Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna

Beauty, Beast, and Belladonna

Author: Maia Chance

Publisher: Berkley

Published: 2016-02-02

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0425271641

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From the author of Cinderella Six Feet Under, a beauty must solve a beastly murder. Variety hall actress Ophelia Flax knows how to win over an audience. That’s why she’s accepted the marriage proposal of the brutish Comte de Griffe to nettle her occasional investigative partner—and romantic sparring partner—the pompous if dashing Professor Penrose. But with his boorish table manners, wild mane of hair, and habit of prowling away the wee hours, the comte has shredded Ophelia’s last nerve. She intends to disengage from her feral fiancé at his winter hunting party—until Penrose, his lovely new fiancée, and a stagecoach of stranded travelers arrive at the comte’s sprawling château. Soon she can’t tell the boars from the bores. When one of the guests is found clawed and bloody in the orangerie, Ophelia is determined to solve the murder before everyone starts believing the local version of Beauty and the Beast. But until the snows melt, she can’t trust her eyes—or her heart—since even the most civilized people hold beastly secrets...


Beasts of Belladonna

Beasts of Belladonna

Author: Gilbert Allen

Publisher:

Published: 2020-10-07

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9781639820757

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If the short story collections of John Cheever and Flannery O'Connor had a love child, it would be The Beasts of Belladonna. Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, Gilbert Allen's collection of fifteen linked stories explores every corner of the suburbanized foothills of South Carolina. Belladonna--a gated community with Tuscan architectural covenants--boasts a championship golf course, compulsory three-car garages, faux cobblestone sidewalks, and a lively assortment of cats, dogs, birds, deer, goldfish, and spider monkeys. Its human inhabitants include a skeptical high-school biology teacher and his stubbornly devout Methodist wife; a 300-pound biracial woman determined to lose weight; the county's self-appointed Pavement Imperfection Coordinator; the state's first African American optometrist; a sociopathic TV reporter and her would-be savior (a young minister from Southern California nicknamed Jesus of Malibu); and a Guatemalan housekeeper tormented by her evangelical employer's cat. Although you won't find Belladonna on any map, you might have already encountered its past, present, and future in Allen's previous collection, The Final Days of Great American Shopping, which Ron Rash praised as ""a delightful collection whose interrelated stories give the pleasure of a novel."" And The Beasts of Belladonna is even better.


Belladonna

Belladonna

Author: Adalyn Grace

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2022-08-30

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0316158453

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The New York Times bestselling author of All the Stars and Teeth brings to life a highly romantic, Gothic-infused world of wealth, desire, and betrayal. ​ Orphaned as a baby, nineteen-year-old Signa has been raised by a string of guardians, each one more interested in her wealth than her well-being—and each has met an untimely end. Her remaining relatives are the elusive Hawthornes, an eccentric family living at Thorn Grove, an estate both glittering and gloomy. Its patriarch mourns his late wife through wild parties, while his son grapples for control of the family’s waning reputation, and his daughter suffers from a mysterious illness. But when their mother’s restless spirit appears claiming she was poisoned, Signa realizes that the family she depends on could be in grave danger and enlists the help of a surly stable boy to hunt down the killer. However, Signa’s best chance of uncovering the murderer is an alliance with Death himself, a fascinating, dangerous shadow who has never been far from her side. Though he’s made her life a living hell, Death shows Signa that their growing connection may be more powerful—and more irresistible—than she ever dared imagine.


Belladonna

Belladonna

Author: Anbara Salam

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-06-09

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0593099362

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A hypnotizing coming-of-age novel set in 1950s Italy that stares into the heart of longing and at the friendships that have the power to save and destroy us. "I was utterly captivated, from first page to last." --Anton DiSclafani, New York Times bestselling author of The After Party Isabella is beautiful, inscrutable, and popular. Her best friend, Bridget, keeps quietly to the fringes of their Connecticut Catholic school, watching everything and everyone, but most especially Isabella. In 1957, when the girls graduate, they land coveted spots at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Pentila in northern Italy, a prestigious art history school on the grounds of a silent convent. There, free of her claustrophobic home and the town that will always see her and her Egyptian mother as outsiders, Bridget discovers she can reinvent herself as anyone she desires... perhaps even someone Isabella could desire in return. But as that glittering year goes on, Bridget begins to suspect Isabella is keeping a secret from her, one that will change the course of their lives forever.


Cinderella Six Feet Under

Cinderella Six Feet Under

Author: Maia Chance

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0698140052

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This Cinderella goes from ashes to ashes in the new Victorian-era Fairy Tale Fatal Mystery by the author of Snow White Red-Handed . . . Variety hall actress Ophelia Flax’s plan to reunite her friend Prue with her estranged—and allegedly wealthy—mother, Henrietta, is met with a grim surprise. Not only is the marquise’s Paris mansion a mouse-infested ruin, but Henrietta has inexplicably vanished, leaving behind an evasive husband, two sinister stepsisters, and a bullet-riddled corpse in the pumpkin patch decked out in a ball gown and one glass slipper—a corpse that also happens to be a dead ringer for Prue. Strangely, no one at 15 rue Garenne seems concerned about who plugged this luckless Cinderella or why, so the investigation is left to Ophelia and Prue. It takes them through the labyrinthine maze of the Paris Opera, down the trail of a legendary fairy tale relic, into the confidence of a wily prince charmless, and makes them vulnerable to the secrets of a mysterious couturière with designs of her own on Prue’s ever-twisting family history.


Skylark

Skylark

Author: Emily N Madison

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing

Published: 2022-08-02

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1631958372

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Skylark, The Dragon Lady is an adventurous fantasy that pulls readers into Belladonna Skylark’s world of piracy, prophecies, dark forces, and personal challenges—propelling the protagonist into tests of her character and resolve.