Now, to make matters even worse, depression is beginning to settle in England. The war still colors everyone's life and there is no forgetting the horror of the battles and the wounded and the dead. Winspear captures the subtleties and the authentic tone of the times. The sense of the period of time in this mystery is delightful. The other has to do with Maisie's father and her somewhat uneasy relationship with him. Both his wife and Maisie are quite concerned. One involves Billy, her assistant, who was wounded in the war and now is acting uncharacteristically moody. Was Charlotte the killer? Is she in danger? What happened to destroy this friendship? The four women went to finishing school in Switzerland together, became inseparable friends, and then, after the war began, went their own ways. His daughter Charlotte, who is in her early 30s, has vanished from his home and he wants her found and returned.Īs she searches, Maisie finds that three of Charlotte's formerly close friends are dead of violence, presumably murder. Joseph Waite, one of them, brings a case to Maisie. There are, however, still some very wealthy people around. It is the spring of 1930 and depression has come to England. In this second novel by Jacqueline Winspear (after MAISIE DOBBS), Maisie has opened an office as an investigator and acquired an assistant, Billy Beale, to whom she is teaching the methods Maurice Blanche taught her.
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In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant-though this time the obsessions revolves around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a town house in Amsterdam. The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America It’s better.” -Dwight Garner, The New York Times I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense.It’s never quite the book you think it is. “ Devil House is terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. He begins his research with diligence and enthusiasm, but soon the story leads him into a puzzle he never expected-back into his own work and what it means, back to the very core of what he does and who he is.ĭevil House is John Darnielle’s most ambitious work yet, a book that blurs the line between fact and fiction, that combines daring formal experimentation with a spellbinding tale of crime, writing, memory, and artistic obsession. Chandler finds himself in Milpitas, California, a small town whose name rings a bell––his closest childhood friend lived there, once upon a time. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success-and a movie adaptation-to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. It’s better.” -Dwight Garner, The New York Timesįrom John Darnielle, the New York Times bestselling author and the singer-songwriter of the Mountain Goats, comes an epic, gripping novel about murder, truth, and the dangers of storytelling. “It’s never quite the book you think it is. Now, he wants to find a place where the Hive Queen can rebuild her species so he can atone for nearly committing xenocide. Ender has brought another species with him: the Hive Queen, the last of her insect-like species, the Formics, or “buggers.” Ender nearly annihilated her species in a war between humans and Formics in Ender’s Game, only to learn that the entire war was the result of a cultural misunderstanding. They live peacefully alongside the pequeninos, the planet Lusitania’s native sentient life. Ender lives in a Catholic Brazilian community of colonists. The action begins where Speaker for the Dead left off. He has won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards for his work. Card is best known for this series and for Ender’s Game in particular. An intergalactic congress orders the destruction of the planet and the virus with it, but that means xenocide. The planet also harbors a virus that is fatal to humans, but necessary for native species. A sequel to Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, it follows Ender Wiggin on the planet Lusitania as he tries to find a way for different species to coexist. Xenocide is a 1991 science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card, the third installment in his Ender’s Saga series. The Painted Man (also published as Death Mask) (2008).Touchy and Feely (based on the Beltway snipers) (2005). Spirit Jump (short story collected in anthology Faces of Fear) (1996).The Djinn (1977) note Featuring Harry Erskine from The Manitou, but no actual Manitou.Significant works by this author include: Quite possibly as a spin-off of this career, he wrote hack sex comedies and several volumes of sex manuals, something he has cheerfully never tried to disguise or conceal as an embarrassing reminder of what he did to earn a living before his literary career really took off. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he edited the UK editions of men's magazines Penthouse and Playboy. Graham Masterton, born in 1946 in Edinburgh, Scotland, is a prolific writer in several genres who is most famous for his voluminous output of horror stories. Harper’s encounters with this horrible disease, which brings her into the orbit of a mysterious Brit called The Fireman-hero and villain all rolled up into one-are overall less trying than dealing with her nasty husband, a master of passive-aggressive put-downs. Against them are arrayed the victims, not all of whom spontaneously combust. But then, so do thousands of innocents, causing the usual end-of-the-world scenario, as good Christians form fundamentalist posses to round up and, well, isolate anyone who shows signs of the illness. The worst effects of the illness make themselves known to school nurse Harper Grayson