Her Secret Could Ruin EverythingFinding out he's a father is life-changing enough. Only now the four-year-old daughter Garrett Miles never met is coming to live with him. Turning to Libby Carter for guidance could be the ideal solution. Garrett thinks Libby is great, and she seems to like him and the idea of sharing child care. But there are some things the single mother isn't sharing.Libby fled with her son to Desperation to escape her abusive ex. She's hoping the close-knit Oklahoma small town will be the place where she can finally stop running. Especially now that Garrett's in her life. But Garrett is a lawyer, and if he discovers she violated her custody agreement and crossed state lines, he'll have to turn her in. After one man nearly destroyed her, can she trust another with her son's life? Views: 71
From the authors of Bodies We've Buried—an uncensored look at real-life CSIs. With a foreword by Patricia Cornwell.For years, Jarrett Hallcox and Amy Welch trained CSIs at the National Forensic Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee. Now they provide a glimpse into the real world of crime scene investigation, and the investigators themselves. Experience, through gripping text and photographs, eight gripping accounts of true crime from across the country: from the murky waters of the Puget Sound to the crumbling ruins of the Alamo and the grimy streets of the Big Apple, these are the real stories of the people who work behind the yellow tape. Views: 70
Intellectual property attorneys, romance publishers, and librarians—the very last people you'd expect to be mixed up in murder! Add a pinch of authentic Civil War re-enactors and a sparkling tour of Kansas City, and voilà, a classic yet up-to-the-minute crime.Rep and Melissa Pennyworth head west from Indiana to a re-enactment of a Civil War battle in Kansas City, Missouri. Rep is really in quest of a cutting-edge copyright case connected with romance publishing house Jackrabbit Press. He finds a corpse instead.Linda Damon, Melissa's best girlhood friend, worked for the victim, an editor (and womanizer) before his death. Linda's husband, librarian Peter, an enthusiastic Civil War hobbyist, had motive (it must be said that on one recent occasion Linda became a bit too involved in her job), means (a Civil War saber that upon examination proves to be drenched in the victim's blood), and opportunity (a publishing party).Logically, Rep's knowledge of trademark and... Views: 70
Alex MacKinloch is chief of his clan and, in these dark times of unrest, he has united his people.The void between him and his wife is proving a much harder challenge. When Alex discovers Laren has been keeping secrets from him, his thinly veiled frustration can no longer be contained.The pleasures of the marital bed seem long forgotten to Laren. Yet her warrior husband is looking at her with increasingly hungry eyes... This powerful highlander has seduction on his mind and his wife in his sights! Views: 70
When a frat boy finds himself on trial in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for piracy on the high seas, Lawyer Rep Pennyworth, suspects he's being used as an unwitting accomplice in a cheap publicity stunt. Meanwhile Rep's wife Melissa, a professor, gets caught in the middle of a verbal firefight between two colleagues that soon escalates into burglary, theft, jury-tampering, forgery of an explosive papal document from World War II—and murder.Melissa wants to protect a naïve undergraduate who might be implicated. But when one of the other suspects makes Melissa a cast-iron alibi, her search for the truth leads through a maze of gray lies—including her own.Dealing with an investigative reporter who's still having flashbacks to 1968, a fellow professor whose acute political correctness masks ruthless academic ambition, an engineer whose father's heart attack may have been either suicide or murder, and a brace of cunning lawyers out for blood, Rep and Melissa have to... Views: 70
Amazon.com ReviewA Q&A with Richard Panek, Author of The Four Percent Universe Q: What is the "four percent universe"? Panek: It’s the universe we’ve always known, the one that consists of everything we see: you, me, Earth, Sun, planets, stars, galaxies. Q: What’s the other 96 percent?Panek: The stuff we can’t see in any form whatsoever. At a loss for words, astronomers have given these missing ingredients the names "dark matter" and "dark energy."Q: What are dark matter and dark energy?Panek: If you find out, book yourself a flight to Stockholm.Q: So nobody knows? We're not talking about "dark" as in black holes?Panek: No. This is "dark" as in unknown for now and possibly forever.Q: Well, then, what do astronomers mean by "dark matter"? Panek: A mysterious substance that comprises about 23 percent of the universe.Q: And dark energy?Panek: Something even more mysterious that comprises about 73 percent of the universe.Q: Okay, 73 and 23 add up to 96 percent, which does leave a four percent universe. But if we don’t know what dark matter and dark energy are, how do we even know they’re there? Panek: In the 1970s, astronomers observed that the motions of galaxies, including our own Milky Way, seem to be violating the universal law of gravitation. They’re spinning way too fast to survive more than a single rotation, yet we know that our galaxy has gone through dozens of rotations in its billions of years of life. Galaxies are living fast but not dying young—a fact that makes sense only if we say that there’s more matter out there, gravitationally holding galaxies and even clusters of galaxies together, than we can see. Astronomers call this substance