Suddenly Susan (Susan Wade Saga Book 1)
Twenty-two-year-old Susan Wade’s dream of a glamorous, high-powered career is the only thing that’s gotten her through the past four years of college. But now that she’s graduating, her future isn’t looking quite as bright as she’d hoped. She’s discovering the hard way that Corporate America values something she doesn’t have: experience. With only five dollars left to her name, Susan is left with two unappealing options: follow her semi-boyfriend to the bowels of Texas or manage a dilapidated diner in her small town. She’s got to convince someone to take a chance on her. But how?
Let’s face it. Ben’s not exactly relationship material. Awkward and geeky, his ideal job is designing computer software while hyped up on energy drinks. Best friends with Susan for far too long, he’s ready to take their relationship to the next level, but she keeps shutting him down. Until one night…
The Advocate: A Women of Redemption Suspense Thriller
Former victim Palmer Reed is facing the 20th anniversary of her kidnapping when she is recruited to the board of a prestigious foundation dedicated to helping the victims of crime. Run by Marjoram Swall, a woman known as The Vindicator, who helped rescue Palmer twenty years ago from the hands of their mutual enemy, the foundation gives Palmer something to believe in, hoping that by helping other victims, she will resolve her own painful past.
But something dark lies beneath the foundation’s surface, and after Palmer learns of the foundation’s use of blackmail to raise money for their cause, she discovers that several individuals who escaped their blackmail attempts all later died in mysterious accidents. She investigates, and soon believes their deaths are anything but accidental.
Kumquat
Thirty-five-year-old introvert Todd Bryan hasn’t really done much with his life, and he’s okay with that. Until, at a painfully bad film festival, he meets Amy Husk. She’s attractive. She’s funny. She’s quirky. And…she has an inoperable brain aneurysm and not much time to live. She may not even make it to the long-awaited final episode of EXIT RED, the Greatest. Show. Ever.
She convinces him that they should do something crazy and frivolous. And suddenly Todd, a guy who doesn’t do spontaneity, is on an insane road trip from Florida to Rhode Island with a woman he barely knows, just to visit a really cool hot dog place.
Many things will go wrong. But, hey, many things will go right, too. There’s a hook-handed hitchhiker and some property destruction. Maybe some sex. A kumquat will probably be relevant at some point, although not during the sex (if there is any).
A laugh-out-loud comedy, a touching love story, and a cross-country adventure, KUMQUAT is a story about making the most out of the time you’ve got.
Summer of Fortune: A Small Town Romance (The Fortune Bay Series Book 1)
A single mother for the past ten years, Maddie’s been too busy for love, and too busy trying to make ends meet to jump start her sagging photography career.
When her daughter goes to live with her father for the summer, Maddie embraces the unexpected freedom and accepts the offer of the first solo show of her moody, black and white photographs.
Leaving Seattle and the safety of her job at an upscale art gallery, she heads to Washington State’s Majestic Lake and rents a rustic cabin on the lake where she finds the inspiration she needs and sets up her dark room.
A traumatic childhood has left her a loner. She’s always felt safer that way. But maintaining her distance is almost impossible in a town like Fortune Bay. Despite her best efforts, she slowly realizes that this is the life she’s always wished for but never thought she could have: inspiration, real friends, and the man and family of her dreams.
Tech Mage: The Magitech Chronicles Book 1
Aran awakens in chains with no memory. He’s conscripted into the Confederate Marines as a Tech Mage, given a spellrifle, then hurled into the war with the draconic Krox and their Void Wyrm masters.
Desperate to escape, Aran struggles to master his abilities, while surviving the Krox onslaught. Fighting alongside him are a Major who will do anything to win, a Captain who will stop at nothing to see him dead, and a woman whose past is as blank as his own.
Caught between survival and loyalty Aran must choose. If he flees he will live, but the Krox will burn the galaxy. Stopping them requires a price Aran may be unable to pay:
Learning to trust the very people who enslaved him.
A Twisted Little Christmas
Facing a lonely Christmas Eve, Devin O’Hannigan accepts a stranger’s invitation to a private holiday party—hoping to score. But when the merriment takes a bizarre twist, he retreats by himself to call it a night… Until his attention is captured by a teary-eyed Santa in a very short skirt.
Holly’s quest to find herself again ends in a disastrous Christmas date, leaving her discouraged and alone in a town far from home. But when her date returns, angry and violent, she’s rescued by a gorgeous stranger—the kind of guy she once would have pursued. But that was before.
Seeking cheer but preferring anonymity, they embark on an innocent game playing the roles of old friends catching up. Without encumbrances, honest conversations uncover hidden desires. Sparks fly, directing them to an outcome they hadn’t expected and shouldn’t pursue. But will it thrust them into each other’s arms or leave them longing for what could have been?
