A Decadent Way To Die

A Decadent Way To Die
Author: G. A. McKevett
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2011-10-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0758277652

A plus-sized PI isn’t playing around when a doll creator is murdered in this cozy mystery by the acclaimed author of Wicked Craving. An ex-cop turned private detective, Savannah Reid prides herself on cracking even the toughest cases. But her latest investigation is leaving her hungry for answers as she tries to unmask the identity of a cunning, would-be killer. His prey? Legendary designer Helene Strauss, creator of the world-famous Helene doll. While Helene’s brassy, take-no-prisoners style made her a huge success, it also made her quite a few enemies. Before long, Savannah is sure she has a handle on the case. But when two key players turn up dead in Helene’s sizzling hot Jacuzzi, Savannah will have to start from scratch—and question everything she thought she knew about the Strausses’ twisted family tree . . . Praise for A Decadent Way to Die: “Superb.” —Publishers Weekly,starred review “McKevett serves up plenty of action.” —Kirkus “Fans of Diane Mott Davidson will appreciate this one.” —Library Journal

No Fire Escape in Hell

No Fire Escape in Hell
Author: Kim Cayer
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2016-02-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1785352261

Maddy makes a fine living as a singing-telegram performer and is the proud mother to an over-achiever. The downside? She's in a mentally abusive relationship with her husband that she fears may turn physical at any time. Her husband agrees to leave the marriage, but only if she hands over 100 grand in cash. Determined to make that goal, but unable to live with her unstable spouse any longer, Maddy decides to move out. Her only option, in order to save as much money as possible, is to move into her car... Heartfelt and humorous, No Fire Escape in Hell will have you rooting for Maddy as she encounters the goodness in some folk, the badness in others, and endures sleepless nights avoiding the eye of police as she looks for places to take a nap.

The Likely World

The Likely World
Author: Melanie Conroy-Goldman
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Total Pages: 549
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1597098116

“[T]hemes of motherhood, love, and addiction collide in heartbreaking and dangerous ways” in this provocative and fascinating debut novel (Publishers Weekly). After twenty years of addiction to cloud, a drug which wipes the user’s short-term memory, Mellie’s mind is a messy collection of fragments. Now a single mother, she has decided to get clean with the help of a tough-minded sponsor. She desperately clings to her fragile sobriety, but on the evening of her twenty-ninth day sober, a stranger pulls into Mellie’s driveway—and her heart surges. To protect her new life and her two-year-old daughter, Mellie must now piece together the shards of her traumatic past. Shifting between 1988 and 2010, Melanie Conroy-Goldman’s debut novel is “bizarre and beautiful, equal parts brainy lit and gut-bucket pulp” (Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior).

Life Underground

Life Underground
Author: Terry Williams
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231556942

Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel residents’ world, seeking to understand life on the margins and out of sight. He visited the tunnels between West Seventy-Second and West Ninety-Sixth Streets hundreds of times from 1991 to 1996, when authorities cleared them out to make way for Amtrak passenger service, and again between 2000 and 2020. Life Underground explores this society below the surface and the varieties of experience among unhoused people. Bringing together anecdotal material, field observations, photographs, transcribed conversations with residents, and excerpts from personal journals, Williams provides a vivid ethnographic portrait of individual people, day-to-day activities, and the social world of the underground and their engagement with the world above, which they call “topside.” He shows how marginalized people strive to make a place for themselves amid neglect and isolation as they struggle for dignity. Featuring Williams’s distinctive ethnographic eye and deep empathy for those on the margins, Life Underground shines a unique light on a vanished subterranean community.

