A sweet and compelling tale about the love and friendship between two sweet outcasts and how they found each other. Dog and Raccoon share their deepest secrets in an environment of love and understanding. Dog is a Pit Bull everyone calls Murder Dog, and also tells Raccoon that people think Dog is a boy when really Dog is a girl. Raccoon tells Dog everyone calls him Trash Panda because they think he is disgusting because he likes to dig in the trash.
When the Dogs are Away, the Trash Pandas Play!Things are always odd and strange in Metamora, but when the proprietor of the curiosity shop, Odd and Strange Metamora, hosts a spring carnival showing off his collection of oddities, the day goes right in the garbage-or rather, out of the garbage when a raccoon overturns a trash can in the middle of town scattering human bones around the park. When it's discovered that the remains date back over a century, rumors start to run as rampant as the pack of furry bandits taking over the town at night. Cameron Cripps Hayman thought she'd have a quiet week with her canine crew away at dog training, but her relaxation is short lived when another possible murder in town needs solving. With her team, the Metamora Action Agency, on the case, they'll piece the mystery together bone-by-bone and lead-by-lead, and maybe even find a way to get rid of the trash pandas in the process!
Hope Carpenter opens up about her personal struggles that nearly destroyed her family, her church, and her ministry, but then God did something miraculous—out of her brokenness, He made something beautiful. As co-pastor of one of the nation's largest megachurches, Hope Carpenter had perfected the roles of supportive wife, good mother, devoted worship leader, and dutiful homemaker. But inside, she was secretly ashamed, sad, and afraid. She didn't know who she was, and she didn't know how to ask for help without bringing down the whole façade. A series of bad choices led to multiple affairs; her husband kicked her out and announced from the pulpit of their church that their marriage was over. Hope was sure her life was done. But in her lowest moments, something beautiful happened. God met her there, and, with a lot of hard work, time, and mountains of therapy, she started to understand the pain that had caused her to act out. She and her family faced their brokenness together, and in powerful acts of forgiveness only God could have arranged, they all found real breakthrough and healing. Ron and Hope rebuilt their marriage and their family, and their ministry thrives today. In The Most Beautiful Disaster, Hope helps readers understand the lasting impact of childhood trauma and gives readers practical steps to uncovering the root of pain in their own lives. She shows how small decisions can lead to big changes, and helps readers find healing and wholeness in Scripture and prayer. Ultimately, readers will be led to hope, reconciliation, and true freedom.
My name is Riley Whittle and my story is a dark one. A story of betrayal, love, and choice. I will tell you this story. The story of how my life came to be, starting with the day when one mistake would change my life forever. And it all starts with my father, a promise, me, a Raven, and a curse, the curse of the moon. Blood will be shed, innocent people will be harmed, and I will be left with experiences that will never leave my mind. For people used to, and still do, turn without touching me. Especially the way my mother died. It made my father have to choose between me and the village, and of course… he chose them. I made an exception that I wouldn’t have any friends, but after the past few months of this stuff, I did have them. Ones I could trust, ones that wouldn’t turn their backs on me. Or would they?
“Methamphetamine was a huge part of this case . . . It was a horrible murder driven by drugs.” — Prosecutor Cal Rerucha, who convicted Matthew Shepard's killers On the night of October 6, 1998, twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard left a bar with two alleged “strangers,” Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Eighteen hours later, Matthew was found tied to a log fence on the outskirts of town, unconscious and barely alive. Overnight, a politically expedient myth took the place of important facts. By the time Matthew died a few days later, his name was synonymous with anti-gay hate. The Book of Matt, first published in 2013, demonstrated that the truth was in fact far more complicated – and daunting. Stephen Jimenez’s account revealed primary documents that had been under seal, and gave voice to many with firsthand knowledge of the case who had not been heard from, including members of law enforcement. In his Introduction to this updated edition, journalist Andrew Sullivan writes: “No one wanted Steve Jimenez to report this story, let alone go back and back to Laramie, Wyoming, asking awkward questions, puzzling over strange discrepancies, re-interviewing sources, seeking a deeper, more complex truth about the ghastly killing than America, it turned out, was prepared to hear. It was worse than that, actually. Not only did no one want to hear more about it, but many were incensed that the case was being re-examined at all.” As a gay man Jimenez felt an added moral imperative to tell the story of Matthew’s murder honestly, and his reporting has been thoroughly corroborated. “I urge you to read [The Book of Matt] carefully and skeptically,” Sullivan writes, “and to see better how life rarely fits into the neat boxes we want it to inhabit. That Matthew Shepard was a meth dealer and meth user says nothing that bad about him, and in no way mitigates the hideous brutality of the crime that killed him; instead it shows how vulnerable so many are to the drug’s escapist lure and its astonishing capacity to heighten sexual pleasure so that it’s the only thing you want to live for. Shepard was a victim twice over: of meth and of a fellow meth user.”
