven different towns before she was even twelve years old. After college at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, she moved to Salt Lake City. She thought she'd only stay a couple years, but instead she fell in love with the mountains and a great guy who became her husband. After many decades in Utah, she and her family moved to Arizona. She writes the Scottish Bookshop Mystery series and the Alaska Wild series. Her other series include the Farmers’ Market, Cooking School, and Dangerous Type mystery series.

A Killer Keepsake (Antiques & Collectibles Mysteries Book 6)

About the Author Ellery Adams is the New York Times bestselling author of the Books by the Bay Mysteries and the Charmed Pie Shoppe Mysteries. Ellery has held many jobs, including caterer, retail clerk, car salesperson, teacher, tutor, and tech writer, all while penning poems, childrens books, and novels. She now writes full-time from her home in Virginia. Parker Riggs love of writing began as a teenager growing up in New Jersey penning short stories and poetry. Her dream to be a published author got set aside for a career in Washington, D.C. where, for two decades, she supported politicians and lawyers. Yet the dream never died. Pursuing her passion for mysteries, Parker is the author of the mystery novel Finding Jessica. She is also co-author of A Treacherous Trader , A Devious Lot , and A Killer Keepsake , the fourth, fifth, and sixth books in New York Times bestselling author Ellery Adams Collectible Mystery series. Parker lives in New Hampshire with her husband and an adorable mini-dachshund named Clarice. --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

