Perfect for Halloween! From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library and coauthor of I Funny and Treasure Hunters, comes a series of spine-tingling mysteries to keep you up long after the lights go out. How serious is stage fright? At the Hanging Hill Playhouse, it can kill you. After narrowly escaping a malevolent spirit in The Crossroads, Zack and Judy are hoping to relax during the rehearsals for a show based on Judy’s bestselling children’s books. Little do they know that the director is planning to raise a horde of evil specters from the dead, and to accomplish this, he needs a human sacrifice . . . and Zack fits the bill perfectly. This second book featuring the intrepid Zack and his stepmother, Judy, is full of the same humorous and spine-tingling storytelling that has made Chris Grabenstein a fast favorite with young and old alike.
In this “powerful and frightening” British thriller, two estranged sisters confront a crime that exposes the nightmares that lurk at the edges of domesticity (Irish Independent). On a picture-perfect morning in Bath, England, a teenage girl’s body is found on the towpath of a canal. Police detective Zoe Benedict is convinced the department head should look beyond the usual domestic motives to solve the brutal murder case. But no one wants to hear any far-fetched ideas from the department’s black sheep. Meanwhile, Zoe’s sister, Sally, has started working as a housekeeper for a wealthy entrepreneur whose eccentricities are beginning to seem increasingly repugnant, and possibly dangerous. As Zoe digs into the case and Sally’s suspicions grow, all signs point to one conclusion: There’s something very wrong at the house on Hanging Hill. “A chiller to the very end. Hayder deals with Britain at its grittiest.” —Peter Millar, The Times (London) “Mo Hayder has crafted a powerful and frightening thriller that grips the reader from page one to the blood-freezing shock of the final page. Utterly compelling.” —Irish Independent “[A] superbly plotted tale [with] an end more alarming than anything that comes before.” —New York Daily News
After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills. Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.
Billy Bartholomew has an audacious soul, and he knows it. Why? Because it's all he has left. He's dead. Eddie Proffit has an equally audacious soul, but he doesn't know it. He's still alive. These days, Billy and Eddie meet on the sledding hill, where they used to spend countless hours -- until Billy kicked a stack of Sheetrock over on himself, breaking his neck and effectively hitting tilt on his Earthgame. The two were inseparable friends. They still are. And Billy is not about to let a little thing like death stop him from hanging in there with Eddie in his epic struggle to get his life back on track.
During rehearsals for a play based on his stepmother's bestselling children's books, eleven-year-old Zack discovers that the director is planning to raise a horde of evil specters from the dead by offering up a human sacrifice.
Named an ALA Quick Pick, an exciting thriller by the author of the best-seller I Know What You Did Last Summer features a seventeen-year-old girl who becomes a clairvoyant and is branded a witch, in a repeat of the Salem witch trials. Reprint. AB.
Gruesome Spectacles tells the sobering history of botched, mismanaged, and painful executions in the U.S. from 1890 to the present. Since the book's initial publication in 2014, the cruel and unusual executions of a number of people on death row, including Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma and Joseph Wood in Arizona, have made headlines and renewed vigorous debate surrounding the death penalty in America. Austin Sarat's book instantly became an essential resource for citizens, scholars, and lawmakers interested in capital punishment—even the Supreme Court, which cited the book in its recent opinion, Glossip v. Gross. Now in paperback, the book includes a new preface outlining the latest twists and turns in the death penalty debate, including the recent galvanization of citizens and leaders alike as recent botched executions have unfolded in the press. Sarat argues that unlike in the past, today's botched executions seem less like inexplicable mishaps and more like the latest symptoms of a death penalty machinery in disarray. Gruesome Spectacles traces the historical evolution of methods of execution, from hanging or firing squad to electrocution to gas and lethal injection. Even though each of these technologies was developed to "perfect" state killing by decreasing the chance of a cruel death, an estimated three percent of all American executions went awry in one way or another. Sarat recounts the gripping and truly gruesome stories of some of these deaths—stories obscured by history and to some extent, the popular press.
Imagine finding yourself divorced and penniless, with no skills and a teenage daughter to support. What if the only way to survive was to do things you never thought possible? These are questions Sally Benedict has never thought about. Married to a successful businessman, she's always been a bit of a dreamer. Until now. Her sister, Zoë, is a detective in the city of Bath. She is fiercely independent, loves her job, and oozes self-confidence in spite of a crippling secret that dates back twenty years and which--if exposed--may destroy her. The two women haven't seen each other for almost twenty years, but the horrific murder of a teenage girl is about to change that. Then Sally's daughter gets into trouble, and Sally suddenly needs cash--lots of it--fast. With no one to help her, she is forced into a criminal world of extreme pornography and illegal drugs; a world in which teenage girls go missing. Two sisters intent on survival find themselves confronting situations they never expected to face . . . until one of the sisters does something so horrific and desperate that there's no way back.
