Packed for a surprise holiday, young wife Leah is instead abducted and taken to a remote farmhouse deep in the countryside. She is held by a farmer who wants her for ransom, and his domineering, sinfully buxom wife, who wants her for her own personal pleasures.
Twin sisters oversee her - April, a sexual sadist, and May, the most beautiful girl Leah has ever set eyes on. With the thrashings and degradation heaped upon her, amongst the threats of punishments far worse than she could ever imagine, Leah still loses her heart and is left torn between hoping for rescue and relishing her new life.
Her husband could save the day if he can raise the ransom money - but he is far more involved in the plot than she knows. Views: 15
Sexy, tatted up, underwear model Marcus Grayson is every girl’s dream—or more likely worst nightmare. He’s a player, a self-proclaimed bachelor for life, and he’s got no problem living up to his man-whore status. But when his older sister’s friend comes back from the past, he may just have the chance to turn some of his adolescent fantasies into reality. Tessa Bradley is a self-sufficient, take-no-bull, single mother—well, now she is. Finally rid of her abusive, alcoholic ex, she’s making a new life for herself and catching up with old friends; the ones she was forced to break ties with because of her controlling husband. When she runs into Marcus, her friend Riley’s once-adorable turned smoking-hot little brother, she has no idea how he’s about to rock her world. You wanted me then, now you can have me. Just promise you’ll Keep Me…** Views: 15
On a tiny island in a ramshackle beach house, Meg, an heiress, is hiding from her family's dubious past. Her true love, Evan, died thirty years ago in a storm at sea, or so she thought. Did her father really have her lover killed and if so, does everyone on the island know about it but Meg? Alex is determined to win Meg over and if that means befriending her son Jon, he's game. Although with his past history with women, he wonders why he even tries. After all, he's just a starving artist with little to offer her. Now that Alex has warmed her heart again, Meg realizes she has friends who care and a life outside her garden. But in order to enjoy it, she must first figure out who is blackmailing her. Views: 15
In 1567, baby Aphra is found among the reeds and rushes by two outcast witches. Even as an infant, her gifts in the dark craft are clear. But when her guardians succumb to an angry mob, Aphra is left to fend for herself. She is shunned and feared by all but one man, the leper known as Long Lankin. Hounded and ostracized, the two find solace only in each other, but even this respite is doomed, and Aphra's bitterness poisons her entire being. Afflicted with leprosy, tortured and about to be burned as a witch, she manages one final enchantment—a curse on her tormentor's heirs. Now, in 1962, Cora and Mimi, the last of a cursed line, are trapped in an ancient home on a crumbling estate in deepest winter, menaced by a spirit bent on revenge. Are their lives and souls forfeit forever? Views: 15
When Carin, an extremely unlucky thief, stumbles into the otherworld by accident, she finds herself in the firing line of one sexy horned god. Herne, the Fae god of the Hunt usually only kills human women for sport, but Carin might be in his sights for a very different reason… Either which way, she’d better run! Views: 15
A haunting story of love and survival that introduces an unforgettable literary heroineLadydi Garcia Martínez is fierce, funny and smart. She was born into a world where being a girl is a dangerous thing. In the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, women must fend for themselves, as their men have left to seek opportunities elsewhere. Here in the shadow of the drug war, bodies turn up on the outskirts of the village to be taken back to the earth by scorpions and snakes. School is held sporadically, when a volunteer can be coerced away from the big city for a semester. In Guerrero the drug lords are kings, and mothers disguise their daughters as sons, or when that fails they “make them ugly” – cropping their hair, blackening their teeth- anything to protect them from the rapacious grasp of the cartels. And when the black SUVs roll through town, Ladydi and her friends burrow into holes in their backyards like animals, tucked safely out of sight.While her mother waits in vain for her husband’s return, Ladydi and her friends dream of a future that holds more promise than mere survival, finding humor, solidarity and fun in the face of so much tragedy. When Ladydi is offered work as a nanny for a wealthy family in Acapulco, she seizes the chance, and finds her first taste of love with a young caretaker there. But when a local murder tied to the cartel implicates a friend, Ladydi’s future takes a dark turn. Despite the odds against her, this spirited heroine’s resilience and resolve bring hope to otherwise heartbreaking conditions.An illuminating and affecting portrait of women in rural Mexico, and a stunning exploration of the hidden consequences of an unjust war, PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN is an unforgettable story of friendship, family, and determination.From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com ReviewOn Writing Prayers for the StolenIn Mexico today women are stolen off the street or taken from their houses at gunpoint. Some women never return home from their work place, a party or from walking to the corner. They are all young and poor and pretty. I have spent over ten years listening to women affected by Mexico’s violence as I was interested in writing about women in Mexico’s drug culture. This was a logical step for me after having written the novel A True Story Based on Lies, which is about the mistreatment of servants in Mexico. I interviewed the girlfriends, wives and daughters of drug traffickers and quickly came to realize that Mexico is a warren of hidden women. They