Tired of fending off street thugs and worried about the day they can no longer take care of themselves, three elderly widows, Josie, Mabel and Mil, concoct the perfect plan for ensuring their safety, which will also guarantee them free room and board for life. As grocery bag-covered bodies begin turning up in Southern California, police and the media are stumped. Detectives assigned to the case, Paige Turner and Mark Wisneski, wonder what weird new serial killer is on the loose. The victims are mostly drug addicts and small-time crooks, but why the grocery bags? The bodies pile up until the widows invite Turner and Wisneski to tea, where they tell all. What they reveal shocks the world and could lead to the widows' master plan seriously backfiring. Life on the streets and in prison will never be the same.
In December 2008, my worst nightmare came true . . . How do you pick yourself up after the one thing you most feared happens to you? Alexandra Penney's revealing, spirited, and ultimately redemptive true story shows us how. Throughout her life, Alexandra Penney's worst fear was of becoming a bag lady. Even as she worked several jobs while raising a son as a single mother, wrote a bestselling advice book, and became editor in chief of Self magazine, she was haunted by the image of herself alone, bankrupt, and living on the street. She even went to therapy in an attempt to alleviate the worry that all she had worked for could crumble. And then, one day, that's exactly what happened. Penney had taken a friend's advice and invested nearly everything she had ever earned--all of her savings--with Bernie Madoff. One day she was successful and wealthy; the next she had almost nothing. Suddenly, at an age when many Americans retire, Penney saw her worst nightmares coming true. Based on her popular blog posts on The Daily Beast, this memoir chronicles Penney's struggle to cope with the devastating financial and emotional fallout of being cheated out of her life savings and illuminates her journey back to sanity, solvency, and security. "I will work harder than I ever have before--which was pretty hard indeed--and see what happens. I have the feeling something good will come of it: tough, challenging work and laserlike focus have always paid off for me. . . . Was it better to have it and then lose it? Yes, yes, yes! Even though I lived with horrible bag lady fears of losing it all, now that those financial fears have materialized, I'm in pretty good shape and looking to what's next. Experiences -- good and bad, exciting and boring, tragic and absurd -- make up a life. Not to have lived to the fullest is the saddest, most irresponsible life I can think of." --- from The Bag Lady Papers
When Gail Harris was assigned by the U.S. Navy to a combat intelligence job in 1973, she became the first African American female to hold such a position. Her 28-year career included hands on leadership in the intelligence community during every major conflict from the Cold War to Desert Storm to Kosovo, and most recently at the forefront of one of the Department of Defense's newest challenges: Cyber Warfare. At her retirement, she was the highest ranking African American female in the Navy. A Woman's War: The Professional and Personal Journey of the Navy's First African American Female Intelligence Officer is an inspirational memoir that follows Gail Harris's career as a naval intelligence officer, sharing her unique experience and perspective as she completed the complex task of providing intelligence support to military operations while also battling the status quo, office bullies, and politics. This book also looks at the way intelligence is used and misused in these perilous times.
From the pen of Sir Terry Pratchett, beloved and bestselling author of the Discworld fantasy series, comes time-travel adventure that mixes outrageous humor and nail-biting suspense! Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This has never been more true than when he finds himself in his hometown on May 21, 1941, over forty years before his birth! An accidental time traveler, Johnny knows his history. He knows England is at war, and he knows that on this day German bombs will fall on the town. It happened. It's history. And as Johnny and his friends quickly discover, tampering with history can have unpredictable—and drastic—effects on the future. But letting history take its course means letting people die. What if Johnny warns someone and changes history? What will happen to the future? If Johnny uses his knowledge to save innocent lives by being in the right place at the right time, is he doing the right thing? Read more of Johnny Maxwell's adventures in Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead!
In a nightmarish, post-holocaust world, an ancient evil roams a devastated America, gathering the forces of human greed and madness, searching for a child named Swan who possesses the gift of life.
Recounts the author's experiences as a young woman caring for wounded Union soldiers in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War and the impact that these experiences had on her development as an author.
In 1942, with a black-market chicken tucked under his arm by his mother, Leo Marks left his father's famous bookshop, 84 Charing Cross Road, and went off to fight the war. He was twenty-two. Soon recognized as a cryptographer of genius, he became head of communications at the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where he revolutionized the codemaking techniques of the Allies and trained some of the most famous agents dropped into occupied Europe. As a top codemaker, Marks had a unique perspective on one of the most fascinating and, until now, little-known aspects of the Second World War. This stunning memoir, often funny, always gripping and acutely sensitive to the human cost of each operation, provides a unique inside picture of the extraordinary SOE organization at work and reveals for the first time many unknown truths about the conduct of the war. SOE was created in July 1940 with a mandate from Winston Churchill to "set Europe ablaze." Its main function was to infiltrate agents into enemy-occupied territory to perform acts of sabotage and form secret armies in preparation for D-Day. Marks's ingenious codemaking innovation was to devise and implement a system of random numeric codes printed on silk. Camouflaged as handkerchiefs, underwear, or coat linings, these codes could be destroyed message by message, and therefore could not possibly be remembered by the agents, even under torture. Between Silk and Cyanide chronicles Marks's obsessive quest to improve the security of agents' codes and how this crusade led to his involvement in some of the war's most dramatic and secret operations. Among the astonishing revelations is his account of the code war between SOE and the Germans in Holland. He also reveals for the first time how SOE fooled the Germans into thinking that a secret army was operating in the Fatherland itself, and how and why he broke the code that General de Gaulle insisted be available only to the Free French. By the end of this incredible tale, truly one of the last great World War II memoirs, it is clear why General Eisenhower credited the SOE, particularly its communications department, with shortening the war by three months. From the difficulties of safeguarding the messages that led to the destruction of the atomic weapons plant at Rjukan in Norway to the surveillance of Hitler's long-range missile base at Peenemünde to the true extent of Nazi infiltration of Allied agents, Between Silk and Cyanide sheds light on one of the least-known but most dramatic aspects of the war. Writing with the narrative flair and vivid characterization of his famous screenplays, Marks gives free rein to his keen sense of the absurd and wry wit without ever losing touch with the very human side of the story. His close relationship with "the White Rabbit" and Violette Szabo -- two of the greatest British agents of the war -- and his accounts of the many others he dealt with result in a thrilling and poignant memoir that celebrates individual courage and endeavor, without losing sight of the human cost and horror of war.
North and South, black and white - the story of the War Between the States is embedded in the soul of every American. In her second book on quilts and the Civil War, Barbara Brackman introduces 9 women who lived during those turbulent times, matching each woman to a quilt that she might have made herself. 9 projects adapted from period quilts, with patterns and instructions. Excellent reference book for Civil War re-enactors; offers creative activities related to each woman’s story. Fascinating information about 9 real-life American women and their experiences during the Civil War, from abolitionist speaker Lucy Stone to freed slave Susie Taylor King to Confederate spy Belle Edmondson. Make a reproduction quilt and forge a personal link to the women of the Civil War!
In 1939 the lives of five women are about to collide in the sleepy little village of Crowmarsh Priors.Evangeline has eloped from New Orleans with a naval captain, Alice is resigned to life as the parish spinster, Elsie is evacuated from the East End to be a maid for Lady Marchmont, Tanni has fled from Vienna with her newborn son, and high-spirited Frances is to see out the war with her godmother. Together these five women face hardship, passion and danger, and form a bond that sees them through their darkest hours, and lasts for the rest of their lives.
