No Regrets and Other True Cases

The criminal monsters featured in Volume 11 of Ann Rule's Crime Files could make Jack the Ripper shiver. This rogues' gallery includes depraved psychopaths and sociopaths who slaughter without conscience or remorse. Not recommended as bedtime reading.
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Dream Lover

This is a sweet contemporary romance novella with a strong heroine in a non-traditional role.Charly applies for a position as a Farm Insurance Inspector, a position traditionally held by the male gender, and knows she has not chosen an easy path. This is confirmed when she comes up against a very antagonistic director of the company at her final interview. She issues a challenge to him - to supervise her for three days, at no salary, and if her work is satisfactory, to then hire her.Fate takes them into a situation they couldn’t have anticipated and changes their relationship completely, but circumstances and personal beliefs keep them apart. They compensate by recording and exchanging their dreams, thus becoming close without being together physically, until fate intervenes once more.
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The Standing Chandelier: A Novella

‘This early stocking filler of a novel … is a brutal treat’ *Daily Mail* From the award-winning novelist and short story writer, Lionel Shriver, comes a literary gem, a story about love and the power of a gift. When Weston Babansky receives an extravagant engagement present from his best friend (and old flame) Jillian Frisk, he doesn’t quite know what to make of it – or how to get it past his fiancée. Especially as it’s a massive, handmade, intensely personal sculpture that they’d have to live with forever. As the argument rages about whether Jillian’s gift was an act of pure platonic generosity or something more insidious, battle lines are drawn… Can men and women ever be friends? Just friends? Described by the Sunday Times as ‘a brilliant writer’ with ‘a strong, clear and strangely seductive voice’, Lionel Shriver has written a glittering examination of friendship, ownership and the conditions of love.
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Demon's Delight

Wedding bells are in the air...It's approaching the most wonderful time of the year again—Yule—and Bedlam is up to its ears in snow and manic joy. Maddy and Sandy are planning a double wedding, but things go haywire when someone unexpected shows up, someone who's intent on winning Maddy away from Aegis. If that wasn't enough to deal with, something is turning the town of Bedlam on its head with a bout of rogue magic. Now, between the chaos running rampant and a choice Maddy never expected to face, will she make it to the altar before disaster strikes?Reading Order for the Bewitching Bedlam Series0: The Wish Factor (short story).5: Blood Music (novella)1: Bewitching Bedlam1.5A: Blood Vengeance (novella)1.5B: Tiger Tails (novella)2: Maudlin's Mayhem3: Siren's Song4. Witches Wild5. Casting Curses6. Demon's Delight (novella)Anthology: Bedlam Calling
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Rangatira

Auckland, June 1886. Ngati Wai chief Paratene Te Manu spends long sessions, over three long days, having his portrait painted by the Bohemian painter Gottfried Lindauer. Hearing of Lindauer's planned trip to England reminds him of his own journey there, twenty years earlier, with a party of northern rangatira. As he sits for Lindauer, Paratene retreats deeper and deeper into the past, from the triumphs in London and their meetings with royalty to the disintegration of the visit into poverty, mistrust, and humiliation. Based on a true story.
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The Minister's Wooing

Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known for writing Uncle Tom\'s Cabin, an anti-slavery novel written in 1852. Many believe that Uncle Tom\'s Cabin was a big factor in the lead up to the Civil War. Regardless of whether or not Stowe\'s classic was one of the causes of the Civil War, its importance in U.S. history can\'t be overstated, and even Abraham Lincoln himself jokingly referred to Stowe as the little lady who caused all the trouble brought about by the war. From the intro: “THE author has endeavoured in this story to paint a style of life and manners which existed in New England in the earlier days of her national existence. Some of the principal characters are historic: the leading events of the story are founded on actual facts, although the author has taken the liberty to arrange and vary them for the purposes of the story. The author has executed the work with a reverential tenderness for those great and religious minds who laid in New England the foundations of many generations, and for those institutions and habits of life from which, as from a fruitful germ, sprang all the present prosperity of America. Such as it is, it is commended to the kindly thoughts of that British fireside from which the fathers and mothers of America first went out to give to English ideas and institutions a new growth in a new world.”
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Farewell Speeches