Will Not Attend: Lively Stories of Detachment and Isolation
Adam Resnick, an Emmy Award-winning writer for NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman, has spent his entire life trying to avoid interaction with people. While courageously admitting to being “euphorically antisocial” and “sick in the head,” he allows us to plunge even deeper into his troubled psyche in this unabashedly uproarious memoir-in-essays where we observe Resnick’s committed indifference to family, friends, strangers, and the world at large. His mind shaped by such touchstone events as a traumatic Easter egg hunt when he was six (which solidified his hatred of parties) and overwrought by obsessions, including one with a plastic shopping bag (which solidified his hatred for change), he refuses to be burdened by chores like basic social obligation and personal growth, living instead by his own steadfast rule: “I refuse to do anything I don’t want to do.”
Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt
When the casket reached the front of the sanctuary, there was a loud cracking sound as the bottom fell out. And with a thump, down came Father Iggy.
From shoot-outs at funerals to dead men screaming and runaway corpses, undertakers have plenty of unusual stories to tell—and a special way of telling them.
In this macabre and moving compilation, funeral directors across the country share their most embarrassing, jaw-dropping, irreverent, and deeply poignant stories about life at death’s door. Discover what scares them and what moves them to tears. Learn about rookie mistakes and why death sometimes calls for duct tape.
Cupcakes, Paws, and Bad Santa Claus (Annie Graceland Book 4)
Annie Graceland’s a baker with a pinch of psychic ability – she can see and talk to ghosts. Much to her dismay, they also talk back, nagging her incessantly to solve their murders.
It’s Christmas, but Annie’s not feeling the holiday spirit. Her BFF takes her holiday shopping but a creepy mall Santa Claus ruins their outing.
Annie’s guilted into helping Sweet Paws Animal Rescue’s holiday fundraiser, but when the same bad Santa is murdered at the party, it’s up to her to track down his killer. Can she find the murderer before she and others are wacked? Can Annie resolve her latest debacle before her hot detective boyfriend wonders why she’s always showing up at crime scenes?
The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel
Not even the icy temperatures of a typical New England winter can match the bone-chilling scene of carnage discovered at the chapel of Our Lady of Divine Light. Within the cloistered convent lie two nuns–one dead, one critically injured–victims of an unspeakably savage attacker. The brutal crime appears to be without motive, but medical examiner Maura Isles’s autopsy of the dead woman yields a shocking surprise: Twenty-year-old Sister Camille gave birth before she was murdered. Then another body is found, mutilated beyond recognition. Together, Isles and homicide detective Jane Rizzoli uncover an ancient horror that connects these terrible slaughters. As long-buried secrets come to light, Maura Isles finds herself drawn inexorably toward the heart of an investigation that strikes close to home–and toward a dawning revelation about the killer’s identity too shattering to consider.
The Things They Carried
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.
Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.
The Things They Carried won France’s prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Please Look After Mom
When sixty-nine-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?
Told through the piercing voices and urgent perspectives of a daughter, son, husband, and mother, Please Look After Mom is at once an authentic picture of contemporary life in Korea and a universal story of family love.
Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey
Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the setting for Julian Fellowes’s Emmy Award-winning PBS show Downton Abbey, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Catherine Wendell. In this transporting companion piece to the New York Times bestseller Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, Catherine, a beautiful and spirited American woman who married Lady Almina’s son, the man who would become the 6th Earl of Carnarvon, presides over the grand estate during a tumultuous time for the British aristocracy. Following the First World War, many of the great houses of England faded as their owners fortunes declined in the new political and social world of the 1920s and 1930s. As war loomed, Highclere’s survival as the family home of the Carnarvons was again in the balance—as was peace between the nations of Europe.
Faerie Tale: A Novel
Phil Hastings was a lucky man—he had money, a growing reputation as a screenwriter, a happy, loving family with three kids, and he’d just moved into the house of his dreams in rural of magic—and about to be altered irrevocably by a magic more real than any he dared imagine.
For with the Magic came the Bad Thing, and the Faerie, and then the Fool . . . and the resurrection of a primordial war with a forgotten People—a war that not only the Hastings but the whole human race could lose.
Layer Cake
The inspiration for the major motion picture starring Daniel Craig: a high-octane crime novel set in the dangerous London underworld of the 1990s.
Kingpins, dealers, rival gangs, false allegiances, bad faith, and good money. There are many levels to the world of drugs lurking beneath the polished surface of London—a “layer cake” of crime that can chew up and spit out even the most experienced of players. Though he’s only twenty-nine, our narrator (“If I told you my name, you’d be as clever as me”) has made a small fortune in cocaine, enough to retire by thirty if he plays his cards right.
But then word comes down that Jimmy Price, one of the biggest Dons in the city, has a job for him, one last big score that could set him up for good. All he has to do is find Charlotte Ryder—and then figure out how to escape the tangled web of the underworld alive.
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