The Art of Dumpster Diving

The Art of Dumpster Diving
Author: Jennifer Anne Moses
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 168442464X

Sixteen-year-old James and his little brother, Danny, live in Crystal Springs, Louisiana, with their grandmother, mother, and first cousin, Lila. The family is working class, proud, strict, and church-going. When a big, clumsy boy named Gabriel moves up the street with his minuscule and mysterious “auntie,” James has a new friend who he loves and hates in equal measure. When Grandma dies and Lila runs away, James and Danny’s mother struggles to make things work, but something’s wrong, so wrong that one awful day, James finds his mother lying in her bed, dead. Panicked, he runs to the only person he can think of, his friend Gabriel. Gabriel insists that if the authorities know that there are no adults at home, they’ll send James and Danny away to foster care or worse, and ends up convincing James that the only way to maintain any kind of decent life for himself and his little brother is to carry on as if things are normal. The boys bury the body under an abandoned house, and, as James tries to make ends meet (procuring food from dumpsters) things become increasingly desperate. It’s Gabriel who comes up with a “master plan” to find a woman who looks enough like the boys’ mother that she can pass for her---and get money out of the bank. They recruit Lucetta from a soup kitchen, and she moves in. For a while, things begin to look up---and then they fall apart completely. But in the process of losing everything, James and his brother Danny gain a new family, one based on grit, faith and hope.

Wolf is a Four-letter Word

Wolf is a Four-letter Word
Author: Carrie Newberry
Publisher: EDGE-Lite
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-08-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1770532064

For an immortal, life is eternally complicated. Kellan Faolanni, half-wolf shapeshifter, is a member of a secret society called the Sankhain. When a man is killed by what appears to be a wolf pack, the Sankhain fear this murder may be directed at Kellan, the only shapeshifter in town. The killer is protected, though, by someone high up in the faery court. Kellan is forbidden from killing him. But how can she make this dangerous man stop killing without taking his life? Avoiding a fight might cost her everything, including her sanity.

Who Glares Wins

Who Glares Wins
Author: Camilla Chafer
Publisher: Audacious
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2012-07-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0956908691

Only a few weeks into her new job as a private investigator, Lexi Graves thinks she may have bitten off more than she can chew with her first solo cases. In between going undercover as a plush pony at a “Bronie” conference and following her cheating brother-in-law, she’s got a saboteur-turned-killer to catch and a missing woman to find. Two of her cases may be connected, but how? There’s no short list of suspects to investigate, but the closer Lexi gets to the killer, the more her life is put in jeopardy. Trying to avoid being framed for a murder she didn’t commit, Lexi knows her luck is running out. To make matters worse, her boyfriend, sexy detective, Adam Maddox, thinks she’s out of the PI game faster than she got into it. Her boss, the mysterious Solomon, meanwhile, hopes to get her between the sheets by night, as well as solving cases by day, and Lexi’s "just say no" resolve might not be as fortified as she believes. All she wants is to be taken seriously and there’s only one way she can do that—solve the cases, no matter what.

The World Atlas of Coffee

The World Atlas of Coffee
Author: James Hoffmann
Publisher: Mitchell Beazley
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2018-10-04
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1784725714

The worldwide bestseller - 1/3 million copies sold 'With his expert guidance we travel around the globe, from Burundi to Honduras via Vietnam, sipping and spitting as we go. This is high geekery made palatable by the evident love pulsing through every sentence.' - The Guardian 'The subject of coffee has never been more, er, hot, and The World Atlas of Coffee takes a close look at its history and evolution, the international range of beans and all the best ways to enjoy coffee. Great pics too.' - Susy Atkins, The Telegraph For everyone who wants to understand more about coffee and its wonderful nuances and possibilities, this is the book to have. Coffee has never been better, or more interesting, than it is today. Coffee producers have access to more varieties and techniques than ever before and we, as consumers, can share in that expertise to make sure the coffee we drink is the best we can find. Where coffee comes from, how it was harvested, the roasting process and the water used to make the brew are just a few of the factors that influence the taste of what we drink. Champion barista and coffee expert James Hoffmann examines these key factors, looking at varieties of coffee, the influence of terroir, how it is harvested and processed, the roasting methods used, through to the way in which the beans are brewed. Country by country - from Bolivia to Zambia - he then identifies key characteristics and the methods that determine the quality of that country's output. Along the way we learn about everything from the development of the espresso machine, to why strength guides on supermarket coffee are really not good news. This is the first book to chart the coffee production of over 35 countries, encompassing knowledge never previously published outside the coffee industry.

