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When You Got A Good Thing (The Misfit Inn Book 1) (affiliate link)
A moment. A mistake. That’s all it took for Kennedy Reynolds to lose her first love and her family. She’s spent a decade traveling the world, building a life, hiding the truth, never looking back at the past–until her adopted mother’s unexpected death pulls her back to the small town–and the secret–she left behind.
A chance to make amends. That’s all Xander Kincaid wants from the woman who ran away with his heart all those years ago. At least that’s what he tells himself, until he sees her again and that old flame flares bright.
Struggling to bridge the gap with her estranged sisters, salvage her mother’s legacy, and care for the foster child her mother left behind, Kennedy finds an unexpected ally in Xander.
Blackbird Fly (Bennett Sisters Book 1) (affiliate link)
My teenage son lost his father. But the will? Don’t get me started. I’m a lawyer – my four sisters are too. My hot-shot investment guy will take care of our son; he told me he would. There are so many shocks in that will. Not the least of which is a cottage in France that nobody knew existed.
As the hits keep coming, I have no choice but to rally, thanks to my sisters. I will go to France, fix up this little stone shack, and secure my son’s future. Putting anxiety, grief, ambition, and a righteous work ethic behind, I answer the call.
What my son and I find in southwest France, in a little village in the Dordogne, is so much beauty, new friends, great wine. But also secrets— a squatter, a leaky roof, a creepy wine cellar, a rude mayor, a deadly fall, and more.
Murder She Sang (A Gemma Becker Cruise Ship Book 1) (affiliate link)
A murdered opera singer, a cruise ship full of secrets, and a retired housekeeper dragged into the mess.
Hoping for a peaceful retirement after years of dedicated service, sixty-something Gemma Becker embarks on her first cruise. Too bad no one told her murder was on the itinerary.
When a despicable diva is found dead in her cabin, Gemma reluctantly teams up with the last person she ever expected to make friends with, Viv, a retired showgirl with enough charm and sass to fill the ocean.
With her furry first mate Buddy helping sniff out the clues, the unlikely duo set a course for justice…with gourmet dishes, hilarious antics, and bonding moments along the way.
The Sound of Murder (Book 1) (affiliate link)
A murdered opera singer, a cruise ship full of secrets, and a retired housekeeper dragged into the mess.
Hoping for a peaceful retirement after years of dedicated service, sixty-something Gemma Becker embarks on her first cruise. Too bad no one told her murder was on the itinerary.
When a despicable diva is found dead in her cabin, Gemma reluctantly teams up with the last person she ever expected to make friends with, Viv, a retired showgirl with enough charm and sass to fill the ocean.
With her furry first mate Buddy helping sniff out the clues, the unlikely duo set a course for justice…with gourmet dishes, hilarious antics, and bonding moments along the way.
Defense of Others (David Brunelle Book 15) (affiliate link)
One of Seattle’s most flamboyant and successful criminal defense attorneys is murdered in his office, and the case lands on the desk of homicide prosecutor David Brunelle. Brunelle isn’t about to shed a tear over the death of a longtime rival, but he has a job to do. The only things standing between him and a conviction are the facts and the law.
Once apprehended, the killer tells a story that, if true, would let him walk out the door. The dead man was everything Brunelle suspected: amoral, craven, unhinged. The killer and a friend went to him for legal help but things went sideways. Things were said. Tempers flared. The lawyer attacked his friend. He had no choice.
Schlepping Across The Nile: Collected Stories (affiliate link)
In the footsteps of Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt, and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit comes Aaron Zevy’s Schlepping Across the Nile: a collection of vignettes, memoirs and stories, culled from Zevy’s first three books, which crackle with wit, brazen sentimentality and unfiltered self-awareness.
This collection adds a comic and often poignant twist to the story of the nearly 1 million strong Jews who lived in Arab lands before the second world war. But Zevy, the son of an ashkenazi father and sephardic mother adds some shtick to his recollections. His Ashkenazi side is the wry, bemused spectator of the antics and entanglements of his other half.
In Crossing the Nile, the young Zevy begs his mother to make Lipton Cup-A-Soup and grilled cheese instead of an Egyptian concoction for a Canadian friend coming over for lunch. In Shesh Besh, the grown up Zevy is terrified that the aggressive backgammon taught to him by his foul-mouthed uncles will derail a blind date.
The Key to Kells: A Key Murphy Ancestral Memory Thriller (affiliate link)
Key Murphy is a freak, a prodigy. He has visions so real he’s diagnosed with PTSD. Key learns that his visions might be caused by a mutated gene which allows him to experience the memories of an ancestor.
Key also has a family link to The Book of Kells. Pages from the book were stolen in Ireland in the distant past. Those pages are believed to contain a fundamental secret of Christendom.
Padraig Collins is one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He was an undercover operative for the IRA. He amassed a fortune. He wants those pages. His soul depends on them. He will do whatever it takes to possess them.
But escape was only the beginning.