dark matter.Q: And the mysterious dark energy?Panek: In the 1990s, two independent teams of astronomers set out to discover the fate of the universe. They knew the universe was born in a big bang and has been expanding ever since. Now they wanted to know how much the mutual gravitation among all this matter—dark or otherwise—was affecting the expansion of the universe. Enough to slow it down so that the universe would eventually grind to a halt, then collapse on itself? Or just enough that the expansion would grind to a halt and stay there? In 1998 the two teams came to the same conclusion: the expansion of the universe isn’t slowing down at all. In fact, it’s speeding up. And whatever force is counteracting gravity is what they call dark energy.Q: Do astronomers have any clue as to what dark matter and dark energy might be? Panek: Yes and no. As for dark matter, they think it might be one of two subatomic particles, but physicists have been looking for these particles for thirty years and still haven’t found them. As for dark energy, they don’t even have an idea of what it might be. They’re still trying to figure out how it behaves. Does it change over space and time or not? If they can answer that question, then they can start to worry about what dark energy is.Q: If astronomers themselves don’t know what dark matter and dark energy are, why should people believe that they exist? Panek: Scientists like to quote a saying of Carl Sagan’s: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Many astronomers in the 1970s strongly resisted the idea of dark matter until the evidence became overwhelming. And even the two teams of astronomers that discovered the evidence for dark energy in 1998 resisted the idea until they could no longer come up with another explanation. Q: Sounds like science is a pretty straightforward process of discovery and follow-up.Panek: Straightforward, maybe. Pretty, no. As I show in The Four Percent Universe, the discoveries involved a lot of behind-the-scenes rivalries that sometimes turned ugly—rivalries that continue to this day. But in a way, these rivalries have been good for the science. When scientists who would like nothing more than to prove one another wrong wind up agreeing on a weird result, their peers can’t help but take the result seriously. Astronomers hate to say it—they’re as superstitious as anyone else, and they think they’ll jinx their chances—but there are Nobel Prizes at stake here.Q: So this is real. Astronomers actually believe that 96 percent of the universe is "missing"?Panek: Yes. They call it the ultimate Copernican revolution. Not only are we not at the center of the universe, we’re not even made of the same stuff as the vast majority of the universe.Q: What now?Panek: Nobody knows! And for astronomers, that’s the exciting part. Again and again, at conference after conference and in interview after interview, I’ve heard astronomers say that they can’t believe how fortunate they are to be scientists at this point in history. Four hundred years ago, Galileo turned a telescope to the night sky and discovered that there’s more out there than the five planets and couple of thousand stars that meet the eye. Now astronomers are saying that there’s more out there, period—whether it meets the eye or not. Lots more: the vast majority of the universe, in fact.Q: If this revolution is such a big deal, why haven’t we heard about it?Panek: Because it’s just beginning. Only in the past ten years have scientists reached a consensus that what we’ve always thought was the universe is really only four percent of it. Now they feel that figuring out the missing 96 percent is the most important problem in science.Q: Will finding answers make our lives better? What’s the payoff? Panek: On an immediate, day-to-day, price-of-milk level, nothing. But Galileo’s observations starting in 1609 completely changed the physics and philosophy of the next four hundred years in ways nobody could have anticipated. As I argue in The Four Percent Universe, this new revolution is going to have the same kind of effect on civilization. The fun is just beginning.From Bookmarks MagazineExploring “one of the most important stories in the history of science” (_Washington Post_), Panek nimbly outlines recent findings in physics, astronomy, and cosmology and evaluates rival theories in clear, comprehensible language. He also dives into the bureaucratic morass and professional enmities of contemporary research, examining how these discoveries were made as well as who made them. While some critics appreciated this behind-the-scenes human drama as a tool for understanding the full story, others believed that Panek’s alternating focus on the scientists themselves detracted from the actual science. However, even readers who prefer their science straight up will find much to admire in this accessible and fascinating survey of one of the most exciting—and maddening—fields of study. Views: 70
"A wonderful exercise in humanism . . . [by] a prodigious and impressive storyteller".—Jakarta GlobeAn epic saga of "families and friends entangled in the cruel snare of history" (Time magazine), Home combines political repression and exile with a spicy mixture of love, family, and food, alternating between Paris and Jakarta in the time between Suharto's 1965 rise to power and downfall in 1998, further illuminating Indonesia's tragic twentieth-century history popularized by the Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing.Leila S. Chudori is Indonesia's most prominent female journalist. Home is her debut novel and won Indonesia's most important literary prize in 2013. Views: 70
