Karen O’Brien, donut shop owner, retired teacher, convicted felon. When a violent man is murdered, her nightmares warn her of more murders. The killer plans to watch her die. After a violent man who threatened Donut Lady is murdered, her nightmares foretell of a tragic, second murder. When the killer stalks Donut Lady, she does not intend to become victim number three, but can she and her shadows expose what the murderer has concealed for years? Even though Donut Lady is fierce, the killer is obsessed for her to die.
Donut Lady, an amateur senior sleuth, sifts through clues. The serial killer squirms under the heat of exposure. It’s time for Donut Lady to die. Karen O’Brien moves to her hometown in south Georgia and buys a charming, old-fashioned donut shop, complete with the owner's dog, cat, and secret recipes. However, shadows and terrifying nightmares from her twelve years in prison disrupt her new life; or are they trying to help? Her struggle to adapt to civilian life becomes even more complicated when the boy no one cares about except her suddenly disappears from his sketchy living conditions. While Donut Lady searches for the missing boy and pursues clues to solve a prison murder, the killer stalks her.
Richard Morgan can’t believe his father is considering a rival candy company’s offer to buy out the family business that he loves. Though the confections division is tiny compared to the family’s other ventures, it’s close to his heart. Maybe too close, since the thought of losing it feels like losing his mother all over again. Convinced it’s the best way to continue the Morgan legacy, his father offers Richard control of the company if he’ll secure the family name with a marriage. After a messy, public divorce, marriage is the last thing Richard wants to consider, but according to his father, it’s the only way. Yvette Cruz is the beautiful, savvy mergers and acquisitions rep charged with brokering the buyout agreement between her company and Morgan Confectioners, and Richard Morgan is the only thing standing between her and the promotion she desperately wants. She came from nothing and worked her way to the top of her field, so she’s not about to let his refusal to cooperate stop her from getting what she wants. Corporate rivalry gives way to an unwise attraction when the two meet and spend a night together that ultimately changes their lives forever. Two enemies find love, but a betrayal threatens to tear them apart. Forgiveness and redemption can lead to everything they’ve ever wanted, but some things can’t be forgotten. Sensuality Level: Sensual
Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape brings us to the mid-2000s, when the Tanzanian government struck a deal with a foreign investor to convert more than 20,000 hectares of long-settled coastal land to establish a sugarcane plantation. Ten years on, the deal was abruptly abandoned. Popularly deemed a case of hubristic global development, critics classified this project another in a line of failed modern resource grabs. Youjin B. Chung argues such tidy accounts conceal myriad and profound implications: not only how gender, history, and culture shaped the project's trajectory, but also how, even in its stalled state, the deal upended social life on the land by setting in motion incomplete processes of development and dispossession. With rich ethnographic detail and visual storytelling, Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape traces the lived experiences of diverse rural women and men as they struggled for survival under a seemingly endless condition of liminality. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the directions and stakes of postcolonial development and nation-building in Tanzania, and the shifting meanings of identity and belonging for those on the margins of capitalist agrarian transformation.
Location is critical! And in compulsively-competitive Silicon Valley no address is more highly-prized than tech-savvy, politically-correct, safe and secure Palo Alto, where the white-hot housing market inspires bidding wars, and money falls on the lucky seller like blood gushes from an open wound. Here, even a sweet deal can turn deadly!Part-time P.I. Trucker Deal knows zilch about real estate until he agrees to help his girlfriend, Attorney Kim Lockwood, checkout the shocking death of an elderly client. Suddenly awash in a roily pool of predatory developers, pushy Realtors, tight-lipped loan sharks, an evasive millionaire who's a wannabe action hero, a defensive heir and her less-than-stand-up family, pin-striped thugs, a mightable mother, and a very spooky bodyguard, Deal finds the real estate game so twisted and dirty that whodunit's the least of his problems as friends and enemies rev-up for a lethal clash!When the high-bid rules, murder's the only bet, so slide by New Deal Investigations where stacked decks are routine, P.C. procedures are an afterthought, and results are what counts!
A Trilogy! Donut Lady’s Specialties: pink-sprinkled donuts and solving murders. Karen O’Brien moves to her hometown in south Georgia and buys a charming, old-fashioned donut shop, complete with the owner's dog, cat, and secret recipes, but the shadows and terrifying nightmares from her twelve years in prison disrupt her new life; or are they trying to help? Donut Lady’s sprinkled donuts and coffee attract her regulars, and her talent for uncovering clues and solving murders attracts the attention of killers who intend for her to die. Three cozy culinary mysteries sprinkled with a smidgen of paranormal.
Independent India has so far witnessed twenty-eight finance ministers. But only a handful of them could leave their mark on the exchequer or North Block, the headquarters of the Indian finance ministry. From Independence to Emergency: India's Finance Ministers 1947-1977 is the story of India's unforgettable finance ministers who shaped India's economy in the first thirty years after Independence. The book highlights the significant difference that these finance ministers made to the management of the Indian economy and to the policy evolution of the government, and who thus left an indelible mark on the psyche of Indian citizens. It attempts to measure the impact these decisions left, not only on India's economic system but also on its political system, and looks at to what extent the decisions were influenced by the socio-economic backgrounds of the finance ministers. Full of interesting anecdotes, the book is the first in-depth account of the crucial role these finance ministers have played in the functioning of India's economy.
The world of Magnolia Le Guin, like that of countless farm women, was defined by and confined to home and family. Born in 1869 into the rural, white, agrarian society of Georgia's central piedmont, she raised eight children virtually on her own, yet never in her life ventured farther than thirty miles from her birthplace. Her situation, however extreme, was not unique in her day. What distinguished Le Guin was her love of writing, her need to write about being a wife and mother--despite a daunting workload and burden of responsibilities that left her with little free time or energy. In a plain, idiomatic style, these diaries detail some of the most trying, but nonetheless fulfilling, years of her life. At the same time, A Home-Concealed Woman (her own self-descriptive phrase) provides a firsthand view of the hardships of subsistence farming, the material culture of rural society, and the codes to which Le Guin as a white woman, a southerner, and an evangelical Christian adhered. The most striking feature of Le Guin's world is that it was confined almost entirely to the indoors, from the bedrooms where her children were born and where her parents lay ill and died to the stove room where the daily meals were cooked and cleared. Her husband's prominence in their small community and the size of their extended families meant that Le Guin hosted an endless flow of callers and overnight guests--more than one hundred in the summer of 1906 alone. Managing an already busy household under these conditions so occupied her time that she treasured every respite: "I was truly glad when I felt the sprinkling of the rain. I was so glad I couldn't content myself indoors washing dishes, sweeping floors, making beds, etc etc, so I just postponed those things and churning too awhile and betook myself out in the misty rain with a new brushbroom and swept a lot of this large yard and inhaled the sweet air scented with rain-settling dust." Less idyllic sentiments also fill Le Guin's diaries, for the anger and anxiety she could not publicly express found a voice in their pages: "I feel rebellious once in awhile at my lot--so much drudgery and so much company to cook for and in meantime my own affairs, my own children, my little baby--all going neglected." Though condescending outbursts about her hired help reveal Le Guin's racial attitudes, her endemic prejudice is tempered by her many expressions of genuine concern for individual blacks close to her family. As writer Ursula K. Le Guin suggests in her foreword, the diary may be the best suited literary form for approximating "the actual gait of people's lives." In Magnolia Le Guin's diary, prayerful entreaties for strength and guidance mingle with daily news about her family, providing a constant background against which major events such as births and deaths, holidays and harvests take place. The reader's admiration for Le Guin will grow as the details of her life emerge and accumulate.
