Poisoned Pins

Poisoned Pins
Author: Joan Hess
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2007-04-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429940077

Claire Malloy loves her life. But how did it go by so fast? A bookstore owner, part-time sleuth, and full-time single mother, Claire is about to turn the big four-oh! Good thing her teenage daughter, Caron, has just been recruited by the Kappa Theta Eta girls—whose sorority house is next door to the Malloys'—to be a consultant for the cosmetics empire My Beautiful Self, Inc. At the very least, Claire can get a little help with those fine lines around her eyes...but at what cost? Turns out there's a high price to pay to look one's best. After a series of dangerous and suspicious incidents, including a hit-and-run "accident" that kills a sorority sister, it becomes clear to Claire that the beauty business in Farberville, Arkansas, is getting pretty ugly—and with every new makeover another dark circle rises from beneath the surface....

Poisoned Pin: A Cozy Mystery

Poisoned Pin: A Cozy Mystery
Author: Laney Monday
Publisher: Cozy Clue Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2019-08-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Former Olympian and Arizona native Brenna Battle’s crazy dream of running her very own judo school for kids in tiny, historic Bonney Bay isn’t exactly off to a great start. She has a grand total of one student signed up, but she’s determined to succeed even if it means going door to door. Brenna’s search for judo recruits takes her inside the infamous haunted Reiner House, where she befriends a confused old man named Harvey, and finds herself at the scene of the second murder since her arrival in Bonney Bay. Brenna butts heads with Will Riggins, AKA Officer Dimples, when the poisoning of Derek Thompson is pinned on his uncle, Harvey Thompson. Harvey claims the ghosts of Reiner House are responsible. Brenna, busy battling the ghosts of her past failures and heartaches as she tries to get her business off the ground, is determined to prove there’s an earthly explanation for Derek’s murder. One that will set Harvey free, not only from jail, but from the torment of the “spirits” inhabiting Reiner House. Poisoned Pin is the second book in the Brenna Battle Cozy Mystery series. The series starts with Taking the Fall. ABOUT THE SERIES: In this fast-paced, fun cozy mystery series, Brenna, the proud new owner of the building that formerly housed Bonney Bay’s lone recreational opportunity for kids, Little Swans Ballet, is ready to turn tutu-clad powder-puffs into little warriors by opening a judo school for kids in its place. Olympian Brenna Battle once had the fire. Now, she’s just burned out—and burned by love. She’s ready to retire from competitive judo and pursue a new dream in a new town, with her biggest supporter, her recently divorced little sister, Blythe.

Taking the Fall, Poisoned Pin, Thrown Off

Taking the Fall, Poisoned Pin, Thrown Off
Author: Laney Monday
Publisher: Cozy Clue Press
Total Pages: 415
Release:
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

This set includes the first three books in the Brenna Battle Cozy Mystery series. At the end of each full-length book, the mystery is solved and there are no cliff-hangers. ABOUT THE SERIES: In this fast-paced, fun cozy mystery series, Brenna, the proud new owner of the building that formerly housed Bonney Bay’s lone recreational opportunity for kids, Little Swans Ballet, is ready to turn tutu-clad powder-puffs into little warriors by opening a judo school for kids in its place. BOOK 1, TAKING THE FALL: Olympian Brenna Battle once had the fire. Now, she’s just burned out—and burned by love. She’s ready to retire from competitive judo and pursue a new dream in a new town, with her biggest supporter, her recently divorced little sister, Blythe. But on their first day in town, Blythe falls for local sleaze-bag reporter, Ellison Baxter, and their small-town welcome is stained by Baxter’s murder. The weapon—Blythe Battle’s hair brush. Now she must clear her sister’s name and save her new dream from ending even more disastrously than her Olympic hopes. Brenna must deal with one crazy member of the local police force, who’s determined to see the sisters pay—and another cop, whose deep brown eyes just might drive Brenna crazy—in a way her battered heart just can’t take. BOOK 2, POISONED PIN: Former Olympian and Arizona native Brenna Battle’s crazy dream of running her very own judo school for kids in tiny, historic Bonney Bay isn’t exactly off to a great start. She has a grand total of one student signed up, but she’s determined to succeed even if it means going door to door. Brenna’s search for judo recruits takes her inside the infamous haunted Reiner House, where she befriends a confused old man named Harvey, and finds herself at the scene of the second murder since her arrival in Bonney Bay. Brenna butts heads with Will Riggins, AKA Officer Dimples, when the poisoning of Derek Thompson is pinned on his uncle, Harvey Thompson. Harvey claims the ghosts of Reiner House are responsible. Brenna, busy battling the ghosts of her past failures and heartaches as she tries to get her business off the ground, is determined to prove there’s an earthly explanation for Derek’s murder. One that will set Harvey free, not only from jail, but from the torment of the “spirits” inhabiting Reiner House. BOOK 3, THROWN OFF: After a few bumps—and mysterious deaths—former Olympian Brenna Battle’s new dream of running her own judo school for kids is finally rolling along. Business is good, and her little Bonney Bay Battlers are getting ready to put on a show for their small town’s Fourth of July parade. Things are heating up between Brenna and her favorite police officer, Will Riggins, too. But then Millie Brown, one of the new friends Brenna and her sister, Blythe, have made since moving to tiny Bonney Bay, takes a spill off her ladder while painting a mural on the wall of the Cherry Bowl grocery store. Her suspicious death has the whole town thrown off. Amid the cupcakes and chili dogs and the bombs bursting in air, Brenna must risk everything, including her budding relationship with Will, to find a killer before time runs out.

