The Blue Last

The Blue Last
Author: Martha Grimes
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2002-08-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101118431

In The Blue Last, Richard Jury finally faces the last thing in the world he wants to deal with—the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood. Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the London City police, has asked for Jury's help. Two skeletons have been unearthed in the City during the excavation of London's last bombsite, where once a pub stood called the The Blue Last. Mickey believes that a child who survived the bombing has been posing for over fifty years as a child who didn't. The grandchild of brewery magnet Oliver Tyndale supposedly survived that December 1940 bombing . . . but did she? Mickey also has a murder to solve. Simon Croft, prosperous City financial broker, and son of the one-time owner of The Blue Last is found shot to death in his Thames-side house. But the book he was writing about London during the German blitzkrieg has disappeared. Jury wants to get eyes and ears into Tynedale Lodge, and looks to his friend, Melrose Plant, to play the role. Reluctantly, Plant plays it, accompanied on his rounds of the Lodge gardens by nine-year-old Gemma Trim, orphan and ward of Oliver Tynedale; and Benny Keagan, a resourceful twelve-year-old orphaned delivery boy. And Richard Jury may not make it out alive. A stolen book, stolen lives, or is any of this what it seems? Identity, memory, provenance - these are all called into question in The Blue Last

The Last Blue

The Last Blue
Author: Isla Morley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1643134191

In this luminous narrative inspired by the fascinating real case of “the Blue People of Kentucky,” Isla Morley probes questions of identity, love, and family in her breathtaking new novel. In 1937, there are recesses in Appalachia no outsiders have ever explored. Two government-sponsored documentarians from Cincinnati, Ohio—a writer and photographer—are dispatched to penetrate this wilderness and record what they find for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. For photographer Clay Havens, the assignment is his last chance to reboot his flagging career. So when he and his journalist partner are warned away from the remote Spooklight Holler outside of town, they set off eagerly in search of a headline story. What they see will haunt Clay into his old age: Jubilee Buford, a woman whose skin is a shocking and unmistakable shade of blue. From this happenstance meeting between a woman isolated from society and persecuted her whole life, and a man accustomed to keeping himself at lens distance from others, comes a mesmerizing story in which the dark shades of betrayal, prejudice, fear, and guilt, are refracted along with the incandescent hues of passion and courage. Panning across the rich rural aesthetic of eastern Kentucky, The Last Blue is a captivating love story and an intimate portrait of what it is like to be truly one of a kind.

Last of the Blue and Gray

Last of the Blue and Gray
Author: Richard A. Serrano
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2013-10-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1588343952

Richard Serrano, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, pens a story of two veterans. In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117 blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting away; an era was ending. Unknown to the public, centennial officials, and the White House too, one of these men was indeed a veteran of that horrible conflict and one according to the best evidence nothing but a fraud. One was a soldier. The other had been living a great, big lie.

The Last Blue Mountain

The Last Blue Mountain
Author: Ralph Barker
Publisher: Vertebrate Publishing
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-03-05
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1912560437

'When an accident occurs, something may emerge of lasting value, for the human spirit may rise to its greatest heights. This happened on Haramosh.' The Last Blue Mountain is the heart-rending true story of the 1957 expedition to Mount Haramosh in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. With the summit beyond reach, four young climbers are about to return to camp. Their brief pause to enjoy the view and take photographs is interrupted by an avalanche which sweeps Bernard Jillott and John Emery hundreds of feet down the mountain into a snow basin. Miraculously, they both survive the fall. Rae Culbert and Tony Streather risk their own lives to rescue their friends, only to become stranded alongside them. The group's efforts to return to safety are increasingly desperate, hampered by injury, exhaustion and the loss of vital climbing gear. Against the odds, Jillott and Emery manage to climb out of the snow basin and head for camp, hoping to reach food, water and assistance in time to save themselves and their companions from an icy grave. But another cruel twist of fate awaits them. An acclaimed mountaineering classic in the same genre as Joe Simpson's Touching the Void , Ralph Barker's The Last Blue Mountain is an epic tale of friendship and fortitude in the face of tragedy.

The Last Little Blue Envelope

The Last Little Blue Envelope
Author: Maureen Johnson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2011-04-26
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0061976792

Ginny Blackstone thought that the biggest adventure of her life was behind her. She spent last summer traveling around Europe, following the tasks her aunt Peg laid out in a series of letters before she died. When someone stole Ginny's backpack—and the last little blue envelope inside—she resigned herself to never knowing how it was supposed to end. Months later, a mysterious boy contacts Ginny from London, saying he's found her bag. Finally, Ginny can finish what she started. But instead of ending her journey, the last letter starts a new adventure—one filled with old friends, new loves, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Ginny finds she must hold on to her wits . . . and her heart. This time, there are no instructions.

