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The ninth installment in the series that inspired the HBO original True Blood offers another exciting undead adventure, which opens with a vampire fashion show, showing just one of the fruits of the author's unique writing style. Original.
Best-selling author, Susan Beth Pfeffer, delivers a riveting companion to Life As We Knew It in this enthralling tale that follows seventeen-year-old Alex Morales as he fights to survive in the aftermath of apocalyptic events in New York City. Alex Morales is an average high schooler focused on his after-school job, helping his dad out with building superintendent responsibilities, and getting good grades so he can make it into an Ivy League college. But when the moon alters its gravitational pull and catastrophic events ensue, everything changes. Now, he has to care for his younger sisters, decide whether it’s ethical to rob the dead, and keep the hope alive that their lost parents will return. Bone-chilling and harrowing, Susan Beth Pfeffer investigates what it takes to survive when the odds are stacked against you in this captivating story about sacrifice and humanity.
An arresting un-coming-of-age story, from a breathtaking talent Becca has always longed to break free from her small, backwater hometown. But the discovery of an unidentified dead girl on the side of a dirt road sends the town--and Becca--into a tailspin. Unable to make sense of the violence of the outside world creeping into her backyard, Becca finds herself retreating inward, paralyzed from moving forward for the first time in her life. Short chapters detailing the last days of Amelia Anne Richardson's life are intercut with Becca's own summer as the parallel stories of two young women struggling with self-identity and relationships on the edge twist the reader closer and closer to the truth about Amelia's death.
An absorbing collection of ten famous murder stories of North Carolina, spanning the years 1808 to 1914. “An interesting job of reporting....A book that rates a place on the bedside table.”-Charlotte Observer
A TONIGHT SHOW SUMMER READS FINALIST An electrifying first novel from "a riveting new voice in American fiction" (George Saunders): A young woman returns to her childhood home in the American South and uncovers secrets about her father's life and death Billie James' inheritance isn't much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day—and she hasn't been back to the South since. Thirty years later, Billie returns but her father's home is unnervingly secluded: her only neighbors are the McGees, the family whose history has been entangled with hers since the days of slavery. As Billie encounters the locals, she hears a strange rumor: that she herself went missing on the day her father died. As the mystery intensifies, she finds out that this forgotten piece of her past could put her in danger. Inventive, gritty, and openhearted, The Gone Dead is an astonishing debut novel about race, justice, and memory that lays bare the long-concealed wounds of a family and a country.
Serious crime isn't supposed to happen in elegant English country homes, especially not in such families as that of Queen's counsel Ralph Mintar, a prominent barrister who's destined to become a high-court judge. So it's particularly shocking when Mintar's attractive wife, Virginia, goes missing just after a small dinner party. Her disappearance is eerily reminiscent of the day four years before, when the Mintars' adult daughter Caroline left the house, never to return. Caroline seems to have vanished off the face of the earth, but Virginia's body is soon found at the bottom of a garden well, and Inspector Luke Thanet and his partner, Sergeant Mike Lineham, who are called in to investigate, quickly discard any idea of accidental death. Virginia was the perfect murder victim. Her outrageous flirting made her many enemies, several of whom were there on the night of her death. They had both reason and opportunity to kill her, but which one took the final, fatal step? Who wanted Virginia dead and gone? Who was Virginia's latest lover? What does her mother-in-law have to hide? What about Caroline's younger sister and her womanizing fiancé? Thanet and Lineham wonder how they can even begin to unravel the morass of family secrets that complicate this case. Distracted by his own daughter Bridget's dangerous pregnancy and pushed by his boss to find hard evidence in this high-profile homicide, Luke Thanet feels pressured as never before as he probes into the life and death of one of the most poignant and, finally, shocking cases of his career. Always a skilled mistress of the classic British crime novel, award-winning author Dorothy Simpson is at the top of her form in this powerful novel of family love gone tragically wrong.
From the modern master of noir, Andrew Vachss, comes this heart-topping and bestselling new thriller that completely reinvents the Burke series. Urban Outlaw Burke barely survives an attack by a professional hit squad that kills his partner. With a new face, Burke goes into hiding. And on the hunt. Dead and Gone takes him from the streets of New York City through a cross-country underground, and deep into his own tortured past. The violent journey ends in a place that exists only in the dreams of the darkest degenerates on earth.
"Life sometimes is a struggle. We have to do what we can to survive. Sometimes we make foolish decisions in life. We all have been there. At times we feel hopeless, unable to persevere. The one thing I've learned is that you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep going. Life is full of uncertainties; we have to expect the unexpected. "Being a child of abuse can sometimes be overwhelming. It's really hard when no one listens to you, and there is no one to confirm that you are abused. You feel lost, and the more you deny what happened, the more lost you become. I am a child of abuse. In order to deal with the pain, I created another world for myself. Later I would use drugs to escape my pain. As an adult I felt so much shame for what happened to me, that I retreated into a world of drugs and prostitution. This is my story." -------- Jasmine S.
The rain-soaked streets of Napua on Hawaii s island of Elima are a far cry from a battlefield but, for returned soldier Kimo Stanner, there s a sudden reminder of warfare when a figure rushes in front of his pickup and he feels the impact. Even before getting out to view the damage, he knows the pedestrian is dead, and there s nothing for it but to report to the police except that when the police arrive, the body has disappeared. When he turns to the firm of Smith, Chu and Yoshinobu to defend him on what is now simply a drunk-driving charge, Kimo s attorney is Laura Correa, newly hired by the firm. Kay Yoshinobu agrees to help the nervous attorney with her first case as a trial lawyer. With no missing persons reported, and no proof that there was actually a body at the scene, the case goes well, the judge is sympathetic, the defense witnesses are effective, and the prosecuting attorney isn t out for blood. And that s when things go wrong terribly wrong. A body turns up in a local gulch, is clearly the one Kimo reported, and the DUI is then raised to manslaughter. As the police look into the matter, they find more and more evidence to indicate even that charge may be changed to something more serious, and Kay s investigative abilities are put to a severe test. That Kimo s pickup clearly struck a pedestrian who was alive at the time seems irrefutable. And, by Kimo s own testimony, the man was dead following the accident. To prove otherwise seems both medically and legally impossible, but Laura and Kay soon find that there may be another explanation. And the search for it takes them off to interview a host of strange people.
Violent dealth is amazingly apt to remind us of vigorous life; these ten stories of classic North Carolina murders which occurred between 1808 and 1914 represent a much neglected part of the exciting history of the state. Victims include a Confederate general, a lovely orphan girl, a pathetic little boy, and a highly offensive political boss. The motives are the usual ones -- gain, revenge, "elimination," and jealousy. The plaintive history and untimely death of Naomi Wise -- "poor 'Omi" they called her in Randolph County over five generations ago -- strikingly counterparts Dreiser's An American Tragedy; Ida Bell Warren, the veritable Lady Macbeth of Forsyth County; the arsenic poisoner of old Fayetteville; the kidnapping of Kenneth Beasley near the site of the Lost Colony; the almost perfect crime, the murder of the hated Reconstruction Senator "Chicken" Stephens of Caswell County, which in spite of the efforts of Claude G. Bowers and others went unsolved for years; the mad jealousy of Frankie Silver of Burke County which ended with bitter justice at the end of the law's noosed rope, the first woman hanged in the state -- these and other lively stories of famous North Carolina murders make fascinating reading. The stories, told with authority and inviting informality, employ material from newspapers, court records, letters, family collections, and numerous works of local history. They evoke a feeling for a past time and place as well as for the untidy events themselves.