The final speeches of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, and First Lady Michelle Obama. Both speeches were instant and moving landmarks, as well as stirring testaments to the time this inspiring and beloved couple spent in the White House.
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But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past

We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there’s nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure—until, of course, they don’t. But What If We’re Wrong? visualizes the contemporary world as it will appear to those who'll perceive it as the distant past. Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of rock music, five hundred years from today? How seriously should we view the content of our dreams? How seriously should we view the content of television? Are all sports destined for extinction? Is it possible that the greatest artist of our era is currently unknown (or—weirder still—widely known, but entirely disrespected)? Is it possible that we “overrate” democracy? And perhaps most disturbing, is it possible that we’ve reached the end of knowledge? Kinetically slingshotting through a broad spectrum of objective and subjective problems, But What If We’re Wrong? is built on interviews with a variety of creative thinkers—George Saunders, David Byrne, Jonathan Lethem, Kathryn Schulz, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Junot Díaz, Amanda Petrusich, Ryan Adams, Nick Bostrom, Dan Carlin, and Richard Linklater, among others—interwoven with the type of high-wire humor and nontraditional analysis only Klosterman would dare to attempt. It’s a seemingly impossible achievement: a book about the things we cannot know, explained as if we did. It’s about how we live now, once “now” has become “then.”
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Zeitoun

National Bestseller  A New York Times Notable Book An O, The Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of the Year A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year A New Yorker Favorite Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Decade The true story of one family, caught between America’s two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned animals and helping elderly neighbors. Then, on September 6th, police officers armed with M-16s arrest Zeitoun in his home. Told with eloquence and compassion, Zeitoun is a riveting account of one family’s unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Bitter Harvest: A Woman's Fury, a Mother's Sacrifice

On the night of October 23/24, 1995 in Prairie Village, Kansas, a fierce, wind-driven fire devastated the luxurious mansion of Dr. Debora Green and her husband, Dr. Michael Farrar. Trapped and burned to death in the flames were twelve-year-old Tim and his six-year-old sister Kelly. Lissa, ten, was barely able to leap to safety from the garage roof into the arms of her mother, who was standing outside the house. When Michael Farrar returned to the scene, he had lost more than his children and his home. His entire life was in ruins.The fire was the climactic event of Michael and Debora's lives. Until that summer, they seemed to have it all -- a happy marriage, successful medical practices, three bright and beautiful children. Then they went on a trip to Peru with their son. There, they met attractive, blonde Celeste Walker, whose husband, John was also a successful doctor. But after that trip, nothing was the same again for either couple, and all the dark hidden places in Debora and Michael's marriage bubbled to the surface in a series of almost unbelievable horrors.Bitter Harvest is the chronicle of this tragedy in the heartland of America, the true story of the disintegration of a marriage and its horrifying consequences. Rule takes us deep in the psyche of a killer whose behavior was so twisted and so evil that it defies belief. Gripping, powerful, and ultimately terrifying, Bitter Harvest is a vivid recreation of an unthinkable crime -- and a depiction of the unimagined depths of a darkness within the human spirit.Copyright (c) 1998 Ann Rule. All Rights ReservedPerformance copyright 1998 by Simon & Schuster Inc. All Rights Reserved
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The Virtue of Selfishness

Ayn Rand here sets forth the moral principles of Objectivism, the philosophy that holds man's life -- the life proper to a rational being -- as the standards of moral values and regards altruism as incompatible with man's nature, with the creative requirements of his survival, and with a free society. **
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The Game-Players of Titan

In this sardonically funny gem of speculative fiction, Philip K. Dick creates a novel that manages to be simultaneously unpredictable and perversely logical. Poor Pete Garden has just lost Berkeley. He's also lost his wife, but he'll get a new one as soon as he rolls a three. It's all part of the rules of Bluff, the game that's become a blinding obsession for the last inhabitants of the planet Earth. But the rules are about to change--drastically and terminally--because Pete Garden will be playing his next game against an opponent who isn't even human, for stakes that are a lot higher than Berkeley. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Prisoners in Devil's Bog

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.
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The Rome Express

A mysterious murder on a flying express train, a wily Italian, a charming woman caught in the meshes of circumstantial evidence, a chivalrous Englishman, and a police force with a keen nose for the wrong clue, are the ingredients from which Major Griffiths has concocted a clever, up-to-date detective story.
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