Showing results by narrator "C.S.E Cooney" in All Categories

Following her recovery from breast cancer, Rarity has embraced a life of healing and service in her Sedona, Arizona, community. She welcomes the opportunity to participate in the annual summer healing fair with her fittingly named new-age bookstore, The Next Chapter. The members of the Tuesday Night Survivors' Book Club are also volunteering, maintaining a cooling station for overheated festivalgoers, and hosting a Tarot card reader for entertainment. But one member, Darby, is anything but entertained when the Tarot reader pulls a Death card.

Despite multiple waves of feminist revolution, today's single woman is still mired in judgment or, worse, pity. But for one brief exclamatory period in the 1930s, she was all the rage. Marjorie Hillis was working at Vogue when she published the radical self-help book Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. With Dorothy Parker-esque wit, she urged spinsters, divorcees, and old maids to shed derogatory labels, and her philosophy became a phenomenon.

Sensible and cautious, Naomi Coblenz lives to help everyone else be happy—particularly when it comes to her twin sister, Ruth. So Omi certainly can't admit she's always loved handsome Bo Helmuth, since he and Ruth have begun courting. To look out for her sometimes-thoughtless sister, Omi even poses as Ruth on a ride home alone with Bo. But it doesn't take Bo long to see the truth—and really notice Omi for the first surprising, hopelessly-wonderful time . . .

Sarah Mae wants to let you in on a little secret about being a good homemaker: It's not about having a clean house. She'd never claim to be a natural, organized cleaner herself - yet, like you, she wants a beautiful space to call home, a place where people feel loved and at peace. Where people can really settle in with good food, comfy pillows, and wide-open hearts. Journey with Sarah Mae on this easy, practical 31-day plan to get you moving and have your house looking and feeling fresh.

As local merchants unite to attract tourists for a much anticipated weekend quilting event, business is sure to spill over into eateries like Daisy's Tea Garden. Gorgeous craftwork is hanging everywhere - but among the quilts, potholders, and placemats, one gallery owner is wrapped up in some dangerous affairs....Reese Masemer had been dating one of Daisy's employees, Tessa, an artist, though their last interaction was as strained as a cup of loose leaf tea. Now Reese has been found dead near a covered bridge where Tessa's been practicing her sketches.

Cassandra Khaw's dynamic and vibrant debut collection, Breakable Things, explores the fragile and nebulous bonds that weave love and grief into our existence. This exquisite and cutting collection of stories showcases a bloody fusion of horrors from cosmic to psychological to body traumas.

Restaurant critic Derek Schumaker, notorious for his bitter reviews, is about to visit Daisy's Tea Garden, and Daisy and Aunt Iris are simmering with anxiety. A bad word from the culinary curmudgeon could really hurt their business. But how can he resist her cucumber sandwiches with pimento spread - not to mention the cheesy cauliflower soup and strawberry walnut salad? Schumaker takes a to-go order when the afternoon tea service is done, which Daisy hopes is a good sign. But when he perishes from a seizure, it looks like his food was dosed with something deadly.

With winter solstice fast approaching, Sora and her companions are running out of time. She must stop The Shade from awakening the Dark God, yet a powerful force has overtaken her Cat's-Eye necklace, rendering the stone almost useless. To use the stone, Sora must learn to trust her instincts and embrace her own inner strength. She joins forces with unexpected allies to protect the City of Crowns. As the city dissolves into chaos, she finds herself barreling toward an epic battle.

Sora and her companions are the only ones who know of the plague's true source. As the disease spreads, Sora must journey to the City of Crowns to retrieve the Book of the Named, her only hope of stopping the Shade. She and her companions arrive just in time for the winter solstice festival, a notorious two weeks of fine wines, grand parties, and legendary debauchery. Sora must don the guise of a noblewoman and infiltrate the First Tier nobility to stop the Shade before it's too late.

A plague is spreading across the land. Crops are rotting. People are dying in the streets. Sora, with the help of her magical Cat's Eye necklace, is the only one who can stop it. She must travel overseas to the Lost Isles, a place of legend and mystery. Only there can she destroy the bloodmage, Volcrian, putting an end to the curse. She is accompanied by Crash, a lethal assassin who once threatened - and saved - her life. But Sora is beginning to question her dark companion.

Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in US prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend 23 hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators' discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one "supermax", California's Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners.

Cat has a full plate at her Aspen Hills Warm Springs Resort, as a group of aspiring cozy mystery authors arrives for a writer's retreat. So when baker Dee Dee Meyer stirs up trouble by filing a false complaint with the health inspector against the B&B - all because she insists Cat's best friend Shauna stole her recipes - Cat marches into the shop to confront her.

Martha Sue Helmuth wishes she could just relax and enjoy her extended visit with her beloved grandparents. Instead, she is nursing a broken heart over gentle widower Yost Beiler. Yost's thirteen-year-old son, Jonah, refuses to accept Martha Sue, and she refuses to risk coming between them. For now, she is just trying to avoid her Mammi's choice of yet another eligible suitor. But when Yost moves himself and Jonah to Huckleberry Hill to change Martha Sue's mind, she can't help dreaming that somehow, some way, she and Yost will have a miraculous second chance to be together.

When she joined the Criminal Investigations Division, Tara knew she'd be investigating some very real crooks. Forget about waitresses hiding tips from the IRS or babysitters not declaring income! Tara and her partner, Eddie, are going after one of country's richest, dirtiest felons. Being on a diet doesn't help Tara's mood much. Hopefully, by the time the investigation is over, she'll be sitting somewhere in a string bikini, far, far away....

Lee has been promoted from field reporter to program director. Keeping track of all the shows and managing the local TV personalities - including a cowboy, a clown, and a performing dog - has her head spinning. Perhaps that's what makes her take pity on the distraught woman she finds sitting alone on a bench on the Salem common. When she realizes that the poor woman doesn't even know her own name, Lee takes her into the warmth of the home she shares with her Aunt Ibby and their clairvoyant gentleman cat, O'Ryan.

As a Salem, Massachusetts, native, WICH-TV field reporter, and amateur sleuth Lee Barrett is well versed in the region's lore. So when the murder of revered local professor Samuel Bond resembles a killing from almost two centuries ago, everyone is on edge....

Daisy's worried one of her employees at Daisy's Tea Garden may be in a spot of trouble. Lately Karina's been loading up on soup and second-day baked goods at the end of her shift - and while the shop's scrumptious treats may be hard to resist, Daisy suspects there's more going on, especially since Karina has been seen hanging out in a rundown part of Willow Creek. Planning her own daughter's wedding is enough to keep her busy, but Daisy can't help feeling a protective maternal instinct - and an instinct to investigate.

"Spring Is in the Air": As the young people of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, plant a garden in memory of their friend, Katie Ann begins to worry that her older brother, Ephraim, is dating her best friend. What if she somehow loses them both? "Home by Summer": Clara Hertzler's surprised when Jerry Petersheim, her old friend, comes to the garden to drop off his younger sister-especially because Jerry has been gone for years and now seems to be living as an Englisher. As the friends get to know each other again, Clara pushes Jerry to examine why he abandoned his Amish beliefs.

The latest novel in this supernatural cozy series from the author of the Witch City Mysteries features a New Englander transplanted to a Florida town along the Gulf of Mexico when she inherits a charming, century-old—and very haunted—inn from a mysterious benefactor.

With these captivating initial glimpses into her storytelling psyche, Jo Walton shines through subtle myths and reinvented realities. Through eclectic stories, subtle vignettes, inspired poetry, and more, Walton soars with humans, machines, and magic-rising from the every day into the universe itself.