Last Night at the Blue Angel

Last Night at the Blue Angel
Author: Rebecca Rotert
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062315307

Set against the backdrop of the early 1960s Chicago jazz scene, a highly ambitious and stylish literary debut that combines the atmosphere and period detail of Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility with the emotional depth and drama of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, about a talented but troubled singer, her precocious ten-year-old daughter, and their heartbreaking relationship. It is the early 1960s, and Chicago is a city of uneasy tensions—segregation, sexual experimentation, free love, the Cold War—but it is also home to one of the country’s most vibrant jazz scenes. Naomi Hill, a singer at the Blue Angel club, has been poised on the brink of stardom for nearly ten years. Finally, her big break arrives—the cover of Look magazine. But success has come at enormous personal cost. Beautiful and magnetic, Naomi is a fiercely ambitious yet extremely self-destructive woman whose charms are irresistible and dangerous for those around her. No one knows this better than Sophia, her clever ten-year-old daughter. For Sophia, Naomi is the center of her universe. As the only child of a single, unconventional mother, growing up in an adult world, Sophia has seen things beyond her years and her understanding. Unsettled by her uncertain home life, she harbors the terrible fear that the world could end at any moment, and compulsively keeps a running list of practical objects she will need to reinvent once nuclear catastrophe strikes. Her one constant is Jim, the photographer who is her best friend, surrogate father, and protector. But Jim is deeply in love with Naomi—a situation that adds to Sophia’s anxiety. Told from the alternating perspectives of Sophia and Naomi, their powerful and wrenching story unfolds in layers, revealing Sophia’s struggle for her mother’s love with Naomi’s desperate journey to stardom and the colorful cadre of close friends who shaped her along the way. Sophisticated yet poignant, Last Night at the Blue Angel is an unforgettable tale about what happens when our passion for the life we want is at sharp odds with the life we have. It is a story ripe with surprising twists and revelations, and an ending that is bound to break your heart.

13 Little Blue Envelopes

13 Little Blue Envelopes
Author: Maureen Johnson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2009-10-06
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0061973807

New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson’s funny, heartbreaking, and utterly romantic tale gets a great new cover! Ginny Blackstone never thought she’d spend her summer vacation backpacking across Europe. But that was before she received the first little blue envelope from Aunt Peg. This letter was different from Peg’s usual letters for two reasons: 1. Peg had been dead for three months. 2. The letter included $1000 cash for a passport and a plane ticket. Armed with instructions for how to retrieve twelve other letters Peg wrote—twelve letters that tell Ginny where she needs to go and what she needs to do when she gets there—Ginny quickly finds herself swept away in her first real adventure. Traveling from London to Edinburgh to Amsterdam and beyond, Ginny begins to uncover stories from her aunt’s past and discover who Peg really was. But the most surprising thing Ginny learns isn’t about Peg . . . it’s about herself. Everything about Ginny will change this summer, and it’s all because of the 13 little blue envelopes. Look for the sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope!

Our Last Blue Moon

Our Last Blue Moon
Author: Kris O'Shee
Publisher: Watershed Lit Books
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre:
ISBN: 9781736814727

In Our Last Blue Moon, dancer Kris O'Shee, widow of Alan Cheuse, the novelist, beloved teacher, and literary commentator known as the "voice of books" on NPR's All Things Considered for over thirty years, tells the story of the loss of her husband after he sustained injuries in a car crash in the summer of 2015. O'Shee chronicles the days in the Northern California hospital, the bedside vigil after Cheuse lapsed into a coma, and ultimately, his death. In her publishing debut, O'Shee writes in engaging and honest prose, in a memoir that is deeply personal and self-aware, without any self-pity or cliché. This is a story vivid in language, awash in love, and honest in reflecting on twenty-five happily shared years with the love of O'Shee's life. Reeling from Cheuse's death, O'Shee was thrust into widowhood. Rattled by grief, she eventually wrote her way to a new stage of life. "...written with grace, charm, wit, and mischief." - Molly Giles "This is a story of ultimate grace, told with ... elegant precision." - Ana Menendez "Her grief and joy will stay with me for a long time." - Matt Klam

Branch Rickey's Little Blue Book

Branch Rickey's Little Blue Book
Author: Branch Rickey
Publisher: SportClassic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2004
Genre: Baseball
ISBN: 9781894963282

Branch Rickey's own words from his personal papers are skillfully compiled to form a book of witticisms and observations that abounds with common sense and insight, stands today a work of inspiration.

A Blue Coast Mystery

A Blue Coast Mystery
Author: Nick Sweeney
Publisher: Addison & Highsmith
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2020-11-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 159211069X

In A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved, a London nurse narrates the story of a drifter she latches onto in a public hospital. Henri is in permanent recovery, not only from his heroin addiction but from the 1960s, a decade that invited the unwary to the biggest party in history then discarded them. She is curious about his past life on the Côte d’Azur with a French countess, hanging out with the Rolling Stones in their exile. Henri dismisses that story; it’s an old one. Instead, he tells her about a couple he knew in Nice, the man an Armenian with the convenient name Armen, and his wife, Luciana, originally from Bessarabia, a forgotten battleground of Europe, subsumed into the bigger countries around it. They are gamblers who continually made and lost small fortunes. They are also genocide survivors – a word Henri understands for the first time when he hears them utter it – Armen escaping the Smyrna conflagration in 1922, and Luciana surviving the totalitarian powers that scourged Europe in the Second World War. Both are from places that no longer exist. Henri’s affinity with them becomes friendship, even as their troubles multiply when Luciana falls prey to a wasting disease. When a series of catastrophes robs Henri of his friends and his countess, his days on the Blue Coast are numbered, and soon he is back in his native England, in and out of London’s hospitals. There are signs that his luck has not been all bad: Henri may have salvaged some of the fortune his friends lost, and the narrator feels close to a solution to a final mystery from his time on the Blue Coast when she deduces that he is not as adrift as he seems. Nick Sweeney is a freelance writer and musician living on the English coast. His fascination with East European history and culture will become apparent to readers of A Blue Coast Mystery: Almost Solved. Nick’s other books include the Poland-set Laikonik Express and The Exploding Elephant.