Blue-Eyed Devil

Blue-Eyed Devil
Author: Michael Muhammad Knight
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2009-03-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1593763514

Michael Muhammad Knight embarks on a quest for an indigenous American Islam in a series of interstate odysseys. Traveling 20,000 miles by Greyhound in sixty days, he squats in run-down mosques, pursues Muslim romance, is detained at the U.S.-Canadian border with a trunkload of Shia literature, crashes Islamic Society of North America conventions, stink-palms Cat Stevens, and limps across Chicago to find the grave of Noble Drew Ali, filling dozens of notebooks along the way. The result is this semi-autobiographical book, with multiple histories of Fard and the landscape of American Islam woven into Knight’s own story. In the course of his adventures, Knight sorts out his own relationship to Islam as he journeys from punk provocateur to a recognized voice in the community, and watches first-hand the collapse of a liberal Islamic dream. The book’s extensive cast of characters includes anarchist Sufi heretics, vegan kungfu punks, tattoo-sleeved converts in hard-core bands, spiritual drug dealers, Islamic feminists, slick media entrepreneurs, sages of the street, the grandsons of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, and a group called Muslims for Bush.

Don't Go

Don't Go
Author: Beverley Bateman
Publisher: Beverley Bateman
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014-10-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0991874846

Washoe County Sheriff’s Office Detective and a member of Crimes Against Children, Samantha Brennan is a dedicated to finding pedophiles who stalk their teenage victims online. Raped as a child Sam has always blamed her parents for not protecting her. Even with counseling, she’s been unable to move past her experience. The emotional scars have left her hating to be physically touched by anyone. It's also prevented her from forming any relationships with men--until now. She’s a strong, dedicated detective whose specialty is the internet chatrooms and stopping young girls from becoming potential rape victims. She works to prevent them from going through the same trauma she’s still struggling with. Reno Police Department Lieutenant Devlin O’Reilly is a loose canon who works alone. Devlin is a renegade cop who prefers to work undercover and catch bad guys. A gun in the perp’s mouth gives him a real rush. For several years previously he worked in the missing children division but his attitude irritated parents, and he also burned out because they seldom found the children alive. Off duty he likes to drink and pick up surgically enhanced, brainless bimbos, so he’s always in control. A relationship to him is a long weekend. This cavalier attitude toward women results from a bad marriage when he first became a cop. The woman lied and said she was pregnant. After the marriage, she said she lost the baby. When she realized that a cop didn’t make that much money, she cheated on Devlin, sometimes with other cops in his division. This embarrassed him in front of his peers. When she found a sugar daddy she walked out on him. Devlin blames himself for his marriage failure and has vowed never to let any woman do that to him again. He wants respect from his buddies and recognition for the work he does and the perps he takes off the street. But what he doesn’t realize is his cavalier, work alone, attitude works against this. It prevents him from advancing his career. Forced to work together when a fourteen year old girl leaves home to meet a ‘boy’ from a chatroom, Sam and Devlin have to overcome many of their personal feelings. They both know that the girl is not going to find a peer who understands her, but a man who will terrorize and rape her. As Sam and Devlin gather information, sift and sort through it, they come to the realization that this is not the first time this pedophile has lured a young girl to meet him. Devlin pulls statistics from five years back. The information indicates a pattern that shows the internet pedophile has been doing this for several years and in different locations. He finds his victims online, meets them and disposes of them. They never return home and bodies are never found. It's looking like he might not be just a pedophile, but a serial killer. Sam and Devlin work to figure out how to outsmart a pedophile and possible serial killer, but he’s always one step ahead of them. They work his profile, to try and catch him before he finds, rapes and kills his next victim. Devlin hasn’t has time to take a drink since the case started and his skills are becoming sharper, so is his interest in Sam. He finds he is working well with her. She works hard and shares information easily. Plus, she's very sexy and becoming more approachable. Sam is learning to trust Devlin. She’s becoming more comfortable with being touched. She’s also more open to other people and physical contact. Sam wonders if the professional relationship with Devlin might become something more after the case is over. They follow the killers trail to Sacramento and work with the local police. Just when they think they have the pedophile--it turns out the killer has set up another man to take the fall. He’s still one step ahead of them and there’s another girl in danger. Will they catch him in time? Is there a future for Sam and Dev?