When regular-guy Larry Jaroque gets a big break and enters the fast-paced world of talk radio, he never imagines the dark underbelly of broadcasting he's about to encounter. Desperate to find the coworker that's sabotaging his budding career, Larry embarks on a journey of justice and revenge. Can Larry race against the clock to find his saboteur, all while keeping his sexy girlfriend Vivien satisfied? Careers - and lives - hang in the balance ...while an entire nation listens!
What if your survival depended on the villainy you long despised? Sister and brother. A loyalty forged in the crucible of their tragic upbringing in the Northwoods town of Backus, Minnesota. Cass, a quiet young woman caring for the grandmother who raised them. Jack, a fugitive carrying a life-changing sum of stolen drug money. Desperate, trusting only his sister, Jack enlists her help in burying the cash in their grandmother's back acres. Cass agrees to the scheme, a decision that soon endangers not only her unassuming backwoods existence, but both of their lives. Jack returns to hiding, and Cass learns of the bounty placed on his head, as the cast of characters in their orbit-some villains, some saviors, some perhaps both-emerges. Their corrupt cop uncle and lawless cousins. Their father, a violent, conniving career criminal whom the siblings blame for their mother's unsolved murder many years ago. Claiming reformation, he pledges to ensure her and Jack's safety. Bowed by the burdens of her love for Jack, haunted by a past that seems poised to repeat itself, Cass realizes that her survival may depend on her own measure of wickedness.
Rarely does a debut novel attract the sweeping critical acclaim of Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin. Shortlisted for two prestigious awards, this tale centers around a military coup in an unnamed country, with characters who have no names or any identifying physical characteristics. Known simply as the ex-President's chef, barber, and portrait painter, these three men perform their mundane tasks and appear unaware of the atrocities of their employer's regime. But when the President is deposed, the trio are revealed as less than innocent. A deeply chilling yet sensual novel, Blood Kin illustrates Lord Acton's famous quip, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," and marks the beginning of an illustrious literary career.
The last words Ash hears her mother say are, “When you fall in love, you will carve out your heart and throw it into the deepest ocean. You will be all in—blood and salt.” Determined to find her mother when she disappears, Ash follows her to Quivara, Kansas, the spiritual commune she escaped long ago. But something sinister and ancient waits among the rustling cornstalks of this village lost to time. Her mother is nowhere to be found, but Ash is plagued by memories of her ancestor, Katia, which harken back to the town’s history of unrequited love, murder, alchemy, and immortality. Charming traditions give way to a string of deaths. And Ash feels herself drawn to Dane, a mysterious, forbidden boy with secrets of his own. As the community prepares for a ceremony five hundred years in the making, Ash fights to save her mother, her lover, and herself. She must discover the truth about Quivara before it’s too late. Before she’s all in—blood and salt.
Learn to Work with the Magick of the Dark Moon Shadow magick occupies a critical but often misunderstood role in the rich history of witchcraft. This book explores topics such as the ethical use of animal parts and bones, blood magick, dark moon energy, and other rarely discussed aspects of witchcraft. With a focus on ethically sourcing materials and suggestions for plant-based substitutions, author Kate Freuler provides much-needed information and hands-on techniques to help you strengthen your witchcraft practice, connect to nature, protect yourself (and your kith and kin), and know yourself in a deep way. Within these pages, you will also discover methods for hexing, scrying, sex magick, and working with dark deities in addition to the magickal use of graveyard dirt and performing spells to assist the crossing of a dying loved one. The shadow work explored in Of Blood and Bones reminds us that not everything is love and light, and that facing the dark side supports the quest to achieve spiritual wholeness.