hide in places that look like supermarkets or grocery stores on the outside, but that are really hiding places with false façades; in the basements of convents, where women live with their children and have not seen daylight for years; and in privately-owned hotels that are rented by the government -- a surreal, Third World concept of a Witness Protection Program. In rural Mexico, the poorest families dig holes in their cornfields. This is how they hide their women from traffickers. It is as if they planted their daughters in the earth so they would not be stolen. At Mexico City’s Santa Martha Acatitla Prison for women, I have listened to prisoners who have been deeply touched or have actively participated in the violence that Mexico is experiencing today. My conversations with assassins, drug dealers, women who claim to be innocent, and with famous criminals exposed cruel and tender lives. In that prison of rough, bare cement walls, I looked at drawings of shells, sand and blue fish drawn by a seventy-year-old woman who had sold fish tacos on a beach before she was forced by drug traffickers to carry drugs across the Mexican border into the United States. She told me that she liked to steal the prison’s saltshakers and rub salt on her skin so she would not forget the sea. After listening to the women in hiding and the women in jail, as well as the women who have been victims of crime, the primary story for me became Mexico’s missing women and children. For years I had heard or read: she disappeared; she never came back; today she would be celebrating her sixteenth birthday; I am praying for a sign; she went missing; some men came for her; if I go to the police they laugh at me; she was just walking, just walking down the street; she never called back; she never called; I can see her walk through the door; that man knows where my daughter is; he took some other girls; I feel she’s still alive; somebody sent someone for my daughter; someone sent somebody for my daughter. Although there are no exact statistics, the number of women trafficked in Mexico is very high. According to the U.S. State Department, 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year. (Note this estimate does not include those trafficked within national borders.) Most people who are stolen and sold are subjected to sex trafficking or other forms of modern slavery: forced labor, debt... A woman can be sold to different owners many times, and even dozens of times a day as a prostitute, while a plastic bag of drugs can be sold once. Prayers for the Stolen *is a novel about Ladydi Garcia Martínez. She is part of a community, like so many in rural Mexico, that has been decimated by drug traffickers, government agricultural policies and illegal immigration. Her home is a village near the once glamorous port of Acapulco. Her story, although inspired by truth, is fiction. Review“With Prayers for the Stolen, Jennifer Clement has cracked open, rewired, and madly reimagined the coming-of-age narrative through the eyes and mind of an ingenious and wise young woman. This book is a glorious fever dream of honesty and love.” —Patrick Somerville, author of* This Bright River*“Prayers for the Stolen is a magnificent story, filled with a wisdom so dense and ancient as to seem almost unbearable. One wants to turn away, but cannot. It’s a mesmerizing read, illustrative of the idea that even traces of beauty, deeply felt, can help carry a traveler through the harshest landscape, or the harshest life.” —Rick Bass, author of Why I Came West “What can I say about this novel? That it’s extraordinary, electric, heartbreaking, profound? There aren’t enough adjectives to describe how moved I was by the story of Ladydi and her friends, of their tragic lives and quiet fortitude in spite of a world that conspires against them. Maybe it’s enough just to say this: Prayers for the Stolen is the best book I’ve read in years.” —Cristina Henríquez, author of The World in Half "The most enchanting journey I’ve taken in a long, long time, and the most important. Prayers For The Stolen is a hand-guided tour through a ruthless true corner of our century, with characters so alive they will burrow into your heart. Stunningly written, magically detailed, you see, smell and taste the action on every page, feel every foible, and miss the candor of these funny, achingly human voices long after you put them down. As the heroine herself might say: not something to read but to lick off a plate." —DBC Pierre, Man Booker Prize-winning author of Vernon God Little“Clement is more a poet than a documentarian, and the girls and women of the village she chronicles are complex individuals...Clement treats the brutal material honestly...and ultimately allows Ladydi to continue to hope.”—Publishers WeeklyInternational Praise for Jennifer Clement“Highly original…[Clement’s] prose is poetic in the true sense: precise as a scalpel, lyrical without being indulgent.” – *The Guardian“What a marvelous writer Clement is. She contains…power in a prose that is simple and simply beguiling.” – *The Scotsman"Bold and innovative…The rich mixture of the outlandishly real and the hyperfabulistic has a certain superstitious power over the reader. Jennifer Clement employs poetry's ability to mirror thought… superbly drawn." —*The Times Literary Supplement“That is the triumph of Clement’s tone in the novel—she shows the black comedy in the details and the emergency in the broader picture...There is a chance that fiction can make a difference.”—Telegraph“Beautifully written...Clement's prose is luminous and startlingly original. The sentences are spare and stripped back, but brilliantly manage to contain complex characters and intense emotional histories in a few vividly poetic words. Her portrayal of modern Mexico is heartbreaking; a dangerous and damaging environment for women, but her portrait of Ladydi and her refusal to be one of the lost girls is defiantly bold and bravely uncompromising”— Sunday Express“Ladydi’s irreverent voice sings off the page and there are laughs to be had as she relates her mother’s drunken wisdom and seeks to find a way to live”— Metro”Despite its violent premise, this is a darkly comic read with one of the funniest, most touching narrators in years, highlighting a very real issue in a remarkably fresh way. An inspiring story of female resilience”— Psychologies“With Ladydi, Jennifer Clement has created a feisty teenage heroine who is an unforgettable character”— Good Housekeeping Views: 15