The Lost Carousel of Provence

Review Praise for The Lost Carousel of Provence "Blackwell uses an outsider’s passion to shine a light into the dark past of a broken family and how a sweet, wooden rabbit can bring them together again."—The Associated Press“Plan your trip to Provence now. In this meticulously researched novel, Juliet Blackwell deftly navigates three time periods, taking us from contemporary California to both The Belle Époque and Nazi-occupied France as she spins a story as charming as an antique carousel.”—Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise “An untrusting American orphan meets a dysfunctional French family—and each turns out to possess wisdom that helps the other to heal from old, old wounds. With crystalline imagery, vivid characters and lively prose, Juliet Blackwell redefines what family means, in a way that will touch readers long after they've read the last page. As Cady points her camera at one antique carousel after another, this novel should come with a warning: Will cause enormous desire to travel to France.”—Stephen P. Kiernan, author of The Baker’s Secret “Narrating from several perspectives, Blackwell weaves together a tale of love lost, repressed passion, and finding a sense of belonging that should utterly charm and delight readers new to her and current fans alike.”— Booklist Praise for Letters from Paris “Blackwell seamlessly incorporates details about art, cast making, and the City of Light...[and] especially stuns in the aftermath of the main story by unleashing a twist that is both a complete surprise and a point that expertly ties everything together.”— Publishers Weekly “Best-selling author Blackwell brings us another captivating tale from the City of Light....this romantic and picturesque novel shows us that even the most broken people can find what makes them whole again.”— Booklist “Blackwell paints a picture of Paris that is both artistically romantic and realistically harsh...A compelling story of Paris, art, and love throughout history.”— Kirkus Reviews “A great tale of mystery, artistry, history, and a little romance. With plenty of backstory and tidbits about Parisian life in the 19th century, there's something for everyone in this recommended read."— Library Journal Praise for The Paris Key “A charming protagonist and a deep well of family secrets, all gorgeously set in the City of Lights.”—Michelle Gable, international bestselling author of I'll See You in Paris “[A] witty, warm, winsome novel...[Blackwell's] generation-spanning tale combines intrigue and passion with a flawless ear for language and a gift for sensory detail.”—Sophie Littlefield, bestselling author of The Guilty One About the Author Juliet Blackwell was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the youngest child of a jet pilot and an editor. She graduated with a degree in Latin American studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and went on to earn master’s degrees in anthropology and social work. While in graduate school, she published several articles based on her research with immigrant families from Mexico and Vietnam, as well as one full-length translation: Miguel León-Portilla’s seminal work, Endangered Cultures . Juliet taught medical anthropology at SUNY–Albany, was producer for a BBC documentary, and served as an elementary school social worker. Upon her return to California, she became a professional artist and ran her own decorative painting and design studio for more than a decade. In addition to mainstream novels, Juliet pens the New York Times bestselling Witchcraft Mysteries and the Haunted Home Renovation series. As Hailey Lind she wrote the Agatha Award–nominated Art Lover’s Mystery series She makes her home in northern California, but spends as much time as possible in Europe and Latin America. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2018 Juliet Blackwell Chapter 1 1901 Château Clement, Provence, France Josephine No one has seen. The château’s usual ranks of gardeners and servants, grape pickers and kitchen staff, have been joined by Monsieur Bayol’s crew of men hammering, sawing, sanding, and painting the newly arrived carousel. The cats, dogs, pigs, and rabbits were carved, painted, and gilded in Bayol’s factory in Angers, but it has taken nine men to transport the pieces by rail, then by steam traction engine from the station to the château, and then to assemble the machine on-site. It will take another two weeks, perhaps a month, to complete the elaborately decorated salon that will house the carousel. Josephine wishes it would take longer. She would be happy if they stayed forever. Especially the carver’s apprentice. She and the apprentice have placed confidence in each other; they will keep each other’s confidences. Josephine knows her neighbors think of her as secretive and scheming because she was not born here. She comes from faraway Bretagne, and yet she stole the heart of their local favorite, the eligible Yves Paul Clement, heir to Château Clement. Bretagne and Provence were meant to be part of France now, but deep-seated regional stereotypes and allegiances do not respect random borders. She understands. After all, before Yves brought her to Château Clement as a young bride, Josephine had always believed the Provençal people to be lazy, unfriendly, and afflicted with a harsh accent. She has found the accent and unfriendliness to be apt, but though her husband is accustomed to taking a sieste every afternoon, he is anything but lazy. Yves rises early to capture the light of dawn on his camera; he works late into the night in his darkroom. He is an educated gentleman: He reads in his library, he composes poetry, he draws. Unlike most in the region, he does not hunt. Instead, he observes and makes note of the birds that perch on the limbs of the plane trees and olive orchards: the short-toed lark and tawny pipit in spring, the red-crested pochard and moustached warbler in fall. Yves’s keen eyes observe the forest creatures, the turning of the leaves, the changing quality of the light throughout the day, throughout the seasons. By virtue of the incessant clicking of his cameras, he records the world around him. And yet, he does not see. Chapter 2 Present day Oakland Cady Anne Drake Cady had never realized how many empty platitudes people voiced when confronted with grief, how they felt compelled to say something, to say anything, in response to a situation that had no answer, no response. No solution. In point of brutal fact, there was nothing to say. Maxine had died. One moment she was there, Cady’s ever-present rock in the shifting sands of life. And the next she had fallen to the floor behind the register, struck down by a sudden heart attack. Maxine had disappeared into the ether, just like that, along with her snarky comments and wise eyes and calm, slightly haughty demeanor that never failed to assuage Cady’s inner demons. She was gone. No one else in this life would be lucky enough to know Maxine Caroline Clark. All that remained of the old woman was her shop, called Maxine’s Treasures, its junky (or artsy, depending on your perspective) inventory, and the back room, where Cady had set up her photography studio and darkroom. Even though Cady had no intention of taking over and managing Maxine’s antiques store, she wasn’t ready to give up her studio. Not to mention that she’d been living in the back room of the shop—which was not strictly legal—since she’d lost her relatively affordable apartment to a condo development several months ago. What now? Where would she go? What would she do? Maxine was family. She was all Cady had. A desperate, breathless weariness reached out its icy fingers to grip Cady’s bones. And it wasn’t the strain of carrying her wooden carousel figure, Gus. She saw reproach in the rabbit’s glass eyes as she maneuvered him into the shop; could this last shred of hope gone be her comeuppance for having tried to sell him? Maxine had given Gus to her ten years ago, on Cady’s wedding day. The marriage hadn’t lasted long, and the only thing Cady took from it—besides bitter experience—was Gus-the-rabbit. It was embarrassing to admit, but Gus had always made her feel . . . loved. According to Maxine, Gus was a genuine piece of carousel history, hand-carved by the famous French sculptor Gustave Bayol. Which would have meant he was worth thousands—maybe tens of thousands. But this morning Cady’s last-ditch financial dreams had been dashed by an earnest young man named Scott Ripley. Peering through a huge magnifying glass, the Antique Forum’s acknowledged expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European carvings had examined the rabbit’s loosening joints, noting how the bands of basswood had pulled away from one another at the tops of the legs, and the gap where the neck section met the body. Carousel figures are hollow, built like boxes with slats of wood joined, laminated, then carved, and primed to conceal the joints. Not only were the sections falling apart—Gus’s ears were now barely connected to his slightly tilted head—but the bright paint and gold gilding were flaking off, with gesso primer showing through in patches. At long last Ripley had straightened, shrugged, and pronounced: “It’s not a Bayol.” “You’re wrong,” Cady said. “Look again.” “Your rabbit is most probably European, and from Bayol’s era, at the turn of the twentieth century. In some ways, it is very much in his style; Bayol carved farmyard animals with sweet expressions like this one, so that fits. But a hallmark of Bayol’s carvings was their simplicity. His work almost never included flourishes like the lily of the valley here,” he said, pointing to the offending flower. “And this rose carved in high relief, with the detailed thorns? I don’t even know what to say about that.” “But Bayol did custom work, right?” Cady replied. “Couldn’t a client have asked for the flowers?” He shook his head. “I know Bayol’s work well; I’m also very familiar with the American carvers Dentzel, Looff, and Carmel. Like all artists, carousel carvers leave their imprints on their work, like signatures. Also, Bayol nearly always attached a small plaque to the saddles of his carved animals, and yours doesn’t have one. Your rabbit might have been carved by one of Bayol’s apprentices, or a competitor—if you could establish its provenance, it would be worth more.” Cady’s impulse was to argue with Ripley, to rail at him and cast aspersions on his professional qualifications, not to mention his parentage. But it wasn’t his fault. Maxine had been wrong. It wasn’t surprising: Maxine always had insisted upon seeing possibilities in the junk other people threw away. So Cady had concentrated on reining in her emotions, fighting an almost overwhelming, and wholly uncharacteristic, urge to burst into tears. Get it together, Drake, she had scolded herself. We’ve been in worse situations than this one. Much, much worse. We’ll just have to come up with another plan. As a child Cady had developed the quirk of using the royal “we” when talking to herself; otherwise the only “we” in her world was wishful thinking. Later, the “we” came to mean Cady and Maxine, and finally, now, Cady and Gus-the-rabbit. It was a silly, childish habit, but Cady had more important things to worry about these days, such as where she was going to get the money to escape the wildly expensive San Francisco Bay Area, to move to a town where normal people could work a regular job and afford a decent place to live, and where she could become a foster mom, or maybe even adopt a child. The thought of change terrified her, but she was desperate to create the sort of family that she’d always wanted for herself. True, being a photographer wasn’t the best career option in a small town, but she didn’t care what she did for a living. She wasn’t proud. The important thing was to start over. To reinvent herself. Cady yearned for the anonymity of a second chance, a clean slate, a tabula rasa. To make a home someplace where no one knew where she came from, where no one knew she had nothing and no one. No family connections, no Maxine, no . . . baby. Without volition her hand went to her stomach. The only bump there now was from stress-eating her way through countless bags of potato chips and boxes of Petit Écolier cookies—scraping off the chocolate in an embarrassingly juvenile ritual—as she sat on the couch for weeks, watching endless reruns of Hoarders. The nurse in the emergency room had smelled of antiseptic and was very nice in the impersonal way of a kindhearted person saddled with far too much to do. She had instructed Cady to finish the round of prophylactic antibiotics, to abstain from sex for six weeks (no problem there—Cady couldn’t imagine being intimate, ever again, with anyone), to get plenty of rest, and to be prepared for sudden hormonal shifts as her body adjusted to what her medical chart referred to as an “SAB”: spontaneous abortion. The baby Cady had accidentally conceived in an exceedingly rare one-night stand, then after weeks of fear and trembling had decided to keep and come to love, had been lost in a gruesome rush of pain and cramps and blood, a gutting experience referred to simply as an SAB. An SAB. Cady’s appalling, alien urge to cry must be due to shifting hormones. Nothing more. Surely. First Maxine had died. Then Cady’s own body had betrayed her. And now, even her precious carousel rabbit had turned out not to be who she’d always thought he was. Cady was on a merry-go-round, and no matter how fast she galloped, she kept winding up at the same place. Her eyes stung, tears threatening. So . . . okay. Maybe she would allow herself a few quick minutes of weeping in the back of the shop, while cursing Mr. Scott Ripley of the Antiques Forum and his so-called expertise. Then she would come up with a new plan. Chapter 3 Present day Oakland Cady The banging on the door wouldn’t stop. Cady had hung the Closed sign on the window of the shop door, alongside a note about Maxine’s death. But some of Maxine’s regular customers could be as persistent and annoying as a broken tooth. “Go away!” she yelled from the back room. The banging continued. She turned the television volume up. “Cady?” A woman’s voice. Olivia. Cady often thought of Maxine as the only person in the world who loved her, but there was also Olivia Gray. They had met years ago, right after Cady got divorced, in an adult education course on photography—genuine, old-fashioned photography and film development, taught by a cranky old man who didn’t take to what he called “that modern digital crap.” Olivia was everything Cady wasn’t but had always wanted to be: pretty, petite, quick to smile at others and to laugh at herself. It was the first time Cady had understood the concept of a girl crush; she was enamored, sneaking glances under her bangs during class, following Olivia out to the vending machines during break. One night the machine ate Olivia’s rumpled dollar. She banged on it ineffectually and yelled, “Gol-darn it!” Cady had never heard anyone say something like that except on television. “Early training,” Olivia explained to Cady, with an embarrassed smile and a chagrined little shrug. “My mom’s a stickler for polite language. If she gets really, really mad she might say, ‘Dammit!’ But then she always follows it up with: ‘Pardon my French!’” Cady smiled, hitting the machine just so while reaching in the back, the way she had learned to do as a bad kid with no spending money. The mechanism started to hum and a PayDay bar banged down into the metal trough. “There you go.” “Thanks! That’s a neat trick. So, what’s your name?” Olivia didn’t even know her name? It figured. Stuck-up jerk. But nipping at the heels of anger was shame: Try as she might, Cady just didn’t pick up on social cues like other people did. She wondered whether it was something integral to her—some mysterious bit of genetic code she had inherited from her unknown parents—or if it derived from her detached, frenetic childhood. Ultimately it didn’t matter. She had always known she wasn’t . . . likable. She turned on her heel and stalked back to the classroom. After class, as Cady was gathering her things, Olivia made a beeline across the room. “So, I’m an idiot in general. And I can never remember names.” Cady shrugged and zipped up the battered leather backpack she had scored at the flea market for five dollars. “I’m a bit of a sleuth, though. Not to mention stubborn,” Olivia said, holding out her hand. “It’s nice to officially meet you, Cady Drake. I’m Olivia Gray. How do you do?” Cady stared at her hand for a beat. “Like I said, I know I’m clueless,” Olivia continued. “But since we’re the only two people in this class under the age of forty, I was wondering, do you want to go grab a drink?” Maxine’s voice whispered in her mind: “Get over yourself, girl. Don’t assume everyone’s out to get you.” So Cady nodded, and they stopped by George O’s. It was a seedy dive bar, typical for this part of Oakland, but when they walked in, Olivia’s eyes lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning. “This is great,” she announced, taking in the dartboard, out-of-date Halloween decorations, and half a dozen men slouched over the bar. She ordered bourbon on the rocks, and Cady did the same. “So,” Olivia said as they took their drinks to a table. “‘Cady’ is a pretty name. I saw on the roster that you don’t spell it the traditional way, K-A-T-Y.” “Yeah,” said Cady. “I mean, I came with it.” Olivia smiled. “I always hated my name.” “Why?” “The kids used to taunt me at school, calling me Olive Oyl,” she said in a low voice, as though confiding a shameful secret. “Gee,” said Cady after a beat, “that must have been very traumatic for you.” Olivia looked surprised, then started laughing. “You just made a joke! And here I thought you were serious all the time.” She held up her glass. “Let’s have a toast. To quote Humphrey Bogart in that movie: ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’” And oddly enough, it was. After the photography class ended, they enrolled in French language courses, then Thai cooking, then botany. Olivia and her boyfriend, Sebastian, had Cady and Maxine over for dinner, and when they married, Cady stood up with them at City Hall. Olivia loved to tag along at antiques flea markets, asking questions, and furnishing her falling-down West Oakland Victorian one piece at a time. Eventually she landed a job at Sunset magazine, and steered the occasional freelance photography job Cady’s way. Through the years they joked about who had the upper hand in the “Trauma Olympics,” and whenever she invoked her childhood, Cady was the hands-down winner. But Olivia had struggles of her own. “Cady!” Olivia called again through the door of Maxine’s Treasures. “Open up. I brought coffee, made with my very own hands.” With reluctance, Cady emerged from the back room and crossed the crowded shop floor. “I don’t want any,” Cady said through the glass pane of the front door. “Too bad. Open up.” Cady undid the dead bolt and crouched down to remove the rubber stopper she always shoved under the door. It made her feel secure. “Here,” Olivia said as soon as the door was open, holding out a commuter mug and pushing past Cady into the store. “It’s French roast, your favorite. You’re welcome.” “I was sleeping.” “No you weren’t,” Olivia said, raising one eyebrow as she looked over the jumble of inventory. “And you obviously haven’t been spending a lot of time cleaning.” “Not my strong suit.” “So, have you been working?” “A little.” Olivia led the way into the back room, where they sat down at the little table by the kitchenette. Belatedly, Cady realized there was plentiful evidence of her recent dissolute lifestyle: crumpled Cheetos bags and cookie packages; old Chinese food takeout boxes, an empty vodka bottle. “Liar,” said Olivia, taking in the scene. “What have you really been doing?” “Crying.” Cady collapsed onto the sofa. “But that’s good, right?” Olivia said, sympathy shining in her big chocolate-colored eyes. “You never used to cry. I count that as personal growth.” Cady let out a humorless bark. “Only you could see crying as a positive.” “So, I was thinking,” Olivia said, fiddling with her coffee mug, which boasted the garish orange-and-black logo of the San Francisco baseball team. “There are a lot of merry-go-rounds in Paris. Loads of them. I remember from when Sebastian and I went there on our honeymoon. A carousel in every public square, it seemed like.” “And?” “You love photographing carousels. Have you ever thought of doing a book of photographs?” “Of Parisian carousels?” “Yes! Why have we been studying French all these years if you’re not going to put the language to good use? And you never know what you might find. The food, the wine, the cobblestone streets . . .” She let out a sigh. “C’est magique!” Cady managed a small smile. “You think everything is magical.” “And you think nothing is. But you’re wrong.” Olivia took another sip and let out a long, contented sigh. She had a way of savoring her coffee as though it were the elixir of life, the cure for maladies, the font of all contentment. And perhaps it was: Olivia was the sunniest person Cady had ever known. Before she met Olivia, Cady had believed sustained happiness was the stuff of fiction, found only in fairy tales. “When did you become a San Francisco Giants fan?” Cady asked in a blatant bid to change the subject. Olivia laughed, holding her mug out and inspecting the logo as though she’d never seen it before. “I have no idea where this came from. It just appeared, as things are wont to do around my house. But I like the way it feels in my hands.” Random items “appeared” at Olivia’s place because people were forever passing through for dinners and parties, spending the night or staying for weeks at a time on the couch, leaving behind towels, a hairbrush, a coffee mug. But Olivia took the ever-shifting landscape of her home in stride, as though things appeared and disappeared by some enchanting sort of magic. That would drive me crazy, Cady thought. She liked things organized, predictable. Even in the apparent muddle of Maxine’s shop, Cady knew where each and every item was. “Anyway, stop trying to change the subject because I’m not falling for it,” Olivia said as she set the mug down. “Maybe a change of scenery is exactly what you need. And you’ve photographed our local carousels enough.” “You’re forgetting our road trip to see the world’s largest carousel at House on the Rock.” “Not that I have anything against Wisconsin, but I was thinking Paris might be a slightly more dramatic change of scene.” Cady shrugged. “I’ll think about it.” “Here’s the thing, Cady: My mother always told me not to offer unsolicited advice. But I’m going to anyway, because I love my mama, but I love you, too, and you haven’t had anyone besides Maxine to give you the advice you need.” “You do realize,” Cady said, “that you are not required to fix my life. I’m—” “Excuse me,” interrupted Olivia. “When I was in the hospital, who brought me Thai noodles and Cherry Garcia Ice Cream?” “You could have gotten as much from a delivery person.” “Is that right? And would this alleged delivery person have given me her absolute devotion and forced me to survive chemotherapy, not to mention surgery? Would said delivery person have read the entirety of 84, Charing Cross Road to me when I was in the hospital, then popped the cork on a bottle of champagne when I finished my chemo? Would she also have watched endless rounds of basketball with Sebastian to keep him from going crazy from worry?” “That was selfish on my part,” said Cady. “You’re my only friend.” With gut-wrenching clarity, Cady remembered the moment, three years ago, when Olivia divulged she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. In that instant Cady came to understand the true danger of loving someone: the absolute panic at the thought of her leaving this earth. Olivia’s only response was a gentle smile. “And where would I even get the money to go?” Cady wondered aloud. She glared at her disappointing rabbit, propped in the corner. Olivia perked up, sensing a potential victory. “Your landlord has been offering you cash to buy out the shop lease, right? And you can liquidate the inventory, which will add up to something. And I’ll lend you enough for the plane ticket.” Cady snorted. “Like you and Sebastian have so much to spare?” “We have some savings set aside for a rainy day; and in case you hadn’t noticed, my friend, it’s raining cats and dogs. Metaphorically speaking.” “It’s my rainy day, not yours.” “Details.” She waved off Cady’s concern. “What good is money if I can’t help a friend? And I believe in your art. What’s that old saying? ‘Anonymous was a woman’?” “What does that have to do with anything?” “Because you’re bound to remain anonymous if you don’t get your art out there for people to see. Taking student portraits might pay the bills, but you’re an artist. And I can be your patron! Sort of. At least I can manage a plane ticket.” As photographers went, Cady did pretty well. She hauled her heavy camera bag all over the Bay Area, from Marin to Morgan Hill, from the beaches of the Pacific Ocean to the Tahoe ski slopes, and never turned down a job. She photographed weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, first communions, anniversaries, birthdays, and family reunions. She had regular gigs taking yearbook portraits at local schools, including the Berkeley French American International School. And she did occasional shoots for Sunset magazine, and a few home design catalogs. Still, paying her bills every month was one thing, but putting aside a nest egg was something else altogether. “Thanks, Olivia, but running away to Paris for a couple of weeks isn’t going to solve anything.” “Think of it as running to something. Anyway, I have to get back to the office. But just promise me this,” Olivia said, as she gathered her things to leave. “You won’t close yourself off to possibility. If something exciting falls in your lap, you’ll take it.” “Exciting? Like what?” Cady demanded, irked. She loved Olivia, but when was the last time something great had “fallen into her lap”? That was the kind of thing that happened to charmed, suburban-grown people like Olivia, not unwanted orphans like Cady. Cady had had to work and scheme—and occasionally steal—to get anything she had. But Olivia lifted her eyebrows and flashed a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “One never knows what the future might bring.” Cady laughed in spite of herself, gave her friend a hug, and watched as Olivia ambled back to her car, turning her face up to the morning sun, taking time to wave at a passing bicyclist. Olivia saw the beauty in everything: the sunrise, the city lights twinkling off the bay, a stranger on a bike. Whereas Cady, when faced with the same scene, saw the smog, the congestion of the freeway, a traffic hazard. Cady leaned her head against the doorjamb for a moment, ignoring the dust collecting on the shop’s inventory, trying not to look at the spot behind the