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER “The stories in this book make for a fascinating and remarkably complete pantheon of just about every common despair and every joy related to game development.” — Rami Ismail, cofounder of Vlambeer and developer of Nuclear Throne Developing video games—hero's journey or fool's errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today's hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes readers on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius. Exploring the artistic challenges, technical impossibilities, marketplace demands, and Donkey Kong-sized monkey wrenches thrown into the works by corporate, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels reveals how bringing any game to completion is more than Sisyphean—it's nothing short of miraculous. Taking some of the most popular, bestselling recent games, Schreier immerses readers in the hellfire of the development process, whether it's RPG studio Bioware's challenge to beat an impossible schedule and overcome countless technical nightmares to build Dragon Age: Inquisition; indie developer Eric Barone's single-handed efforts to grow country-life RPG Stardew Valley from one man's vision into a multi-million-dollar franchise; or Bungie spinning out from their corporate overlords at Microsoft to create Destiny, a brand new universe that they hoped would become as iconic as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings—even as it nearly ripped their studio apart. Documenting the round-the-clock crunches, buggy-eyed burnout, and last-minute saves, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a journey through development hell—and ultimately a tribute to the dedicated diehards and unsung heroes who scale mountains of obstacles in their quests to create the best games imaginable.
In June of 1963, when Michael Peppiatt first met Francis Bacon, the former was a college boy at Cambridge, the latter already a famous painter, more than thirty years his senior. And yet, Peppiatt was welcomed into the volatile artist's world; Bacon, considered by many to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” proved himself a devoted friend and father figure, even amidst the drinking and gambling. Though Peppiatt would later write perhaps the definitive biography of Bacon, his sharply drawn memoir has a different vigor, revealing the artist at his most intimate and indiscreet, and his London and Paris milieus in all their seediness and splendor. Bacon is felt with immediacy, as Peppiatt draws from contemporary diaries and records of their time together, giving us the story of a friendship, and a new perspective on an artist of enduring fascination.
You can’t tell the story of how it all began for supernatural cops Ivy Tamwood and Rachel Morgan without telling how it all nearly ended. The fiery living vampire and erstwhile earth witch never asked to be paired up in the first place. And having to work Inderland Security’s crummiest beat—busting two-bit paranormal street punks—sure didn’t sweeten the deal. But when it counts, Ivy and Rachel always have each other’s backs. They’d better—because someone just hung targets on both of them. It doesn’t take a hotshot homicide detective to know that nearly getting flattened by a falling gargoyle or impaled by a lead pipe aren’t on-the-job accidents. But it doesn’t seem possible that the class of crooks Ivy and Rachel routinely collar could kill anything but brain cells. So who put Cincinnati’s tough and tender twosome on their “to do in” list? Is Ivy’s vampire master, the powerful and seductive Piscary, jealous of her growing bloodlust (and just plain lust) for Rachel? Or have forces unknown—living or undead—made the partners prey in a deadly witch (and vampire) hunt? Before this case is cracked, Ivy and Rachel will face down vicious dogs, speeding locomotives, rogue bloodsuckers, and their own dark desires; spells will be cast and blood will be spilled; and Kim Harrison’s hair-raising, heart-racing, dark urban world of magic and monsters will leap howling from the pages of her second electrifying, full-color graphic novel.
As seen on The Five on Fox News Channel! Over the course of seven days in 1970s New Haven, veteran homicide detective Frank Suchy gradually loses his grip on sanity and sobriety while investigating the murder of his best friend’s child. The year is 1976. Veteran New Haven homicide detective Frank Suchy has finally learned to cope with the demons in his life and the daily pressure of ‘the job’—being exposed to every manner of death that could possibly befall someone—all the while celebrating his third year of sobriety. But when his best friend’s child is brutally murdered in broad daylight outside a downtown shopping mall, his world begins to deteriorate, bringing back the nightmares that he thought were locked away long ago. Recollections of his brief friendship with rock singer Jim Morrison (who he befriended at the 1967 New Haven concert where the singer was arrested onstage), and all the other terrible memories he had worked so hard to suppress…come pouring back. To make matters worse, there are external forces that threaten Detective Suchy’s wellbeing. Pressure from bureaucrats and the political elite to curtail any exposure of the case to the public in the wake of New Haven’s recent massive Urban Renewal Project, and the simmering racial and social divide between the minority communities against the police department in particular, send Detective Suchy over the edge. He spirals out of control in a desperate race against time to solve this horrendous case, hoping to somehow redeem his soul—and the city’s, for that matter—even if it means laying down his own life in the process. What Detective Suchy eventually uncovers is the seedy, horrifying underbelly of the 1970s.