Cuckold Beach, Book OneAbby is a very naughty girl. Hornier than your average housewife. And she's certain she's done a good job of hiding it from Troy. But like any dutiful husband, not only has Troy noticed the intensity of Abby's sex drive—he plans to exploit it.In a luxurious house on the beach, where couples gather to privately enjoy a taste of sexual freedom, Abby's about to experience the hottest gift a husband can give.An Exotika® contemporary erotica story from Ellora's Cave Views: 15
Vicky Harper is still hopelessly single and having to face up to the unpalatable fact that the last time she had a relationship with that highly elusive species, the decent single man, was well before Phantom of the Opera hit Broadway.So, having discovered an ancient book which says you can have anything you want from the Universe... and that all you need do is ask, she decides to give it a whirl. Turns out all she has to do is focus on thinking her wildest fantasies into reality. Kind of like Pollyanna, except with a Magic 8 Ball, a mortgage and a lot of vodka.So, along with her two beyond-fabulous best friends, Vicky decides to put 'The Law of Attraction' into action. Trouble is, 'The Law of Attraction' doesn't come with an instruction manual and Vicky soon realizes that you have to be very, very careful what you wish for... Views: 15
THE HISTORICAL THRILLER OF THE YEAR
Benjamin Weaver is an outsider in eighteenth-century London: a Jew among Christians; a ruffian among aristocrats; a retired pugilist who, hired by London's gentry, travels through the criminal underworld in pursuit of debtors and thieves.
In A Conspiracy of Paper , Weaver investigates a crime of the most personal sort: the mysterious death of his estranged father, a notorious stockjobber. To find the answers, Weaver must contend with a desperate prostitute who knows too much about his past, relatives who remind him of his alienation from the Jewish faith, and a cabal of powerful men in the world of British finance who have hidden their business dealings behind an intricate web of deception and violence. Relying on brains and brawn, Weaver uncovers the beginnings of a strange new economic order based on stock speculation--a way of life that poses great risk for investors but real danger for Weaver and his family.
In the tradition of The Alienist and written with scholarly attention to period detail, A Conspiracy of Paper is one of the wittiest and most suspenseful historical novels in recent memory, as well as a perceptive and beguiling depiction of the origin of today's financial markets. In Benjamin Weaver, author David Liss has created an irresistibly appealing protagonist, one who parlays his knowledge of the emerging stock market into a new kind of detective work. Views: 15
Stacey had left the hospital in a huff. How dare Doctor McLeod send a shrink to evaluate her, she thought, If she needed a psychiatrist she has an uncle in Dallas she could see. Just because she pulled Doctor McLeod down and kissed him when she woke up and called him Eric, her long dead husband, didn't make her crazy. And besides, her best friend Annie had handed her a mirror and convinced her she wasn't ninety-six years old and had just died. Annie had told her she had fallen through a week spot in the Ville and had been unconscious for the pass three days. Stacey listened to her friend, however, she wondered how could she have dreamed a life time in three days. Although everyone tried to convince her it was just a dream, somehow she knew better. Stacey had promised Annie she would go with her to a fund raiser her uncle was hosting on Friday night, however, come Saturday, she had every intention of renting a car and heading north to Yorkshire to search every library and Historical society available to her, because that was where she had lived in her dream. Views: 15
The heart-stoppingly hot Warfield brothers, William and Walden, are both
in love with innocently beguiling Allie Darling, but only one brother
can own her heart. Her love has changed them both, William has let his
iron-clad guard down and Walden has begun a whole new chapter in his
long history of pain with pleasure. Will Allie loose
sight of her love for William long enough to let his brother win her
over, or will she see through Walden's obsession and realize that
William really is the one for her? Views: 15
Red is living life in the spotlight, a place she always dreamed of. Stripping was a way of escaping from her past, and it was something she was well-known for. But, Red’s fight to remain queen isn’t the only battle she’s facing. And when the war against her addiction is won, it’s not in her favor.Facing three to five years in a federal penitentiary, Red feels like her life is over. But, just like he always does, Luke Carmical, her childhood best friend, comes to the rescue. Only this time, he’s brought Devil’s Renegades Regg with him. Having no other option, Red is forced to spend the next ninety days in a place she’s never been and in the care of a man she hardly knows.Spending three months of her life on a secluded farm turns out to be a lot more than Red bargained for. Because, it’s there that Regg stands by her side through endless hours of withdrawal, constant mood swings and restless pacing. It’s there that the MC family reminds her of their motto:love, loyalty and respect. And it’s there she learns that hitting rock bottom, doesn’t keep you from falling…in love. Views: 15