when a street person bursts into flames: “His head tipped further and further back,” Hill writes with graphic glee, “and he opened his mouth to scream and black smoke gushed out instead.” About the only positive thing that comes of this pyromaniacal display is that Glenn Beck torches, too. Why? Well, Clooney was doing his humanitarian thing, and Rowling was just trying to help young people unfortunate enough to come down with a scorching case of Dragonscale, a manifestation of a very unpleasant malady caused, as the epidemiological portion of Hill’s yarn details, by a runaway spore. And not nicely, either: she’s gunned down by a firing squad, and “her execution had been televised on what remained of the web.” George Clooney has already burst into flames. Rowling gets it, you know things are bad. Pleasing mayhem from horror/thrillermeister Hill ( NOS4A2, 2013, etc.), the chip-off-the-old-block son of Stephen King. Today, she is chiefly remembered for her letters from the Ottoman Empire, which Billie Melman described as ‘the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient’. Lady Mary joined her husband in Istanbul, where she spent the next two years of her life and wrote extensively about her Ottoman experiences. In 1712, she married Edward Wortley Montagu, who later served as the British ambassador to Turkey. Born in 1689, she spent her early life in England. Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont, 1689-1762) was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet. In her own words, ‘No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure more lasting.’ She is one of the first modern travel writers and still one of the best, studying and recording a lived culture through its own values and its own language. For two years she lovingly observed Ottoman society as a participant, with affection, intelligence and an astonishing lack of prejudice. Her letters remain as fresh as the day they were penned: enchanted by her discoveries of the life of Turkish women behind the veil, by Arabic poetry and by contemporary medical practices - including inoculation. In 1716 she travelled across Europe to take up residence in Istanbul as the wife of the British ambassador. Mary Montagu was ‘one of the most extraordinary characters in the world.’ She was a self-educated intellectual, a free spirit, a radical, a feminist but also an entitled aristocrat and a society wit with powerful friends at court. With a new biographical afterword by Dervla Murphy I can’t wait for their stories.Ĭonran Buchanan doesn’t think he has any real talents. We only have Rory, Alick, and Geordi left. So far the only sister, Saidh, has married along with Dougall, Niels, Aulay and now Conran. I’ve loved each of their stories and they are all wonderful. Including this story, we’ve found HEA’s for 5 of the 8 Buchanan’s – only three more to go. You can read this book as a stand-alone, but I highly recommend the rest of the series – otherwise, you’ll miss out on some lovely stories and great background on some of the characters appearing in this story. I love the main characters as well as the re-appearances of the large and boisterous Buchanan family. The writing, as always, is excellent and the story is tightly plotted and well executed. Each book is witty and humorous while still being tense, exciting and romantic. I think I enjoy this series more and more with each new book. Anyways, during their senior year, Victor and Eli find out a way to gain supernatural abilities via near-death experiences. But mostly high functioning sociopaths, those two. They are both a tad bit sociopathic, and occasionally have good senses of humor. Eli is brilliant, lonely and good at masking it-he enjoys nothing more than going to a party, before an evening of quiet brooding. Victor is brilliant, lonely and cynical-he enjoys nothing more than an evening of quiet brooding. Their names are Victor Vale and Eli Cardale, and they are roommates in college together. Vicious, as the name entails, is about people who maybe aren’t the nicest to one another. Such is the case with V.E.Schwab’s Vicious. But the good news is that when I like a book, and find one that bridges the gap between too gritty and too sweet- well, let’s just say I really like the book. There is no middle ground- I’m like the literary equivalent of a picky eater. Eleven times out of ten, if someone recommends YA to me, I’ll discreetly wrinkle my nose and offer a polite but firm “no thanks.” Either a book is too hard and gritty for my tastes, or it’s sickeningly sweet. But as a choosy (read: ridiculously selective) reader, it’s often difficult for me to find one that feels right. It is a truth universally acknowledged that books are pretty great. Superpowers, murder and mayhem abound in this series opener The Agency statement is reprinted in AFIO WIN 31-07 (13 Aug. Central Intelligence Agency, " CIA Statement on 'Legacy of Ashes'" (6 Aug. (Not the KGB, certainly, nor the SIS or Mossad.) If not, and if there is no consistently 'first rate' intelligence service, then the problem may lie in an exaggerated expectation that any secret intelligence service can reliably 'see things as they are in the world.'" The implication here is that the standard for excellence has been set by another intelligence agency, one that unlike CIA is 'first rate.' If so, it would be interesting to know which agency that is. 2007, notes the author's contention that "the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. In a comment by someone who is certainly not a fan of the CIA, Aftergood, Secrecy News (from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy), 13 Jul. Tim Weiner - Legacy of Ashes Tim Weiner Legacy of Ashes |