register where Maxine had fallen. She wasn’t doing right by Maxine—or even by her landlord, for that matter. She wasn’t doing right by herself, or Olivia, or anyone. She didn’t think of herself as a true artist, as Olivia had suggested. But . . . surely Cady Anne Drake had something to offer this world? If only she knew what it was. Chapter 4 1915 Château Clement, Provence Yves Clement She’s out there again, riding that cursed carousel machine. It is a ghostly sight: a grown woman riding a children’s toy, bathed in silver moonlight, her white dress floating out behind her, like a creature out of time. What does she think? What does she want? Josephine is a puzzle Yves has never solved, would never be able to solve. Perhaps she was too young when they married, or he was too old. Their age difference didn’t seem to bother her, but it gave him pause. Increasingly so with the passage of time. Yves thinks back to his father’s pear orchard. Workers would fit bottles over budding branches in early spring, so that the fruit would grow to full size while captured inside the glass, as poires prisonnières, imprisoned pears. Once the pear matured, the bottle would be filled with brandy, called eau de vie, water of life. And at long last it would be set on a high shelf and brought out on special occasions, leaving everyone to wonder how the miracle had occurred, how the pear came to be within the bottle. For the rest of his life, the sound of wind chimes would remind Yves of the glinting glass bottles hanging from those tree branches, clinking together in the famous winds that swept over the fields and orchards of Provence. His Josephine is like a bud in a bottle, a prisoner of the glass, awaiting her eau de vie. “What is she looking for?” His thoughts, voiced by another. Marc-Antoine, their beloved son, joins Yves at the library window and gazes through the leaded glass at Josephine, as perplexed as his father. Yves places his hand on his son’s newly muscular shoulder, missing the sharp feeling of delicate little-boy wing bones under his palm. Marc-Antoine’s dark hair and eyes favor his mother’s secretive features, and unlike Yves, Marc-Antoine has always been large for his age, overtaking Yves in height two years ago, when he was but twelve years old. Our boy is becoming a young man, Yves thinks as fear pierces his heart. All too soon, Marc-Antoine will leave him alone here in this once-grand château, with only Josephine—a pale imitation of the woman he had married—as company. “What is it she is looking for, riding that ridiculous merry-go-round at night?” Marc-Antoine asks the question for the hundredth time. Yves does not answer. There is no answer, just the darkness of the night and the eerie song of the carousel. Chapter 5 Present day Oakland Cady Cady was two drinks in when she bashed her toe, hard, on a leg of the couch. Whirling around in a fit of anger and frustration, she kicked Gus. Harder than she’d intended. The carved rabbit fell over onto its side, slamming against the granite edge of an end table. Several already loosened joints gave up, and chunks of carved wood scattered on the floor like so many Tinker Toys: the ears, two slats from one side, the front legs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. . . .” Shame engulfed her. This was the sort of thing she would have done as a child. Cady had pursued counseling, attended mindfulness classes, and read dozens of self-help books to learn to stifle her violent impulses. She took a moment to close her eyes, take a breath for the count of four, hold it for seven, and release it for eight, as Maxine had taught her to do. And then she grabbed her camera. She perceived more clearly when she peered through the lens. It allowed her to concentrate, to sink into herself and tune out the external world. Like peering through a pair of corrective glasses, looking through the camera lens allowed her to see in a way she couldn’t with the bare eye. Now, Cady realized: there was something hidden in the cavity of the rabbit’s belly. A bundle wrapped in pink fabric. Crouching down, she tried to pull it out, but it was stuck tight. She would have to dislodge another of the laminated wood slats to get it out. After a moment’s hesitation, Cady decided that poor, broken Gus was in for some heavy repair work in any case, so she carefully pried the torso apart. The rosy silk material was incredibly soft to the touch and reflected the overhead lights with a slight sheen. Her heart hammering in anticipation, Cady pushed aside the fabric. Inside was a carved wooden box. A breathtaking box. A work of art. Made of pale ash wood, it had been carved with acanthus leaves, flowers, and swirls; it was lacquered, polished, and sealed with a brass lock. Who would hide a box within a carousel rabbit? And why? If she broke the lock, would she be destroying a piece of history? Or . . . could there be something inside that was worth real money? Something that might finance a trip to Paris, or even allow her to move and reestablish herself, as she’d hoped selling Gus would do? Could this be the little piece of magic Olivia insisted Cady would find someday? No, she reminded herself. Things like that don’t happen to me. To hell with history. Cady grabbed a spackling knife, shoved it into the seam of the lock, and tapped the end of it with a hammer. She had to pry the box in several locations before the lock finally snapped. She opened the lid. A childish part of her hoped for a cache of jewels or gold, as though a pirate might have concealed his booty within this children’s amusement. Instead, she found an ancient, sepia-toned photograph of a woman; a tightly braided plait of dark brown hair; an intricately carved wooden rose; and a note written in slanted letters. The ink had faded to a light brown and the script was hard to read, but she made out: Je t’aime toujours, et encore. Souviens-toi de moi. “I love you forever, and still,” Cady translated aloud. “Remember me.” She checked the box for a false bottom, just in case, but there was nothing else. Certainly no treasure. Disappointment washed over her. “That was it? That’s your big secret?” Cady glared at the rabbit. “I gotta tell you, Gus, after all these years you’re really letting me down.” Still, she snapped several more photos of the hidden cache. Unless . . . the man at the antiques fair had told her establishing a provenance might increase Gus’s value. Were there clues that could reveal where the rabbit figure had come from? Stroking the silky plait of hair, Cady inspected the intricately carved wooden rose, complete with tiny thorns. It reminded her of the flower on Gus’s side that had so offended Scott Ripley. There was no signature or marking of any kind, certainly no brass plaque indicating provenance. She picked up the photograph. The woman stood stiffly in front of a carousel, unsmiling, looking directly into the camera. She appeared to be young, probably in her early twenties. Her hair was piled on her head, with several strands escaping to frame a heart-shaped face. She wore a dark, high-necked dress that fell to her ankles, topped by a work apron. No visible lace or other embellishment. Cady was hardly a fashion expert, but she guessed it was from around the turn of the twentieth century, certainly before World War I. The photograph was slightly fuzzy and crooked, as though taken by an amateur. But a professional-looking photographic stamp on the right lower corner read: Château Clement. Cady opened her computer and searched, but she found no results for that name. She read that only a few dozen historic châteaux still existed in good repair; most had been too expensive to renovate after being abandoned during the French Revolution and then further damaged over the course of the two World Wars. The great majority had fallen into ruin. The woman didn’t appear to be the lady of the manor—surely she would have donned her finest gown for a photo session? In fact, with the apron and the messy hair, she looked like a servant. Which led to the next obvious question: Who would have taken a servant’s photograph and then tucked it away in a box along with a love note? And why? Cady brought out her photographer’s loupe to study the fuzzy details of the carousel in the background. She made out two carved horses, a carriage, and a rabbit that looked a little like Gus. Gus. She gazed at her poor gutted rabbit. “I’m sorry, little guy. Let’s see what we can do about fixing you up.” She lifted him onto the big project table and turned on some Edith Piaf to get in the mood. When Cady first started working for Maxine to repay her for items she had pilfered from the shop, she had simply cleaned and straightened and organized. But over time Maxine taught Cady how to do some basic repairs on antiques and how to make new things look old with crackle paint and sandpaper, using the contents of the vacuum bag to rub into crevices and voids. She learned how to apply gold and silver gilt, how to execute a proper French polish, and how to use glazes to suggest antiquity and increase value. At the flea market on weekends, Maxine pointed out what was valuable, what was a cheap imitation, and how to tell the difference. Still, Cady wasn’t a trained conservator, so she had always hesitated to work on the rabbit, afraid her efforts at repairing him would decrease, rather than add to, his value. But now, since Gus wasn’t who she’d thought he was anyway, she figured she could at least piece him back together. Cady enjoyed using her hands and getting back to basics: sanding and scraping and laminating. The process was calming, healing. As Piaf crooned her love for Paris, Cady’s mind cast about, pondering the woman in the photograph. Was the note written for her, or by her? And how could Cady track down Château Clement? Might it be the name of an old photography studio, rather than a true “château” per se? The phone rang. Lately Cady had been ignoring phone calls, but this was from Olivia. If she ignored her calls, Olivia would show up in person. “Hey,” Cady answered. “What’s up?” “Remember a couple of days ago, how I was saying you should hold out for a little magic in your life?” “Yeah . . . why?” Had Olivia somehow intuited what Cady had found in Gus’s belly? “Addison Avenue Books wants to offer you a contract for a photo book of Parisian carousels.” “What are you talking about?” “Which part didn’t you understand?” “They’re offering me a book contract? Who are these people?” “They’re a small press based in San Francisco, but they’ve been around for a long time. They publish big, glossy coffee-table books. It’s a niche market, but a profitable one. One of the senior editors plays golf with Sebastian, and he pitched her the idea. I sent her a link to your website, and she checked out your online portfolio. I told her the magazine loves working with you, you’re so professional and exclusive and very much in demand, blah blah blah.” “Basically, you lied.” “I did not lie. I enhanced. Anyway, since you don’t have an agent, I told her to send me the contract so I could look it over for you. Legalese and all that.” “I don’t . . . I mean . . . I really don’t know . . .” “Cady, the universe is handing you a huge gift. Accept your landlord’s offer to take over the lease, sell off Maxine’s inventory, store your stuff in my garage, and go to Paris.” “Speaking of gifts from the universe, listen to this: Gus fell over—to be honest, I kicked him—and broke open, and—” “You kicked him? Poor Gus.” “Yes, but listen: There was a box hidden inside.” “What was in it? Gold coins? Diamonds? Scads of old-fashioned currency?” “No, unfortunately. Just a photograph and a lock of hair. And a love note, and a wooden rose.” “How cool! Are there any clues about where Gus came from?” “Not right off the bat, but I did find the name of a château. I have no idea where it is, though. It doesn’t come up on the Internet.” “Well, the book offer specifies photos of Parisian carousels, but there’s no reason you can’t wander a little farther afield once you’re in the country,” said Olivia. “You could track down that château. You and I both know you’re going to become obsessed with your mystery box, anyway. It’s what you do.” It was true: Cady was already reading and rereading the note, gazing at the photo, stroking the plait of hair, wondering about the significance of the rose. Maxine used to say that once something had caught Cady’s interest, she was like a dog with a bone. On the one hand, her single-mindedness had helped her in her photography; on the other, her obsessions sometimes drove a further wedge between her and others. “Seriously, Cady,” Olivia continued. “Take the leap. You know what they say: The world’s your oyster.” “I don’t like oysters.” “Have you ever tried oysters?” “No.” Cady liked things to be predictable. Running off to Paris for a photography assignment felt . . . reckless. Just the prospect gave her a dizzying sensation, like the first time she had seen the ocean, standing on the edge of a very steep cliff. “The pay’s not great, but you’re not a big spender, so it’ll be enough. Honestly, Cady, what do you have to lose?” Cady gripped the telephone so tightly that her knuckles hurt. Even she had to admit: It felt like the universe was giving her a big old shove in the direction of La Belle France. “You don’t have any room in your garage,” Cady said. “Everyone else’s stuff is jammed in there already.” “I’ll make room,” Olivia answered, a triumphant tone to her voice. “So, is that a yes?” “Mais oui,” Cady said, surprising them both. Read more