Busy Bodies

Busy Bodies
Author: Joan Hess
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2009-04-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429966025

Since his recent arrival, avant-garde artist Zeno Gorgias has been turning heads and attracting gawkers in the otherwise tame college town of Farberville Arkansas. Zeno's "interactive" art—featuring an undressed woman lounging beside a coffin on his front yard—is neither welcome by the community nor punishable by law. But as local bookseller and amateur sleuth Claire Malloy is about to find out, sometimes there's a dark side to one's freedom of artistic expression... Strange things keep happening to Zeno and his oeuvre. First, his estranged wife comes to town, demanding he be committed to a mental institution. Then Zeno's house mysteriously goes up in flames. And if that's not enough, a dead body is found inside of the infamous coffin. Now that Zeno has been arrested for murder, it's up to Claire to figure out what on earth is going on in Farberville...while the real killer remains on the loose.

The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies

The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies
Author: Bill Palmer
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1461672759

Now in Paperback! Early in 1971, Five Fingers of Death premiered in a New York movie theater. This was America's first look at a Chinese martial arts movie. In Chicago that same year, Duel of the Iron Fist debuted. With the release of Bruce Lee's films, the market exploded. And thus began America's love affair with what is one of the most misunderstood and maligned film genres. The Encyclopedia covers the genre from 1920 to 1994. The genre, however, can be very confusing: films often have several titles, and many of the stars have more than one pseudonym. In an effort to clarify some of the confusion, the authors have included all the information available to them on almost 3,300 films. Each entry includes a listing of the production company, the cast and crew, distributors, running times, reviews with star ratings whenever possible, and alternate film titles. A list of film series and one of the stars' pseudonyms, in addition to a 7,900 name index, are also included. Illustrated.

The Detective and the Artist

The Detective and the Artist
Author: J.K. Van Dover
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2019-01-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476635919

This book focuses on the distinctive role that artists have played in detective fiction--as detectives, as villains and victims, and as bystanders. With a few significant exceptions, literary detectives have always identified themselves as essentially the deconstructors of the artful crimes of others. They may use various methods--ratiocinative, scientific, or hard-boiled--but they always unravel the threads that the villains have woven into deceptive covers for their crimes. The detective does, in the end, produce a work of art: a narrative that explains everything that needs explanation. But the detective's moral work is often juxtaposed to the aesthetic work of the painters, poets, and writers that the detective encounters during an investigation. The author surveys this juxtaposition in works by important authors from the early development of the genre (Poe, Conan Doyle), the golden age (Bentley, Christie, Sayers, James, et al.), and the hard-boiled era (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Spicer et al.).

Poisoned Profits

Poisoned Profits
Author: Philip Shabecoff
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2008-08-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1588367126

In this shocking and sobering book, two fearless journalists directly and definitively link industrial toxins to the current rise in childhood disease and death. In the tradition of Silent Spring, Poisoned Profits is a landmark investigation, an eye-opening account of a country that prizes money over children’s health. With indisputable data, Philip Shabecoff and Alice Shabecoff reveal that the children of baby boomers–the first to be raised in a truly “toxified” world–have higher rates of birth defects, asthma, cancer, autism, and other serious illnesses than previous generations. In piercing case histories, the authors identify the culprit as corporate pollution. Here are the stories of such places as Dickson, Tennessee, where babies were born with cleft lips and palates after landfill chemicals seeped into the water, and Port Neches, Texas, where so many graduates of a high school near synthetic rubber and chemical plants contracted cancer that the school was nicknamed “Leukemia High.” The danger to our children isn’t just in the outside world, though. The Shabecoffs provide evidence that our homes are now infested with everything from dangerous flame retardants in crib mattresses to harmful plastic softeners in teething rings to antibiotics and arsenic in chicken–additives that are absorbed by growing and physically vulnerable kids as well as by pregnant women. Compounding the problem are chemical corporations that sabotage investigations and regulations, a government that refuses to police these companies, and corporate-hired scientists who keep pertinent secrets massaged with skewed data of their own. Poisoned Profits also demonstrates how people are fighting back, whether through grassroots parents’ groups putting pressure on politicians, the rise of “ecotheology” in the pulpits of formerly indifferent churches, or the new “green chemistry” being practiced in labs to replace bad elements with good. The Shabecoffs also include helpful tips on reducing risks to children in how they eat and play, and in how parents clean and maintain their homes. Powerful, unflinching, and eminently readable, Poisoned Profits is a wake-up call that is bound to inspire talk and force change.