Showing results by publisher "Wordwooze Publishing" in All Categories

If you think you know the Borscht Belt Catskills, think again. Dirty Dancing and Mrs. Maisel are fun but they’re fiction. Bart Charlow, born a “Hotel Brat”, lifts the curtains on a rollicking era that they missed. Most books focus on the glamour of the era. A Catskill Carnival takes you behind the scenes, where life was tough, turbulent, and alternately warm and hard. This is the real Borscht Belt, told by a 3rd generation insider with no illusions.“We were carnies – carnival people – only we didn’t move the tents. That’s the Borscht Belt in a nutshell, and we were the chief nuts.

Cory Smit never had a chance to grow up as a normal kid. Between the extreme views pushed on him in church to being bullied at a series of schools, it took years to understand the worst of his trouble at home. After surviving physical and psychological trauma at the hands of his adoptive parents, Cory entered custody of the State of Arizona through a series of misunderstandings and misguided interventions.

Here are nine fascinating, shuddery tales about those most overlooked of sleuths -- the ghost hunters and psychic detectives who spiced up the pages of turn-of-the century magazines.

In late November a few weeks after rare book expert Crystal McInney’s relationship with her long-time boyfriend ends abruptly, she trades the sunshine of Orlando, Florida, for a more traditional Christmas atmosphere in her hometown of Placer, South Dakota. Unsure of her future, she begins a new job: cataloging and valuing the massive private library of Saul Custer, the town curmudgeon. Saul’s son Jason, whom she had jilted in their junior year of high school, shows up from New York City with his fiancée.

At age 24, Janet Buttenwieser moved to Seattle with a résumé devoted to public service and fantasies of single-handedly ending poverty. But within a year she’d developed an intestinal illness so rare she wound up in a medical journal. Janet navigated misdiagnosis, multiple surgeries, and life with a permanent colostomy. Like many female patients her concerns were glossed over by doctors. She was young and insecure, major liabilities in her life as a patient. How would she advocate for low-income people when she couldn’t even advocate for herself?

A lone survivor on a battlefield many years later, Pall dazedly recovers from the wounds of war. Despite the dead cast about him, everything he looks upon is unfamiliar to him. Wandering away from this scene of carnage, he encounters John Savage, a giant of a man who puts Pall within the sight of Savage’s seven-foot, nocked longbow.

After Holly tires of the erotic film industry grind in Los Angeles, she heads to San Francisco in hopes of parlaying her modest fame into becoming a successful exotic dancer. A chance conversation with Daisy, a waitress at Big Al’s, leads to an impromptu audition that launches her new career and exciting friends-with-benefits naughtiness.

Megan McShaw falls for another lycanthrope, Derek Lee. Soon the two are hiding in a cabin in the woods from a rogue werewolf who is out to get Derek after a bar fight reveals he is a lycanthrope but not from the local pack. Meanwhile, woman reporter, Jac Hamilton, comes to Heather Grove to investigate a 'werewolf' story.

From multi-award-winning author, Linda Watkins, comes a story of two women, from different walks of life, and the one dog who loved them both. A feature writer for the Boston Globe, Sarah Palmer had it all – a beautiful apartment, a great job, and a family she adored. A thousand miles away, Mindy Sue Watson didn’t have it so good. Trapped in a marriage to an abusive alcoholic, her only pleasure was in tossing a ball to a skinny dog she’d adopted from the local shelter.

Barker, the mysterious homeless detective with no memory of his past, returns in the wild, third installment of the Barker Mysteries. Sequestered in a thrown-together shack beneath the soggy planks of California’s Old Fisherman’s Wharf, Barker and his gaggle of street dogs have kept largely to themselves since the events of Monterey Pulp.

True Werewolves of History uses archival chronicles and new research to bring to life the stories of 100 werewolves. This unique tour-de-force focuses on real tales of werewolves (not to mention "werebears,” “werejaguars” and others) from throughout the world and across the centuries. You'll find them all in this volume for your delectation and enlightenment.

Think again! We have unearthed from their yellowing pulp pages coffins, six stories that you have probably never heard, and combined them with two indisputable classics for one of the best and freshest anthologies of undead doings you are likely to listen to for a long time to come.

Dakota Territory: 1885. A violent band of Civil War veterans, who roamed the Badlands were roused from their restless inertia by the murder of the Colonel they idolized. The towns simmered, and hatreds flared up anew, and every stranger became suspect. Since Smoke Wade was a stranger, when he stepped out of the hotel a dozen tough and sullen men were waiting for him. They followed him down the dusty street like a pack of hungry dogs stalking a young deer. Someone in their midst spoke the word. "Murderer."

Meet Cocoa and Cream, the amazing twin ponies with wild, untamed manes! They are anything but ordinary. Cocoa and Cream have a big dream: to teach little kids how to ride, and help them discover their incredible potential. Join Cocoa and Cream, and discover the countless ways these special ponies help kids like you reach their goals!

Joel Marcus, a young, successful Manhattan DA, stuck in a loveless marriage, is with his beautiful DA girlfriend when he rescues an elderly Haitian woman from muggers. She rewards him with a voodoo ceremony. Now when he dies, his spirit will survive and pass into the one nearest him. When he is, in fact, soon murdered, his spirit does pass into the one nearest him: the Black hitman who murdered him. While trying to convince loved ones he's still alive, he's being sought by the police as the prime suspect in his own murder.

Ralph Greco, Jr., leads the listener through stories of sexual denial, where mind games, chastity devices, and relationship dynamics push the characters to their limits, both physically and mentally. Whether by friends, neighbors, lovers, or strict mistresses, the men and women in Denied will be challenged in the most delicious ways.

Hatch faces a DUI and attends court-ordered AA meetings. One night he stops at a nearby Seattle diner owned by Rosa, a Puerto Rican earth mother who hires him as a kitchen prep. Rosa inspires Hatch to renew his love of drawing. As he claws his way to sobriety one brushstroke at a time, Hatch must come to terms with ghosts from the war, his fellow marine, and the truth about his dog.

Blood ties. The family we’ve been given, the friends we make, the loves we keep, and those we lost. The 26 stories in Family and Other Ailments teeter on the brink, hover at the periphery, or even the possibility, of crime. Under a soft light and at an angle, they're all love stories. The collection opens with “Spy Head”, a tale of friendship after a crushing trauma. In “Texas Two-Step”, brotherhood leads to a wicked double-cross. “Razorbills” shows a young woman seeking freedom from the prison-like caring of her sibling.

It’s 1993—a year of optimism, change, and killer music—when Kees VanSpyker, a penniless Gulf War veteran and would-be guitar hero, takes a job with the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) to infiltrate a Wisconsin mink ranch and find out what happened to the last guy they sent there who subsequently vanished. Kees just wants to earn enough cash to take his guitar and follow the stampede to Seattle, but finding out what happened proves hairier than he bargained for. Sinister doings and suspects abound on the ranch, in Madison, and among the ALF members themselves.

The day Teddy Roosevelt learned McKinley had died and he was now president of the United States, he made up his mind he would cut a canal through the Isthmus of Panama. No small task. The French had tried and failed with more than twenty thousand dead. Roosevelt wasn’t alone in wanting to see a canal. The Wall Street financier, J. P. Morgan, wanted it too, and so did revolutionaries in Panama. Morgan wanted a shorter route for his ships and was willing to secretly finance the insurrection against Colombia, who owned the territory of Panama. Not everyone was wild about America in Panama.