The Egyptology Handbook: A Course in the Wonders of Egypt (Ologies)

From the Publisher From the author of the #1 New York Times best-selling EGYPTOLOGY. Inside this indispensable and beautifully illustrated workbook is everything you need to know to become an esteemed Egyptologist. Among the books delightful novelty elements are: * An envelope containing Miss Emily Sandss Top Ten Things to See in Egypt * Flaps to lift, revealing hidden treasure in the desert sands * A four-page foldout section full of stickers featuring treasures from King Tuts tomb and other ancient Egyptian artifacts * About the Author Dugald Steer has written many books for children including the best-selling DRAGONOLOGY and its companion, THE DRAGONOLOGY HANDBOOK, as well as the forthcoming WIZARDOLOGY. For ten years he was an editor at Templar Publishing in England, but he now devotes himself full-time to writing. Other books he has written include, THE NIGHT TIGER, JUST ONE MORE STORY, and PICTURE THIS . . . (with Alison Jay). For the moment, though, it seems more "ologies" are in the offing.Nghiem Ta, Artistic Direction: Nghiem Ta works as a designer and paper-engineer at Templar where she has overseen the creation of the best-selling DRAGONOLOGY and EGYPTOLOGY, as well as the forthcoming WIZARDOLOGY. Prior to working with Templar, she spent four years with pop-up maestro Ron van der Meer. Her current projects include more books with "ology" in the title.Ian Andrew, Artist: Ian Andrew created the black and white pencil illustrations for EGYPTOLOGY and THE EGYPTOLOGY HANDBOOK. He is an accomplished animator having worked on the animated film, "Dolphins" which won several awards including Best Newcomer at the Zagreb Film Festival. He has illustrated many books for children including JIM'S LION by Russell Hoban and TELL ME ONE THING, DAD by Tom Pow. Nick Harris, Artist: Nick Harris created the large color illustrations in EGYPTOLOGY on his computer. In addition to forays into animated TV advertising, he spent a spell working in the background department on the feature film, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" He has illustrated many books for children including the Smarties book Prize-winning FIREWORK MAKER'S DAUGHTER by Phillip Pullman. Helen Ward, Artist: Helen Ward, who also worked on DRAGONOLOGY, painted the many color recreations of Ancient Egyptian statues, wall paintings, and antiquities as well as the 1920s memorabilia that appear in EGYPTOLOGY. Helen has also written a number of successful children's books including THE TIN FOREST and THE DRAGON MACHINE, both illustrated by Wayne Anderson.

The Rules of Magic: A Novel (2) (The Practical Magic Series)

From School Library Journal The gray-eyed Owens children have always been strange, and not just because they like black clothing and are oddly buoyant. Frances, the oldest, can communicate with birds; shy and beautiful middle sibling Bridget (nicknamed Jet for her black hair) can read minds; and the youngest, Vincent, is so winsome and irresistible that his obstetric nurse attempted to kidnap him. Growing up in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s, the children never fit in, until they visit Aunt Isabelle in Massachusetts and discover they are bloodline witches. Full of gifts and potential, the siblings are cursed with knowing too much about fate and the future. Though this coming-of-age tale is a prequel to Hoffman's Practical Magic, readers need not have read the earlier book—but they'll eagerly seek out the author's other work. The clever Owenses handle major crises such as the Vietnam War, first loves, and the death of family members, all while learning how to cope with their special abilities in a world that doesn't always value those who are different. Fans of magical realism and lyrical novels, such as Leslye Walton's The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender and Moïra Fowley-Doyle's The Accident Season, will appreciate Hoffman's descriptive and succinct way with words. VERDICT Give to sophisticated teens who enjoy a bit of magic in their love stories.—Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL Review PRAISE FOR THE RULES OF MAGIC BY ALICE HOFFMAN **INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** **OFFICIAL REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICK** BEST FALL BOOKS SELECTION BY * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * NEW YORK POST * POPSUGAR * “Hoffman has conjured up another irresistible novel in The Rules of Magic . This is the kind of book you race through, then pause at the last 40 pages, savoring your final moments with the characters.”— USA Today (4/4 Stars) “[T]his is a novel that begins with the words, ‘Once upon a time,’ and its strength is a Hoffman hallmark: the commingling of fairy-tale promise with real-life struggle. The Owens children can’t escape who they are. Like the rest of us, they have to figure out the best way to put their powers to use.” — New York Times Book Review “In this prequel to Practical Magic , Hoffman, a master of magical realism, draws us back into the spellbinding universe of the Owens family with gorgeous prose set against a backdrop of vivid imagery.”— Marie Claire “The story unfolds in romantic and magical ways against the backdrop of 1960s, with the Stonewall riot, LSD in Central Park, Bob Dylan and Vietnam all making appearances. Hoffman will keep you guessing until the very end of the book how the Practical Magic generation fits in, a clever, heartbreaking finale.” — Newsday "Hoffman delights in this prequel to Practical Magic as three siblings discover both the power and curse of their magic. Hoffman’s novel is a coming-of-age tale replete with magic and historical reference to the early witch trials. The spellbinding story, focusing on the strength of family bonds through joy and sorrow, will appeal to a broad range of readers. Fans of Practical Magic will be bewitched.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Hoffman weaves a spell….Readers who enjoy a little magic mixed in with their love stories…will relish this book.” — Library Journal "It’s clear why Hoffman is a favorite for fantasy readers: She creates interesting mythologies; she’s able to weave magic into the modern world; and she alludes to the magical properties of herbs and everyday items without overexplaining them and overcomplicating her narratives."— Bookpage "Reading [ The Rules of Magic ] was like being caught in a current, floating along with a river's twists and turns, glimpsing familiarity and difference in varied measure before tumbling into something like the sea. I kept reading, not because I wanted to reach the end, but because I wanted to dwell in the honey-light of Hoffman's words. I wanted to hold these characters' hands... Hoffman's prose is as tender, dreamy and sweet as ever, laced with the sting of vinegar and broken glass."— NPR Books “Just in time for Halloween, Alice Hoffman brings us back to the world of the Owens family, whom we first met in Practical Magic . It's a world where magic exists and love is a curse. The Rules of Magic will transport you. An utter delight.”— Popsugar (Best 2017 Fall Books) "[ The Rules of Magic is] a novel readers didn’t know they were waiting for until it arrived." — Bustle "Reading an Alice Hoffman book is like falling into a deep dream where senses are heightened and love reigns supreme. The Rules of Magic is no exception—as I tumbled into the story of three siblings desperate for and cursed by love, I never wanted to awaken." —Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things "No one's more confident or entertaining than Hoffman at putting across characters willing to tempt fate for true love. Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot twist—delivering everything fans of a much-loved book could hope for in a prequel." —Kirkus Reviews About the Author Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including Magic Lessons , The World That We Knew , Practical Magic , The Rules of Magic , the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth , The Red Garden , The Dovekeepers , The Museum of Extraordinary Things , The Marriage of Opposites , and Faithful . She lives near Boston. Read more