Now she’s facing a killer she’ll never outrun.Cameron Cooper was once an esteemed FBI analyst, known for tracking some of the most dangerous serial killers in the country. But her life changed forever when she was abducted and tortured by the notorious J-Bird, a monster who left her physically and mentally scarred. Narrowly escaping with her life, Cameron disappeared, abandoning her career and adopting a new identity in an effort to outrun her past.Years later, Cameron lives a quiet life in New York City, far removed from the horrors she once faced. But when the NYPD seeks her expertise to help capture the elusive “Stealth Stalker,” the brutal killings reignite memories she’s tried desperately to forget. As she works alongside Detective Hunter Finnegan, the case begins to feel disturbingly familiar. Patterns emerge and parallels to the past develop that Cameron can’t ignore.
I Have Never (London Series Book 6) (affiliate link)
The freezing winter temperatures and intoxicating effects of alcohol offer a simple explanation for Tony Mercier’s death when his body is found outdoors in the wake of a house party – but did he wind up in the garden of his own volition?
It doesn’t take DCI Lawrence Forrester and DS Rebecca Palmer long to discover that Tony was involved in heated arguments with two of his housemates during the course of the evening, nor that he had recently fallen out with a third after she dismissed him from his job at her biomedical start-up. But determining the causes of these ructions proves more challenging, with what little explanation the housemates do volunteer failing to ring true.
Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (affiliate link)
Pain. Vomiting. Hours and days spent lying in the dark. Migraine is an extraordinarily common, disabling, and painful disorder that affects over 36 million Americans and costs the US economy at least $32 billion per year. Nevertheless, it is a frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized condition. In Not Tonight, sociologist Joanna Kempner argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and care for people in pain.
The symptoms that accompany headache disorders—like head pain, visual auras, and sensitivity to sound—lack objective markers of distress that can confirm their existence. Therefore, doctors must rely on the perceived moral character of their patients to gauge how serious their complaints are.
Discourse and Truth and Parresia (The Chicago Foucault Project) (affiliate link)
This volume collects a series of lectures given by the renowned French thinker Michel Foucault. The first part presents a talk, Parresia, delivered at the University of Grenoble in 1982. The second presents a series of lectures entitled “Discourse and Truth,” given at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, which appears here for the first time in its full and correct form.
Together, these lectures provide an unprecedented account of Foucault’s reading of the Greek concept of parresia, often translated as “truth-telling” or “frank speech.” The lectures trace the transformation of this concept across Greek, Roman, and early Christian thought, from its origins in pre-Socratic Greece to its role as a central element of the relationship between teacher and student.
The Justin Wilson Cookbook (affiliate link)
“I started interspersing my safety talks with Cajun humor. And what do you know? My audiences stayed awake!”
They did a lot more than stay awake. They chuckled, they laughed, they roared—and they learned their safety lessons! For decades, Wilson was in heavy demand on television and in person. He recorded four albums, one of which—The Humorous World of Justin Wilson—broke all album sales records in Texas at the time.
His first cookbook, published in 1965, still stands as a masterpiece of Cajun cooking and of culinary expertise in general. Unique, entertaining, and authentic, his original Cajun recipes include everything from the perfect roux to Eggplant Appetizer a la Justin, Red Bean Soup, Okra Gumbo, Venison Roast, and Dirty Rice.
Don Troiani’s Civil War Soldiers (affiliate link)
In the world of historical painting, Don Troiani stands alone, universally acclaimed for the accuracy, drama, and sensitivity of his depictions of America’s past. His images, both stirring and informative, define the view Americans have of the epochal Civil War.
In this new collection of Troiani artworks, ten years in the making, Troiani teams his signature large format battle paintings with detailed paintings of both Union and Confederate soldiers along with over three hundred photographs of uniforms, equipment, and artifacts from the nation’s most respected museum and private collections to give a full picture of the life of the Civil War soldier. Civil War uniform and equipment experts Earl J. Coates and Michael McAfee have contributed accompanying text. Includes fifty paintings and over three-hundred photographs.
Hidden Twin (Love Inspired Suspense) (affiliate link)
In witness protection ever since she exposed a human trafficking ring, Amy Brady hasn’t seen her twin sister in years. Living in Georgia under an assumed name, she spends every day wondering if she’s about to be freed—or found by the criminals who want her dead.
When she gets a distressed call from US marshal Sam Maldonado, the answer is clear. With her handler dead and WITSEC hacked, the killers are closing in. Sam is determined to do whatever it takes to save Amy’s life. But Amy knows that if she’s in trouble, so is her sister. Now Sam will have to go rogue to save them both.
Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius (affiliate link)
The singer and poet Leonard Cohen was deeply learned in Judaism and Christianity, the spiritual traditions that underpinned his self-identity and the way he made sense of the world. In this book Harry Freedman, a leading author of cultural and religious history, explores the mystical and spiritual sources Cohen drew upon, discusses their original context and the stories and ideas behind them.Cohen’s music is studded with allusions to Jewish and Christian tradition, to stories and ideas drawn from the Bible, Talmud and Kabbalah. From his 1967 classic ‘Suzanne’, through masterpieces like ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Who by Fire’, to his final challenge to the divinity, ‘You Want It Darker’ he drew on spirituality for inspiration and as a tool to create understanding, clarity and beauty.
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