A Collection of Suspense by Joan Hall Hovey Includes 5 short stories and a novella. “Joan Hall Hovey knows suspense. She keeps it simmering in every scene she writes and knows just the right moments to turn up the heat. She also knows character creating richly layered people to populate her stories, sometimes with no more than a single sentence stocked with perfectly chosen description words or phrases... terrific suspense ..v. James Hankins, author of Brothers and Bones..." “Taut plotting, great characters, and chilling suspense. Abook you can’t put down, exhibits a master’s touch. Alfred Hitchcock would be smiling. - Book Pleasures Review, Steve Moore
'A slow-burning thriller that builds to a devastating dénouement.' Mail on Sunday If you go, there's no coming back. Dr Georgia Healey can't grieve. Her nineteen-year-old daughter went for a walk two years ago and vanished. The police never found Stephanie's body. The case has gone stale, but Georgia can't let it go. She knows Stephanie's out there, somewhere. On the anniversary of Stephanie's disappearance, Georgia's ready to re-interrogate university students, lecturers, Steph's past boyfriends, everyone. She treads the exact path where Stephanie vanished. Yet the shocking truth is even more than she can handle. When you seek the lost, be prepared for what you find . . . Reviews for P.R. Black: 'A tense thriller that kept me reading way past bedtime then kept me awake.' Kerry Watts 'It's edge-of-the-seat stuff... A cracker.' Bookbag 'Copious amounts of suspense.' Novel Kicks
On a long dark road in deep East Texas, James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck one summer night in 1998. The brutal modern-day lynching stunned people across America and left everyone at a loss to explain how such a heinous crime could possibly happen in our more racially enlightened times. Many eventually found an answer in the fact that two of the three men convicted of the murder had ties to the white supremacist Confederate Knights of America. In the ex-convict ringleader, Bill King, whose body was covered in racist and satanic tattoos, people saw the ultimate monster, someone so inhuman that his crime could be easily explained as the act of a racist psychopath. Few, if any, asked or cared what long dark road of life experiences had turned Bill King into someone capable of committing such a crime. In this gripping account of the murder and its aftermath, Ricardo Ainslie builds an unprecedented psychological profile of Bill King that provides the fullest possible explanation of how a man who was not raised in a racist family, who had African American friends in childhood, could end up on death row for viciously killing a black man. Ainslie draws on exclusive in-prison interviews with King, as well as with Shawn Berry (another of the perpetrators), King's father, Jasper residents, and law enforcement and judicial officials, to lay bare the psychological and social forces—as well as mere chance—that converged in a murder on that June night. Ainslie delves into the whole of King's life to discover how his unstable family relationships and emotional vulnerability made him especially susceptible to the white supremacist ideology he adopted while in jail for lesser crimes. With its depth of insight, Long Dark Road not only answers the question of why such a racially motivated murder happened in our time, but it also offers a frightening, cautionary tale of the urgent need to intervene in troubled young lives and to reform our violent, racist-breeding prisons. As Ainslie chillingly concludes, far from being an inhuman monster whom we can simply dismiss, "Bill King may be more like the rest of us than we care to believe."
EOS - The Long, Dark Road of Horse & Human Lori woke with the strange sensation of floating. She tried to wake up, taking in the peculiar translucent-ivory moonlight. It stirred about the bedroom, restless, haunted and haunting. A thrum pulsed through the bed-this sound! The cayuse, the wild horses, running over the ridge came close to the ranch. That night changed Lori's life forever.... EOS - an enchanting story caught between reality and the supernatural, exploring the long, long history of horse and human unlike any you've ever read! EOS - The Long, Dark Road of Horse & Human – take a journey into a realm of romance and enchantment.
From one of world literature’s most courageous voices, a novel about the human cost of China’s one-child policy through the lens of one rural family on the run from its reach Far away from the Chinese economic miracle, from the bright lights of Beijing and Shanghai, is a vast rural hinterland, where life goes on much as it has for generations, with one extraordinary difference: “normal” parents are permitted by the state to have only a single child. The Dark Road is the story of one such “normal” family—Meili, a young peasant woman; her husband, Kongzi, a village schoolteacher; and their daughter, Nannan. Kongzi is, according to family myth, a direct lineal descendant of Confucius, and he is haunted by the imperative to carry on the family name by having a son. And so Meili becomes pregnant again without state permission, and when local family planning officials launch a new wave of crackdowns, the family makes the radical decision to leave its village and set out on a small, rickety houseboat down the Yangtze River. Theirs is a dark road, and tragedy awaits them, and horror, but also the fierce beauty born of courageous resistance to injustice and inhumanity. The Dark Road is a haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty. While Ma Jian wrote The Dark Road, he traveled through the rural backwaters of southwestern China to see how the state enforced the one-child policy far from the outside world’s prying eyes. He met local women who had been seized from their homes and forced to undergo abortions or sterilization in the policy’s name; and on the Yangtze River, he lived among fugitive couples who had gone on the run so they could have more children, that most fundamental of human rights. Like all of Ma Jian’s novels, The Dark Road is also a celebration of the life force, of the often comically stubborn resilience of man’s most basic instincts.
A weary coach struggles across a merciless landscape, fighting the relentless bitterness of the wind. It is a land of endless grey bogs, of mud-sucked hills, of twisted and impenetrable forest. A land of sin. A land of death. This is where Odalric and Clithanus and the Graue Blutengel, the Grey Leech, hold sway. Battered and wind-whipped and coated in dust, the men of God inside the laboring coach are every bit as grim as the country that seeks to engulf them. They endure. They must. Shadowed at all times by the Other Wolves, haunted by the Way Home, defended by purity and American Winchester rifles, their resolve is their greatest strength in the nightmare that surrounds them. For their mission is paramount, and it must not be permitted to falter. Joe Pulver's latest masterpiece is as uncomfortable as it is oneiric, a hypnagogic trek through a blasted piece of world, surrounded at all times by hatred and bitterness and evil. As claustrophobic as it is relentless, A Long, Dark, Grim Road will cling to you, and you will never escape its clutches.
Gunslinger Roland Deschain is pursued, along with Cuthbert and Alain, by the Big Coffin Hunters, and they are forced into the desert while Roland is in a coma with his consciousness held captive by Maerlyn's mystical sphere.
Detective Dirk Gently investigates after a passenger at Heathrow airport erupts into a mysterious ball of flames. Mystery, hilarity, and the fantastical are combined in this title from the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. -- HPL Readers Advisor.
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity
The critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller A Land More Kind Than Home—hailed as "a powerfully moving debut that reads as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird" (Richmond Times Dispatch)—returns with a resonant novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, set in western North Carolina, involving two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins. After their mother's unexpected death, twelve-year-old Easter and her six-year-old sister Ruby are adjusting to life in foster care when their errant father, Wade, suddenly appears. Since Wade signed away his legal rights, the only way he can get his daughters back is to steal them away in the night. Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and he quickly turns up unsettling information linking Wade to a recent armored car heist, one with a whopping $14.5 million missing. But Brady Weller isn't the only one hunting the desperate father. Robert Pruitt, a shady and mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, is also determined to find Wade and claim his due. Narrated by a trio of alternating voices, This Dark Road to Mercy is a story about the indelible power of family and the primal desire to outrun a past that refuses to let go.