Flower Fairies of the Spring

Karma Camellia: A Village Flower Shop Paranormal Cozy Mystery

Follow the River: A Novel

From the Inside Flap Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women, then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom--an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people. From the Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From the Back Cover Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement, killed the men and women, then took her captive. For months, she lived with them, unbroken, until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail to freedom--an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her people. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1   Sunday, July 8, 1755   She shivered, despite the heat of the hearth, and glanced again toward the sunny rectangle of the cabin door. No one was there, not a shadow. But she felt that same uneasiness that had returned to her several times this morning: a sense that if she had looked a second sooner there would have been a figure in the doorway.   It was not the nature of Mary Draper Ingles to be afraid in the daytime. Sometimes in the deep wilderness nights, when the wolves wailed and the owls conspired high on the Blue Ridge east of the valley, when the dying fire made shapes move on the ceiling and the restless sleeping children rustled their corn-shuck mattresses, Mary Ingles would feel frightened. But seldom was she fearful in bright daylight like this, when the valley was familiar and peaceful and the locusts unreeled their eternal dry shrills under the summer sun.   Mary turned back to the cookfire. Its heat baked her sweaty face. The little black iron stewpot with the rabbit in it was almost bubbling over now. She pulled it across the iron arm a little, moving it away from the hottest coals, so that the stew might simmer the afternoon away and be at its tenderest when William came back up from the fields. The old clock at the far end of the room ticked slowly.   She brushed a strand of sweat-damp auburn hair back away from her cheek. She braced her palms on her knees to help lift her weight from the low puncheon stool and stood up, wheezing with the effort. Her swollen belly, firm and turgid with life, tugged down at all the strong young muscles of her torso. She smoothed the faded homespun cloth of her dress down over the mound and cupped her palms underneath, a caress and an appraisal. It would be happening any day now; she could feel that.   She paused there, looking through the sunny doorway, out at the lush meadows, over the dark green treetops, toward the ranks of somber Allegheny mountains marching away to the west where no one except Indians lived.   This little group of cabins at Draper’s Meadows was deeper into the mountains than any other white community in Virginia. It was the first settlement west of what her husband Will called the Allegheny “divide.” She and Will had been, indeed, the first white people wed on this wild side of the Blue Ridge. Five years ago, it had been: a pastoral wedding between the blue mountains with God seeming to breathe through the whole vast stillness of it. And they had lived prosperously and happily and in peace those five years. Their health was robust and both of their first two children had lived. The valley, fertile with limestone-rich soil where dense bluegrass grew and rippled, was irrigated by never-failing limestone springs, whose waters flowed down crystalline creeks into the lovely, twisting New River and thence out of their valley into the uncharted west. It was a place for health and high spirits, where one’s first look out the cabin door every morning made the heart swell up. So, surely her uneasiness of this morning would pass.   Of course, Mary Ingles knew, a woman’s feelings are at their most unsettled, their most skittish, when she is full of the humors of childbearing. She tried to smile away her anxiety. Even William had made light of it this morning, as he often made light of women’s fears. This morning he had passed it off just that way, as the spookishness of a mother-to-be.   “Must’ee go?” she had asked him after their Sunday morning prayers, when the valley had still been full of the shadow of the ridge. “I … I be afraid, a wee bit. And William Ingles had hesitated here in this cabin door with his cradle scythe over one shoulder, a bag of hoecake and a watergourd over the other. He had never before heard Mary profess fear in the daytime. “Why afraid?” he had said then, with that joshing smile of his, looking down at her swollen middle. “When Tommy an’ Georgie come, y’ squzz ’em oot slick as a grape-pip. And your ma’s here to help. Bettie’s here, too, who wasna before. And if ’ee start birthin’, why, only send down for me, and y’ know I’ll come a-runnin’, Mary darlin’.”   So she had smiled him away down toward the grainfield, that great, dear, strong, hairy man whom she loved till her heart ached with the sweetness of loving, that man who kept her from being as fearful as she might have been here in the wilds with a lesser man. She had not tried to explain to him this morning that it was not the birthing she feared. Nor, really, was it anything else she could name. She had stood in the doorway and watched him join her brother Johnny Draper at the edge of the meadow, strong Johnny with his own scythe over his shoulder, and they both had turned to wave back at her as they disappeared—seemed to sink—below the rippling grass at the brow of the meadow.   They would have been working four hours in the barley by now, she reckoned—scarcely ever pausing, shirtless, pouring sweat, probably singing to give a cadence to the sweep of their scythes. She knew how they looked working because she had always worked beside them. This was the first year she had not helped with the harvest; her term was too close. But she could envision them as clearly as if she were down there. Those two were durable men and could work all day long, even in this July sun.   Her eye somehow went to William’s long rifle, which lay across its two pegs on the far wall, beside the grandfather clock, a powder horn and bullet bag hanging under it, and again she felt the foreboding. Should not he have carried the gun down to the fields with him, as he had done in the first few years? Lately he had simply dismissed it as extra weight.   The Indians who had passed up and down through Draper’s Meadows since their arrival here in 1748 had never annoyed them nor given them cause for alarm. Usually they were parties from north of the distant O-y-o River, going down to raid their enemies, the Catawbas, who lived farther south. For centuries they had used the New River as their war road through the mountains. They had caves in its cliffs and canoes secreted in its tributaries. But even in their war paint, they had always been friendly with this little vanguard of white families here in the valley. They would always drink spring water offered them in gourd dippers, smacking their lips and smiling, apparently trying to dispel any uneasiness their war-painted faces and their bristling weaponry might be causing. Sometimes they would take bread that was offered to them, eat it while nodding in appreciation, and then stand and raise their hands in a peaceful salute and continue down the ridges. And then the white people who had remained hidden inside the cabins with their flintlocks cocked, ready for the first unfriendly move, would ease forward the hammers of their guns and exhale in relief, hang up the guns and come out to resume their work or to watch the savages fade into the woods. Only twice had Indians caused any mischief in this valley: in 1749 when a band had raided the cabin of Adam Harmon to steal furs, and in 1753 when another party had stolen skins from George Hoopaugh and Jacob Harmon and killed their barking dogs. Those were old and negligible incidents. So William Ingles had got out of the habit of taking his gun with him to the fields. “More sensible, I’d say, to leave it here for your peace o’ mind,” he had joked to her once this summer.   True, there was war in the land now, in distant places along the frontier, war against the French and their Indian allies. And once, a few months ago, a young Virginia lieutenant-colonel named Washington, a serious-looking giant of a fellow but a gentleman withal, had passed through this valley with a small escort of horsemen, talking to Colonel James Patton, the valley’s militia leader, about what was happening in the distant conflict. Colonel Washington had advised Patton to have his people on their guard for armed Indian bands with Frenchmen among them.   But the people of Draper’s Meadows had seen no Frenchmen, and only friendly Indians; and the weeks had rolled on, and the plantings had been done; the crops had grown, and edibles from the woods had been gathered and preserved, and Bettie Draper’s infant son had learned to crawl, and Mary Ingles’ baby had made movements inside her; those were the main concerns of the people in this isolated valley where war surely had no reason to come. Their King was two thousand miles away in London Town and surely gave no more thought to these distant subjects of his than they gave to him. If he was at war with France, how could it affect them here in this valley His Majesty had never even heard of? --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. About the Author James Alexander Thom was a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, and a member of the faculty at the Indiana University Journalism School. His books include Panther in the Sky, for which he won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award for Best Historical Novel.David Drummond has narrated over seventy audiobooks for Tantor, in genres ranging from current political commentary to historical nonfiction, from fantasy to military, and from thrillers to humor. He has garnered multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie Award nomination. Visit him at drummondvoice.com. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more

