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Angel's Fall

A vicar's daughter, Juliet Grafton-Moore is also the proprietress of Angel's Fall, a house where London's ladies of the night recieve shelter from their past. It is an institution despised by distinguished peers and peasants alike, a place where the women learn by Juliet's pristine example -- and no "men" are allowed. But this rule is soundly broken when Juliet, suddenly besieged by an angry mob, is swept to safety by the dark-eyed, notorious Sabrehawk.... This sword-wielding legend, also known as the dashing Adam Slade, expects merely to fulfill a promise when he takes this spirited beauty under his wing. But upon seeing Juliet he is moved by her gentle blue eyes, her golden curls, and her admirable will. A man who has fought the fiercest of foes, Adam now finds his greatest challenge in protecting this lady...and resisting the unimagined heights of their growing passion....
Views: 1 031

The Mystery on the Train

The Alden children are enjoying the train ride until something is stolen from a young woman and they need to find the thief before the last stop.
Views: 1 030

Sun-Kissed Christmas

All she wants for Christmas… Summer is headed to the Keys for winter break, but what should be a fun-in-the-sun holiday is becoming unbearable. Summer hasn’t been able to stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend, Austin, since their summer romance fizzled, and she can’t stand seeing him at the beach with his new girlfriend…. Now Austin is everywhere she goes. She’s reminded of how much fun they had, how gorgeous he is, and what she really wants is what she can’t have. Will it take a Christmas miracle for Summer to survive this holiday season? Or will the mistletoe work its magic?
Views: 1 030

The Ballad of Lucy Whipple

Dear Gram and Grampop, Please do not address yours truly as California anymore, California Morning Whipple being a foolish name for a duck much less a girl. I call myself Lucy now. I cannot hate California and be California. I know you will understand. California doesn't suit Lucy Whipple -- not the name, not the place. But moving out West to Lucky Diggins, California, was her mama's dream-come-true. And now her brother, Butte, and sisters, Prairie and Sierra, seem to be Westerners at heart, too. For Lucy, Lucky Diggins is hardly a town at all -- just a bunch of ramshackle tents and tobacco-spitting miners. Even the gold her mama claimed was just lying around in the fields isn't panning out. Worst of all, there's no lending library! Dag diggety! So Lucy vows to be plain miserable until she can hightail it back East where she belongs. But Lucy California Morning Whipple may be in for a surprise -- because home is a lot closer than she thinks... When California Morning Whipple's widowed mother uproots her family from their comfortable Massachusetts environs and moves them to a rough mining camp called Lucky Diggins in the Sierras, California Morning resents the upheaval. Desperately wanting to control something in her own life, she decides to be called Lucy, and as Lucy she grows and changes in her strange and challenging new environment. Here Karen Cushman helps the American Gold Rush spring to colorful life, just as she did for medieval England in her previous two books, Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife's Apprentice, which won Newbery Honor status and a Newbery Medal respectively.
Views: 1 026

The Gunpowder Plot

Antonia Fraser, a popular historian, has delved into archives across Europe to unravel the true story of the plot by fanatical Roman Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I at the opening of Parliament in 1605.
Views: 1 026

Longer Views: Extended Essays

"Reading is a many-layered process — like writing," observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy. "Over the course of his career," Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.
Views: 1 025

Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman

Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung features his popular character A. J. Raffles, a well-known cricketer and gentleman thief. Any profits made from the sale of this book will go towards supporting the Freeriver Community project, a project that aims to support community and encourage well-being. To learn more about the Freeriver Community project please visit the website- www.freerivercommunity.com
Views: 1 019

My Dark Places

"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant." --Philadelphia Inquirer In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb.  Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running.  He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.   In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence. "Ellroy is more powerful than ever." --The Nation   From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 1 015

Her Own Rules

Meredith Stratton worked hard to become a successful businesswoman—and now she owns six elegant inns all over the world. But on a trip abroad she is struck by a strange illness, one that seems to have no physical cause. Meredith has always played by her own rules—and won—and now she must uncover the roots of this mystery ailment that threatens her future happiness. The answers lie buried somewhere in her forgotten past. And with the help of a caring psychiatrist, Meredith will have to peel back the layers of her most carefully designed and constructed creation: herself.
Views: 1 012

The Mystery at the Fair

The county fair has come to Greenfield. The Aldens are so excited about entering the competitions at the fair. Henry and Benny will bake a blueberry pie, Jessie will make jewelry, and Violet will paint a picture.
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Abby and the Secret Society

When Abby signs the BSC up to help reopen a country club that's been closed for twenty years, the girls find a mystery to clear away as well as cobwebs.
Views: 1 010

Checkers

Speaking from a mental hospital, a teenage girl recounts the tremendous media pressure preceding the breaking scandal of her father's unethical business dealings. "This affecting account of a family under siege by the media is both an engaging read and a strong psychological exploration".--"Booklist".
Views: 1 008

Reality and Dreams

Tom Richards has fallen off a crane while directing his latest movie, 'The Hamburger Girl', fracturing some ribs and a hip. A comic procession of doctors, nurses, and relatives files through his hospital room. Another director replaces him at the studio, and everything in his cinematic dream is being changed - the screenplay, the title, the plot. Tom is baffled and furious. His children's marriages are coming apart, and who can be certain of his own? People everywhere are losing their jobs. His real life and his creative life become ever more displaced while he gradually recovers his health, his balance, and his natural imbalance. Tom's shrewd wife, Claire; their daughter Marigold, for whom Tom has ambivalent feelings; his beautiful daughter Cora, by his first marriage; and his lovers, family, friends, and colleagues all find themselves revolving in a sexual and economic maelstrom that gradually results in violence. "What we are doing, " Tom tells his film crew at last, "is real and not real. We are living in a world where dreams are reality and reality is dreams. In our world everything starts from a dream."
Views: 1 008

The Mystery of the Lost Mine

The Aldens search for a lost gold mine while on a camping trip to Arizona.
Views: 1 005

Fade Away

In novels that crackle with wit and suspense, Harlan Coben has created one of the most fascinating heroes in suspense fiction: the wisecracking, tenderhearted sports agent Myron Bolitar. In this gripping third novel in the acclaimed series, Myron must confront a past that is dead and buried—and more dangerous than ever before. The home is top-notch New Jersey suburban. The living room is Martha Stewart. The basement is Legos—and blood. The signs of a violent struggle. For Myron Bolitar, the disappearance of a man he once competed against is bringing back memories—of the sport he and Greg Downing had both played and the woman they both loved. Now, among the stars, the wannabes, the gamblers, and the groupies, Myron is embarking upon the strange ride of a sports hero gone wrong that just may lead to certain death. Namely, his own.
Views: 1 004