The Long Walk

Review "A master storyteller." - Houston Chronicle "An illusionist extraordinaire." - Publishers Weekly About the Author Stephen King, the world's bestselling novelist, was educated at the University of Maine at Orono. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, and their children in Bangor, Maine. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Part One - STARTING OUT Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Part Two - GOING DOWN THE ROAD Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Part Three - THE RABBIT Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Only death can keep you from the finish line—in the ultimate competition of the all-too-near future. . . . THE LONG WALK Every year, on the first day of May, one hundred teenage boys meet for an event known throughout the country as “The Long Walk.” Among this year’s chosen crop is sixteen-year-old Ray Garraty. He knows the rules: that warnings are issued if you fall under speed, stumble, sit down. That after three warnings . . . you get your ticket. And what happens then serves as a chilling reminder that there can be only one winner in the Walk—the one that survives. . . . WORKS BY STEPHEN KING NOVELS Carrie ’Salem’s Lot The Shining The Stand The Dead Zone Firestarter Cujo THE DARK TOWER I: The Gunslinger Christine Pet Sematary Cycle of the Werewolf The Talisman (with Peter Straub) It Eyes of the Dragon Misery The Tommyknockers THE DARK TOWER II: The Drawing of the Three THE DARK TOWER III: The Waste Lands The Dark Half Needful Things Gerald’s Game Dolores Claiborne Insomnia Rose Madder Desperation The Green Mile THE DARK TOWER IV: Wizard and Glass Bag of Bones AS RICHARD BACHMAN Rage The Long Walk Roadwork The Running Man Thinner The Regulators COLLECTIONS Night Shift Different Seasons Skeleton Crew Four Past Midnight Nightmares and Dreamscapes NONFICTION Danse Macabre SCREENPLAYS Creepshow Cat’s Eye Silver Bullet Maximum Overdrive Pet Sematary Golden Years Sleepwalkers The Stand The Shining SIGNET Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First printing, July 1979 First printing (with King introduction), April 1999 ISBN: 9781101138182 Copyright © Richard Bachman, 1979 Introduction copyright © Stephen King, 1996 All rights reserved Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from ”Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan. © 1965 Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. PUBLISHER’S NOTE This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014. The Importance of Being Bachman by Stephen King This is my second introduction to the so-called Bachman Books—a phrase which has come to mean (in my mind, at least) the first few novels published with the Richard Bachman name, the ones which appeared as unheralded paperback originals under the Signet imprint. My first introduction wasn’t very good; to me it reads like a textbook case of author obfuscation. But that is not surprising. When it was written, Bachman’s alter ego (me, in other words) wasn’t in what I’d call a contemplative or analytical mood; I was, in fact, feeling robbed. Bachman was never created as a short-term alias; he was supposed to be there for the long haul, and when my name came out in connection with his, I was surprised, upset, and pissed off. That’s not a state conducive to good essay-writing. This time I may do a little better. Probably the most important thing I can say about Richard Bachman is that he became real . Not entirely, of course (he said with a nervous smile); I am not writing this in a delusive state. Except . . . well . . . maybe I am. Delusion is, after all, something writers of fiction try to encourage in their readers, at least during the time that the book or story is open before them, and the writer is hardly immune from this state of . . . what shall I call it? How does “directed delusion” sound? At any rate, Richard Bachman began his career not as a delusion but as a sheltered place where I could publish a few early works which I felt readers might like. Then he began to grow and come alive, as the creatures of a writer’s imagination so frequently do. I began to imagine his life as a dairy farmer . . . his wife, the beautiful Claudia Inez Bachman . . . his solitary New Hampshire mornings, spent milking the cows, getting in the wood, and thinking about his stories . . . his evenings spent writing, always with a glass of whiskey beside his Olivetti typewriter. I once knew a writer who would say his current story or novel was “putting on weight” if it was going well. In much the same way, my pen-name began to put on weight. Then, when his cover was blown, Richard Bachman died. I made light of this in the few interviews I felt required to give on the subject, saying that he’d died of cancer of the pseudonym, but it was actually shock that killed him: the realization that sometimes people just won’t let you alone. To put it in more fulsome (but not at all inaccurate) terms, Bachman was the vampire side of my existence, killed by the sunlight of disclosure. My feelings about all this were confused enough (and fertile enough) to bring on a book (a Stephen King book, that is), The Dark Half . It was about a writer whose pseudonym, George Stark, actually comes to life. It’s a novel my wife has always detested, perhaps because, for Thad Beaumont, the dream of being a writer overwhelms the reality of being a man; for Thad, delusive thinking overtakes rationality completely, with horrific consequences. I didn’t have that problem, though. Really. I put Bachman aside, and although I was sorry that he had to die, I would be lying if I didn’t say I felt some relief as well. The books in this omnibus were written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and deeply infatuated with the art and craft of writing. They weren’t written as Bachman books per se (Bachman hadn’t been invented yet, after all), but in a Bachman state of mind: low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair. Ben Richards, the scrawny, pre-tubercular protagonist of The Running Man (he is about as far from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get), crashes his hijacked plane into the Network Games skyscraper, killing himself but taking hundreds (maybe thousands) of Free-Vee executives with him; this is the Richard Bachman version of a happy ending. The conclusions of the other Bachman novels are even more grim. Stephen King has always understood that the good guys don’t always win (see Cujo, Pet Sematary, and—perhaps— Christine ), but he has also understood that mostly they do. Every day, in real life, the good guys win. Mostly these victories go unheralded (MAN ARRIVES HOME SAFE FROM WORK YET AGAIN wouldn’t sell many papers), but they are nonetheless real for all that . . . and fiction should reflect reality. And yet . . . In the first draft of The Dark Half, I had Thad Beaumont quote Donald E. Westlake, a very funny writer who has penned a series of very grim crime novels under the name Richard Stark. Once asked to explain the dichotomy between Westlake and Stark, the writer in question said, “I write Westlake stories on sunny days. When it rains, I’m Stark.” I don’t think that made it into the final version of The Dark Half, but I have always loved it (and related to it, as it has become fashionable to say). Bachman—a fictional creation who became more real to me with each published book which bore his byline—was a rainy-day sort of guy if ever there was one. The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 X 2. But I know something else as well: there’s a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. In Thinner, Bachman spoke for the first time on his own—it was the only one of the early Bachman novels that had his name on the first draft instead of mine—and it struck me as really unfair that, just as he was starting to talk with his own voice, he should have been mistaken for me. And a mistake was just what it felt like, because by then Bachman had become a kind of id for me; he said the things I couldn’t, and the thought of him out there on his New Hampshire dairy farm—not a best-selling writer who gets his name in some stupid Forbes list of entertainers too rich for their own good or his face on the Today show or doing cameos in movies—quietly writing his books gave him permission to think in ways I could not think and speak in ways I could not speak. And then these news stories came out saying “Bachman is really King,” and there was no one—not even me—to defend the dead man, or to point out the obvious: that King was also really Bachman, at least some of the time. Unfair I thought then and unfair I think now, but sometimes life bites you a little, that’s all. I determined to put Bachman out of my thoughts and my life, and so I did, for a number of years. Then, while I was writing a novel (a Stephen King novel) called Desperation, Richard Bachman suddenly appeared in my life again. I was working on a Wang dedicated word processor at that time; it looked like the visiphone in an old Flash Gordon serial. This was paired with a marginally more state-of-the-art laser printer, and from time to time, when an idea occurred to me, I would write down a phrase or a putative title on a scrap of paper and Scotch-tape it to the side of the printer. As I neared the three-quarter mark on Desperation, I had a scrap with a single word printed on it: REGULATORS. I had had a great idea for a novel, something that had to do with toys, guns, TV, and suburbia. I didn’t know if I would ever write it—lots of those “printer notes” never came to anything—but it was certainly cool to think about. Then, one rainy day (a Richard Stark sort of day), as I was pulling into my driveway, I had an idea. I don’t know where it came from; it was totally unconnected to any of the trivia tumbling through my head at the time. The idea was to take the characters from Desperation and put them into The Regulators . In some cases, I thought, they could play the same people; in others, they would change; in neither case would they do the same things or react in the same ways, because the different stories would dictate different courses of action. It would be, I thought, like the members of a repertory company acting in two different plays. Then an even more exciting idea struck me. If I could use the rep company concept with the characters, I could use it with the plot itself as well—I could stack a good many of the Desperation elements in a brand-new configuration, and create a kind of mirror world. I knew even before setting out that plenty of critics would call this twinning a stunt . . . and they would not be wrong, exactly. But, I thought, it could be a good stunt. Maybe even an illuminating stunt, one which showcased the muscularity and versatility of story, its all but limitless ability to adapt a few basic elements into endlessly pleasing variations, its prankish charm. But the two books couldn’t sound exactly the same, and they couldn’t mean the same, any more than an Edward Albee play and one by William Inge can sound and mean the same, even if they are performed on successive nights by the same company of actors. How could I possibly create a different voice? At first I thought I couldn’t, and that it would be best to consign the idea to the Rube Goldberg bin I keep in the bottom of my mind—the one marked INTERESTING BUT UNWORKABLE CONTRAPTIONS. Then it occurred to me that I had had the answer all along: Richard Bachman could write The Regulators . His voice sounded superficially the same as mine, but underneath there was a world of difference—all the difference between sunshine and rain, let us say. And his view of people was always different from mine, simultaneously funnier and more cold-hearted (Bart Dawes in Roadwork, my favorite of the early Bachman books, is an excellent example). Of course Bachman was dead, I had announced that myself, but death is actually a minor problem for a novelist—just ask Paul Sheldon, who brought Misery Chastain back for Annie Wilkes, or Arthur Conan Doyle, who brought Sherlock Holmes back from Reichenbach Falls when fans all over the British Empire clamored for him. I didn’t actually bring Richard Bachman back from the dead, anyway; I just visualized a box of neglected manuscripts in his basement, with The Regulators on top. Then I transcribed the book Bachman had already written. That transcription was a little tougher . . . but it was also immensely exhilarating. It was wonderful to hear Bachman’s voice again, and what I had hoped might happen did happen: a book rolled out that was a kind of fraternal twin to the one I had written under my own name (and the two books were quite literally written back-to-back, the King book finished on one day and the Bachman book commenced on the very next). They were no more alike than King and Bachman themselves. Desperation is about God; The Regulators is about TV. I guess that makes them both about higher powers, but very different ones just the same. The importance of being Bachman was always the importance of finding a good voice and a valid point of view that were a little different from my own. Not really different; I am not schizo enough to believe that. But I do believe that there are tricks all of us use to change our perspectives and our perceptions—to see ourselves new by dressing up in different clothes and doing our hair in different styles—and that such tricks can be very useful, a way of revitalizing and refreshing old strategies for living life, observing life, and creating art. None of these comments are intended to suggest that I have done anything great in the Bachman books, and they are surely not made as arguments for artistic merit. But I love what I do too much to want to go stale if I can help it. Bachman has been one way in which I have tried to refresh my craft, and to keep from being too comfy and well-padded. These early books show some progression of the Bachman persona, I hope, and I hope they also show the essence of that persona . Dark-toned, despairing even when he is laughing (despairing most when he’s laughing, in fact), Richard Bachman isn’t a fellow I’d want to be all the time, even if he were still alive . . . but it’s good to have that option, that window on the world, polarized though it may be. Still, as the reader works his or her way through these stories, he/she may discover that Dick Bachman has one thing in common with Thad Beaumont’s alter ego, George Stark: he’s not a very nice guy. And I wonder if there are any other good manuscripts, at or near completion, in that box found by the widowed Mrs. Bachman in the cellar of their New Hampshire farmhouse. Sometimes I wonder about that a lot . —Stephen King Lovell, Maine April 16, 1996 This is for Jim Bishop and Burt Hatlen and Ted Holmes. “To me the Universe was all void of Life, or Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?” —Thomas Carlyle “I would encourage every American to walk as often as possible. It’s more than healthy; it’s fun.” —John F. Kennedy (1962) “The pump don’t work ’Cause the vandals took the handle.” —Bob Dylan Part One STARTING OUT Chapter 1 “Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars. George, who are our first contestants? George . . . ? Are you there, George?” —Groucho Marx You Bet Your Life An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run. One of the guards, an expressionless young man in a khaki uniform and a Sam Browne belt, asked to see the blue plastic ID card. The boy in the back seat handed it to his mother. His mother handed it to the guard. The guard took it to a computer terminal that looked strange and out of place in the rural stillness. The computer terminal ate the card and flashed this on its screen: GARRATY RAYMOND DAVIS RD 1 POWNAL MAINE ANDROSCOGGIN COUNTY ID NUMBER 49-801-89 OK-OK-OK The guard punched another button and all of this disappeared, leaving the terminal screen smooth and green and blank again. He waved them forward. “Don’t they give the card back?” Mrs. Garraty asked. “Don’t they—” “No, Mom,” Garraty said patiently. “Well, I don’t like it,” she said, pulling forward into an empty space. She had been saying it ever since they set out in the dark of two in the morning. She had been moaning it, actually. “Don’t worry,” he said without hearing himself. He was occupied with looking and with his own confusion of anticipation and fear. He was out of the car almost before the engine’s last asthmatic wheeze—a tall, well-built boy wearing a faded army fatigue jacket against the eight o’clock spring chill. His mother was also tall, but too thin. Her breasts were almost nonexistent: token nubs. Her eyes were wandering and unsure, somehow shocked. Her face was an invalid’s face. Her iron-colored hair had gone awry under the complication of clips that was supposed to hold it in place. Her dress hung badly on her body as if she had recently lost a lot of weight. “Ray,” she said in that whispery conspirator’s voice that he had come to dread. “Ray, listen—” He ducked his head and pretended to tuck in his shirt. One of the guards was eating C rations from a can and reading a comic book. Garraty watched the guard eating and reading and thought for the ten thousandth time: It’s all real . And now, at last, the thought began to swing some weight. “There’s still time to change your mind—” The fear and anticipation cranked up a notch. “No, there’s no time for that,” he said. “The backout date was yesterday.” Still in that low conspirator’s voice that he hated: “They’d understand, I know they would. The Major—” “The Major would—” Garraty began, and saw his mother wince. “You know what the Major would do, Mom.” Another car had finished the small ritual at the gate and had parked. A boy with dark hair got out. His parents followed and for a moment the three of them stood in conference like worried baseball players. He, like some of the other boys, was wearing a light packsack. Garraty wondered if he hadn’t been a little stupid not to bring one himself. “You won’t change your mind?” It was guilt, guilt taking the face of anxiety. Although he was only sixteen, Ray Garraty knew something about guilt. She felt that she had been too dry, too tired, or maybe just too taken up with her older sorrows to halt her son’s madness in its seedling stage—to halt it before the cumbersome machinery of the State with its guards in khaki and its computer terminals had taken over, binding himself more tightly to its insensate self with each passing day, until yesterday, when the lid had come down with a final bang. He put a hand on her shoulder. “This is my idea, Mom. I know it wasn’t yours. I—” He glanced around. No one was paying the slightest attention to them. “I love you, but this way is best, one way or the other.” “It’s not,” she said, now verging on tears. “Ray, it’s not, if your father was here, he’d put a stop to—” “Well, he’s not, is he?” He was brutal, hoping to stave off her tears . . . what if they had to drag her off? He had heard that sometimes that happened. The thought made him feel cold. In a softer voice he said, “Let it go now, Mom. Okay?” He forced a grin. “Okay,” he answered for her. Her chin was still trembling, but she nodded. Not all right, but too late. There was nothing anyone could do. A light wind soughed through the pines. The sky was pure blue. The road was just ahead and the simple stone post that marked the border between America and Canada. Suddenly his anticipation was greater than his fear, and he wanted to get going, get the show on the road. “I made these. You can take them, can’t you? They’re not too heavy, are they?” She thrust a foil-wrapped package of cookies at him. “Yeah.” He took them and then clutched her awkwardly, trying to give her what she needed to have. He kissed her cheek. Her skin was like old silk. For a moment he could have cried himself. Then he thought of the smiling, mustachioed face of the Major and stepped back, stuffing the cookies into the pocket of his fatigue jacket. “G’bye, Mom.” “Goodbye, Ray. Be a good boy.” She stood there for a moment and he had a sense of her being very light, as if even the light puffs of breeze blowing this morning might send her sailing away like a dandelion gone to seed. Then she got back into the car and started the engine. Garraty stood there. She raised her hand and waved. The tears were flowing now. He could see them. He waved back and then as she pulled out he just stood there with his arms at his sides, conscious of how fine and brave and alone he must look. But when the car had passed back through the gate, forlornness struck him and he was only a sixteen-year-old boy again, alone in a strange place. He turned back toward the road. The other boy, the dark-haired one, was watching his folks pull out. He had a bad scar along one cheek. Garraty walked over to him and said hello. The dark-haired boy gave him a glance. “Hi.” “I’m Ray Garraty,” he said, feeling mildly like an asshole. “I’m Peter McVries.” “You are ready?” Garraty asked. McVries shrugged. “I feel jumpy. That’s the worst.” Garraty nodded. The two of them walked toward the road and the stone marker. Behind them, other cars were pulling out. A woman began screaming abruptly. Unconsciously, Garraty and McVries drew closer together. Neither of them looked back. Ahead of them was the road, wide and black. “That composition surface will be hot by noon,” McVries said abruptly. “I’m going to stick to the shoulder.” Garraty nodded. McVries looked at him thoughtfully. “What do you weigh?” “Hundred and sixty.” “I’m one-sixty-seven. They say the heavier guys get tired quicker, but I think I’m in pretty good shape.” To Garraty, Peter McVries looked rather more than that—he looked awesomely fit. He wondered who they were that said the heavier guys got tired quicker, almost asked, and decided not to. The Walk was one of those things that existed on apocrypha, talismans, legend. McVries sat down in the shade near a couple of other boys, and after a moment, Garraty sat beside him. McVries seemed to have dismissed him entirely. Garraty looked at his watch. It was five after eight. Fifty-five minutes to go. Impatience and anticipation came back, and he did his best to squash them, telling himself to enjoy sitting while he could. All of the boys were sitting. Sitting in groups and sitting alone; one boy had climbed onto the lowest branch of a pine overlooking the road and was eating what looked like a jelly sandwich. He was skinny and blond, wearing purple pants and a blue chambray shirt under an old green zip sweater with holes in the elbows. Garraty wondered if the skinny ones would last or burn out quickly. The boys he and McVries had sat down next to were talking. “I’m not hurrying,” one of them said. “Why should I? If I get warned, so what? You just adjust, that’s all. Adjustment is the key word here. Remember where you heard that first.” He looked around and discovered Garraty and McVries. “More lambs to the slaughter. Hank Olson’s the name. Walking is my game.” He said this with no trace of a smile at all. Garraty offered his own name. McVries spoke his own absently, still looking off toward the road. “I’m Art Baker,” the other said quietly. He spoke with a very slight Southern accent. The four of them shook hands all around. There was a moment’s silence, and McVries said, “Kind of scary, isn’t it?” They all nodded except Hank Olson, who shrugged and grinned. Garraty watched the boy in the pine tree finish his sandwich, ball up the waxed paper it had been in, and toss it onto the soft shoulder. He’ll burn out early, he decided. That made him feel a little better. “You see that spot right by the marker post?” Olson said suddenly. They all looked. The breeze made moving shadow-patterns across the road. Garraty didn’t know if he saw anything or not. “That’s from the Long Walk the year before last,” Olson said with grim satisfaction. “Kid was so scared he just froze up at nine o’clock.” They considered the horror of it silently. “Just couldn’t move. He took his three warnings and then at 9:02 AM they gave him his ticket. Right there by the starting post.” Garraty wondered if his own legs would freeze. He didn’t think so, but it was a thing you wouldn’t know for sure until the time came, and it was a terrible thought. He wondered why Hank Olson wanted to bring up such a terrible thing. Suddenly Art Baker sat up straight. “Here he comes.” A dun-colored jeep drove up to the stone marker and stopped. It was followed by a strange, tread-equipped vehicle that moved much more slowly. There were toy-sized radar dishes mounted on the front and back of this halftrack. Two soldiers lounged on its upper deck, and Garraty felt a chill in his belly when he looked at them. They were carrying army-type heavy-caliber carbine rifles. Some of the boys got up, but Garraty did not. Neither did Olson or Baker, and after his initial look, McVries seemed to have fallen back into his own thoughts. The skinny kid in the pine tree was swinging his feet idly. The Major got out of the jeep. He was a tall, straight man with a deep desert tan that went well with his simple khakis. A pistol was strapped to his Sam Browne belt, and he was wearing reflector sunglasses. It was rumored that the Major’s eyes were extremely light-sensitive, and he was never seen in public without his sunglasses. “Sit down, boys,” he said. “Keep Hint Thirteen in mind.” Hint Thirteen was “Conserve energy whenever possible.” Read more

Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book: The Boston Cooking School

About the Author Fannie Farmer (1857–1915) came to cooking due to a stroke at the age of sixteen that forced her to remain homebound for over a decade. She took up cooking so thoroughly that she turned her mother’s home into a boardinghouse known for its uncommonly delicious meals. Once she was able to walk again, Farmer attended the Boston Cooking School in the late 1880s and learned to approach cooking as a domestic science, as was popular then. The cookbook she eventually published under the school’s name in 1896 became unexpectedly famous, thanks to its system of standardized measuring vessels and level measurements. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book The Boston Cooking-School By Fannie Merritt Farmer Skyhorse Publishing Copyright © 2011 Fannie Merritt FarmerAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-61608-543-8 Contents CHAPTER I. Food, CHAPTER II. Cookery, CHAPTER III. Beverages, CHAPTER IV. Bread and Bread Making, CHAPTER V. Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, and Shortcakes Batters, Sponges, and Doughs, CHAPTER VI. Cereals, CHAPTER VII. Eggs, CHAPTER VIII. Soups, CHAPTER IX. Soups without Stock, CHAPTER X. Soup Garnishings and Force–Meats, CHAPTER XI. Fish, CHAPTER XII. Bdeef, CHAPTER XIII. Lamb and Mutton, CHAPTER XIV. Veal, CHAPTER XV. Sweetbreads, CHAPTER XVI. Pork, CHAPTER XVII. Poultry and Game, CHAPTER XVIII. Fish and Meat Sauces, CHAPTER XIX. Vegetables, CHAPTER XX. Potatoes, CHAPTER XXI. Salad Dressings and Salads, CHAPTER XXII. Entrees, CHAPTER XXIII. Hot Puddings, CHAPTER XXIV. Pudding Sauces, CHAPTER XXV. Cold Desserts, CHAPTER XXVI. Ces, Ice Creams, and other Frozen Desserts, CHAPTER XXVII. Pastry, CHAPTER XXVIII. Pies, CHAPTER XXIX. Pastry Desserts, CHAPTER XXX. Gingerbreads, Cookies, and Wafers, CHAPTER XXXI. Cake, CHAPTER XXXII. Cake Fillings and Frostings, CHAPTER XXXIII. Fancy Cakes and Confections, CHAPTER XXXIV. Sandwiches and Canapés, CHAPTER XXXV. Recipes for the Chafing-dish, CHAPTER XXXVI. Cooking, Preserving, and Canning Fruits, CHAPTER XXXVII. Recipes Especially Prepared for the Sick, CHAPTER XXXVIII. Helpful Hints to the Young Housekeeper, CHAPTER XXXIX. Suitable Combinations for Serving, Breakfast Menus, Luncheon Menus, Dinner Menus, Menu for Thanksgiving Dinner, Menu for Christmas Dinner, A Full Course Dinner, Menus for Full Course Dinners, Necessary Utensils and Stores for Furnishing School, Kitchen for a Class Of Twenty-Four, Glossary, Course of Instruction as Given at the Boston Cooking School, Practice Lessons, CHAPTER 1 FOOD. Food is anything which nourishes the body. Thirteen elements enter into the composition of the body: oxygen, 62 %; carbon, 21 %; hydrogen, 10%; nitrogen, 3%; calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, iron, and fluorine the remaining 3%. Others are found occasionally, but, as their uses are unknown, will not be considered. Food is necessary for growth, repair, and energy; therefore the elements composing the body must be found in the food. The thirteen elements named are formed into chemical compounds by the vegetable and animal kingdoms to support the highest order of being, man. All food must undergo chemical change after being taken into the body, before it can be utilized by the body; this is the office of the digestive system. Food is classified as follows: — I. Organic 1. Proteid (nitrogenous or albuminous). 2. Carbohydrates (sugar and starch). 3. Fats and oils. II. Inorganic 1. Mineral matter. 2. Water. The chief office of proteids is to build and repair tissues. They can furnish energy, but at greater cost than carbohydrates, fats, and oils. They contain nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulphur or phosphorus, and include all forms of animal foods (excepting fats and glycogen) and some vegetable foods. Examples: milk, cheese, eggs, meat, fish, cereals, peas, beans, and lentils. The principal constituent of proteid food is albumen. Albumen as found in food takes different names, but has the same chemical composition; as, albumen in eggs, fibrin in meat, casein in milk and cheese, vegetable casein or legumen in peas, beans, and lentils; and gluten in wheat. To this same class belongs gelatine. The chief office of the carbohydrates is to furnish energy and maintain heat. They contain carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and include foods containing starch and sugar. Examples: vegetables, fruits, cereals, sugars, and gums. The chief office of fats and oils is to store energy and heat to be used as needed, and constitute the adipose tissues of the body. Examples: butter, cream, fat of meat, fish, cereals, nuts, and the berry of the olive-tree. The chief office of mineral matter is to furnish the necessary salts which are found in all animal and vegetable foods. Examples: sodium chloride (common salt); carbonates, sulphates and phosphates of sodium, potassium, and magnesium; besides calcium phosphates and iron. Water constitutes about two-thirds the weight of the body, and is in all tissues and fluids; therefore its abundant use is necessary. One of the greatest errors in diet is neglect to take enough water; while it is found in all animal and vegetable food, the amount is insufficient. CORRECT PROPORTIONS OF FOOD. Age, sex, occupation, climate, and season must determine the diet of a person in normal condition. Liquid food (milk or milk in preparation with the various prepared foods on the market) should constitute the diet of a child for the first eighteen months. After the teeth appear, by which time ferments have been developed for the digestion of starchy foods, entire wheat bread, baked potatoes, cereals, meat broths, and occasionally boiled eggs may be given. If mothers would use Dr. Johnson's Educators in place of the various sweet crackers, children would be as well pleased and better nourished; with a glass of milk they form a supper suited to the needs of little ones, and experience has shown children seldom tire of them. The diet should be gradually increased by the addition of cooked fruits, vegetables, and simple desserts; the third or fourth year fish and meat may be introduced, if given sparingly. Always avoid salted meats, coarse vegetables (beets, carrots, and turnips), cheese, fried food, pastry, rich desserts, confections, condiments, tea, coffee, and iced water. For school children the diet should be varied and abundant, constantly bearing in mind that this is a period of great mental and physical growth. Where children have broken down, supposedly from over-work, the cause has often been traced to impoverished diet. It must not be forgotten that digestive processes go on so rapidly that the stomach is soon emptied. Thanks to the institutor of the school luncheon-counter! The daily average ration of an adult requires 3½ oz. proteid. 3 oz. fat. 10 oz. starch. 1 oz. salt. 5 pints water. About one-third of the water is taken in our food, the remainder as a beverage. To keep in health and do the best mental and physical work, authorities agree that a mixed diet is suited for temperate climates, although sound arguments appear from the vegetarian. Women, even though they do the same amount of work as men, as a rule require less food. Brain workers should take their proteid in a form easily digested. In consideration of this fact, fish and eggs form desirable substitutes for meat. The working man needs quantity as well as quality, that the stomach may have something to act upon. Corned beef, cabbage, brown-bread, and pastry will not overtax his digestion. In old age the digestive organs lessen in activity, and diet should be almost as simple as that of a child, increasing the amount of carbohydrates and decreasing the amount of proteids and fat. WATER ([H.sub.2O). Water is a transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid. It is derived from five sources, — rains, rivers, surface-water or shallow wells, deep wells, and springs. Water is never found pure in nature; it is nearly pure when gathered in an open field, after a heavy rainfall, or from springs. For town and city supply, surface-water is furnished by some adjacent pond or lake. Samples of such water are carefully and frequently analyzed, to make sure that it is not polluted with disease germs. The hardness of water depends upon the amount of salts of lime and magnesia which it contains. Soft water is free from objectionable salts, and is preferable for household purposes. Hard water may be softened by boiling, or by the addition of a small amount of bicarbonate of soda (NaHCO). Water freezes at a temperature of 32º F., boils at 212º F.; when bubbles appear on the surface and burst, the boiling-point is reached. In high altitudes water boils at a lower temperature. From 32º to 65º F. water is termed cold; from 65º to 92º F. tepid; 92º to 100º F. warm; over that temperature, hot. Boiled water is freed from all organic impurities, and salts of lime are precipitated; it does not ferment, and is a valuable antiseptic. Hot water is more stimulating than cold, and is of use taken on an empty stomach, while at a temperature of from 60º to 95º F. it is used as an emetic; 90º F. being the most favorable temperature. Distilled water is chemically pure and is always used for medicinal purposes. It is flat and insipid to the taste, having been deprived of its atmospheric gases. There are many charged, carbonized, and mineral spring waters bottled and put on the market; many of these are used as-agreeable table beverages. Examples: Soda water, Apollinaris, Poland, Seltzer, and Vichy. Some contain minerals of medicinal value. Examples: Lithia, saline, and sulphur waters. SALTS. Of all salts found in the body, the most abundant and valuable is sodium chloride (NaCl), common salt; it exists in all tissues, secretions, and fluids of the body, with exception of enamel of the teeth. The amount found in food is not always sufficient; therefore salt is used as a condiment. It assists digestion, inasmuch as it furnishes chlorine for hydrochloric acid found in gastric juice. Common salt is obtained from evaporation of spring and sea water, also from mines. Our supply of salt obtained by evaporation comes chiefly from Michigan and New York; mined salt from Louisiana and Kansas. Salt is a great preservative; advantage is taken of this in salting meat and fish. Other salts — lime, phosphorus, magnesia, potash, sulphur, and iron — are obtained in sufficient quantity from food we eat and water we drink. In young children, perfect formation of bones and teeth depends upon phosphorus and lime taken into the system; these are found in meat and fish, but abound in cereals. STARCH ([C.sub.6][H.sub.10][O.sub.5]). Starch is a white, glistening powder; it is largely distributed throughout the vegetable kingdom, being found most abundantly in cereals and potatoes. Being a force-producer and heat-giver, it forms one of the most important foods. Alone it cannot sustain life, but must be taken in combination with foods which build and repair tissues. Test for Starch . A weak solution of iodine added to cold cooked starch gives an intense blue color. Starch is insoluble in cold water, almost soluble in boiling water. Cold water separates starch-grains, boiling water causes them to swell and burst, thus forming a paste. Starch subjected to heat is changed to dextrine ([C.sub.6][H.sub.10][O.sub.5]), British gum. Dextrine subjected to heat plus an acid or a ferment is changed to dextrose ([C.sub.6][H.sub.12][O.sub.6]). Dextrose occurs in ripe fruit, honey, sweet wine, and as a manufactured product. When grain is allowed to germinate for malting purposes, starch is changed to dextrine and dextrose. In fermentation, dextrose is changed to alcohol ([C.sub.2][H.sub.5]HO) and carbon-dioxide (C[O.sub.2]). Examples; Bread-making, vinegar, and distilled liquors. Glycogen, animal starch, is found in many animal tissues and in some fungi. Examples: In liver of meat and oysters. Raw starch is not digestible; consequently all foods containing starch should be subjected to boiling water, and thoroughly cooked. Starch is manufactured from wheat, corn, and potatoes. Corn-starch is manufactured from Indian corn. Arrowroot , the purest form of starch, is obtained from two or three species of the Maranta plant, which grows in the West Indies and other tropical countries. Bermuda arrowroot is most highly esteemed. Tapioca is starch obtained from tuberous roots of the bitter cassava, native of South America. Sago is starch obtained from sago palms, native of India. SUGAR ([C.sub.12][H.sub.22][O.sub.11]). Sugar is a crystalline substance, differing from starch by its sweet taste and solubility in cold water. As food, its uses are the same as starch; all starch must be converted into sugar before it can be assimilated. The principal kinds of sugar are: Cane sugar or sucrose, grape sugar or glucose ([C.sub.6][H.sub.12][Q.sub.6]), milk sugar or lactose ([C.sub.12][H.sub.22][O.sub.11]), and fruit sugar or levulose ([C.sub.6][H.sub.12][O.sub.6]). Cane sugar is obtained from sugar cane, beets, and the palm and sugar-maple trees. Sugar cane is a grass supposed to be native to Southern Asia, but now grown throughout the tropics, a large amount coming from Cuba and Louisiana; it is the commonest and sweetest of all, and in all cases the manufacture is essentially the same. The products of manufacture are: Molasses, syrup, brown sugar, loaf, cut, granulated, powdered, and confectioners' sugar. Brown sugar is cheapest, but is not so pure or sweet as white grades; powdered and confectioners' sugars are fine grades, pulverized, and, although seeming less sweet to the taste, are equally pure. Confectioners' sugar when applied to the tongue will dissolve at once; powdered sugar is a little granular. Cane sugar when added to fruits, and allowed to cook for some time, changes to grape sugar, losing one-third of its sweetness; therefore the reason for adding it when fruit is nearly cooked. Cane sugar is of great preservative value, hence its use in preserving fruits and milk; also, for the preparation of syrups. Three changes take place in the cooking of sugar: First, barley sugar; second, caramel; third, carbon. Grape sugar is found in honey and all sweet fruits. It appears on the outside of dried fruits such as raisins, dates, etc., and is only two-thirds as sweet as cane sugar. As a manufactured product it is obtained from the starch of corn. Milk sugar is obtained from the milk of mammalia, but unlike cane sugar does not ferment. Fruit sugar is obtained from sweet fruits, and is sold As diabetin, is sweeter than cane sugar, and is principally used by diabetic patients. GUM, PECTOSE AND CELLULOSE. These compounds found in food are closely allied to the carbohydrates, but are neither starchy, saccharine, nor oily. Gum exists in the juices of almost all plants, coming from the stems, branches, and fruits. Examples: Gum arabic, gum tragacanth, and mucilage. Pectose exists in the fleshy pulp of unripe fruit; during the process of ripening it changes to pectin; by cooking, pectin is changed to pectosic acid, and by longer cooking to pectic acid. Pectosic acid is jelly-like when cold; pectic acid is jelly-like when hot or cold. Cellulose constitutes the cell-walls of vegetable life; in very young vegetables it is possible that it can be acted upon by the digestive ferments; in older vegetables it becomes woody and completely indigestible. FATS AND OILS. Fats and oils are found in both the animal and vegetable kingdom. Fats are solid; oils are liquid; they may be converted into a liquid state by application of heat; they contain three substances, stearin (solid), olein (liquid), palmitin (semi-solid). Suet is an example where stearin is found in excess; lard where olein is in excess, and butter where palmitin is in excess. Margarin is a mixture of stearin and palmitin. The fatty acids are formed of stearin, olein, and palmitin, with glycerine as the base. Examples: stearic, palmitic, and oleic acid. Butyric acid is acid found in butter. These are not sour to the taste, but are called acids on account of their chemical composition. Among animal fats cream and butter are of first importance as foods, on account of their easy assimilation. Other examples are: The fat of meats, bone-marrow, suet (the best found around the loin and kidneys of the beef creature), lard, cottolene, coto-suet, cocoanut butter, butterine and oleomargarine. The principal animal oils are cod liver oil and oil found in the yolk of egg; principal vegetable oils are olive, cotton-seed, poppy, and cocoanut oil, and oils obtained from various nuts. Oils are divided into two classes, essential and fixed. Essential oils are volatile and soluble in alcohol. Examples: Clove, rose, nutmeg, and violet. Fixed oils are non-volatile and soluble in ether, oil or turpentine. Examples: Oil of nuts, corn-meal, mustard, and glycerine. Fats may be heated to a high temperature, as considered in cookery they have no boiling-point. When appearing to boil, it is evident water has been added, and the temperature lowered to that of boiling water, 212° F. MILK. COMPOSITION. Proteid, 3.4%. Fat, 4%. Mineral matter, .7%. Water, 87%. Lactose, 4.9%. Boston Chemist. The value of milk as a food is obvious from the fact that it constitutes the natural food of all young mammalia during the period of their most rapid growth. There is some danger, however, of overestimating its value in the dietary of adults, as solid food is essential, and liquid taken should act as a stimulant and a solvent rather than as a nutrient. One obtains the greatest benefit from milk when taken alone at regular intervals between meals, or before retiring, and sipped, rather than drunk. Hot milk is often given to produce sleep. When milk is allowed to stand for a few hours, the globules of fat, which have been held in suspension throughout the liquid, rise to the top in the form of cream; this is due to their lower specific gravity. The difference in quality of milk depends chiefly on the quantity of fat therein: casein, lactose, and mineral matter being nearly constant, water varying but little unless milk is adulterated. Why Milk Sours . A germ found floating in the air attacks a portion of the lactose in the milk, converting it into lactic acid; this, in turn, acts upon the casein (proteid) and precipitates it, producing what is known as curd and whey. Whey contains water, salts, and some sugar. Milk is preserved by sterilization, pasteurisation, and evaporation. Fresh condensed milk, a form of evaporized milk, is sold in bulk, and is preferred by many to serve with coffee. Various brands of condensed milk and cream are on the market in tin cans, hermetically sealed. Examples: Nestle's Swiss Condensed Milk, Eagle Condensed Milk, Daisy Condensed Milk, Highland Evaporated Cream, Borden's Peerless Evaporated Cream. Malted milk — evaporized milk in combination with extracts of malted barley and wheat — is used to a considerable extent; it is sold in the form of powder. Thin, or strawberry, and thick cream may be obtained from almost all creameries. Devonshire, or clotted cream, is cream which has been removed from milk allowed to heat slowly to a temperature of about 150° F. In feeding infants with milk, avoid all danger of infectious germs by sterilization. By this process milk can be kept for many days, and transported if necessary. To prevent acidity of the stomach, add from one to two teaspoonfuls of lime water to each half pint of milk. Lime water may be bought at any druggist's, or easily prepared at home. Lime Water . Pour two quarts boiling water over an inch cube unslacked lime; stir thoroughly and stand over night; in the morning pour off the liquid that is clear, and bottle for use. Keep in a cool place. (Continues...) Excerpted from Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer . Copyright © 2011 Fannie Merritt Farmer. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.