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The NBA according to The Sports Guy—now updated with fresh takes on LeBron, the Celtics, and more! Foreword by Malcom Gladwell • “The work of a true fan . . . it might just represent the next phase of sports commentary.”—The Atlantic Bill Simmons, the wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining basketball addict known to millions as ESPN’s The Sports Guy, has written the definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA. From the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time, Simmons opens—and then closes, once and for all—every major pro basketball debate. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball. Comprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler.
When I Was Ten is the stay-up-all-night thriller by acclaimed crime author Fiona Cummins. ‘Grips like a vice’ – Val McDermid ‘Absorbing, tense and beautifully paced’ - Daily Mail Twenty-one years ago, Dr Richard Carter and his wife Pamela were killed in what has become the most infamous double murder of the modern age. Their ten year-old daughter – nicknamed the Angel of Death – spent eight years in a children’s secure unit and is living quietly under an assumed name with a family of her own. Now, on the anniversary of the trial, a documentary team has tracked down her older sister, compelling her to break two decades of silence. Her explosive interview sparks national headlines and journalist Brinley Booth, a childhood friend of the Carter sisters, is tasked with covering the news story. For the first time, the three women are forced to confront what really happened that night – with devastating consequences for them all. ‘I finished it with my heart in my mouth. Highly recommended’ – Louise Candlish ‘Dark, creepy and ultimately compassionate . . . a chilling look at the consequences of a childhood gone wrong’ – JP Delaney ‘Utterly compelling; a true just-one-more-chapter thriller’ – Clare Mackintosh ‘Pacy, dark and surprises to the bitter end. Loved it’ – Fiona Barton
A collection of newspaper stories by award-winning Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard—including “Dirty John,” the basis for the hit podcast and the upcoming Bravo scripted series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. Since its release in fall 2017, the “Dirty John” podcast—about a conman who terrorizes a Southern California family—has been downloaded more than 20 million times, and will soon premiere as a scripted drama on Bravo starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. The story, which also ran as a print series in the Los Angeles Times, wasn’t unfamiliar terrain to its writer, Christopher Goffard. Over two decades at newspapers from Florida to California, Goffard has reported probingly on the shadowy, unseen corners of society. This book gathers together for the first time “Dirty John” and the rest of his very best work. “The $40 Lawyer” provides an inside account of a young public defender’s rookie year in the legal trenches. “Framed” offers an unblinking chronicle of suburban mayhem (and is currently being developed by Netflix as a film starring Julia Roberts). A man wrongly imprisoned for rape, train-riding runaways in love, a Syrian mother forced to leave her children in order to save them, a boy who grows up to become a cop as a way of honoring his murdered sister, another boy who struggles with the knowledge that his father is on death row: these stories reveal the complexities of human nature, showing people at both their most courageous and their most flawed. Goffard shared in the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011 and has twice been a Pulitzer finalist for feature writing. This collection—a must-read for fans of both true-crime and first-rate narrative nonfiction—underscores his reputation as one of today’s most original journalistic voices.
Stalker Kai always knew Death walked in his shadow. But when his search for his mentor's estranged brother brings Death to his door, Kai discovers a fierce need to live life to the fullest.
People Magazine Book of the Week A Best Book of the Year at Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, The Chicago Review of Books, Minnesota Public Radio, and more An Indies Introduce and Indie Next Pick Fans of Maria Semple's Where'd You Go Bernadette and and Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang will delight in Annie Hartnett's debut, a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother. Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know—like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother's silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother's death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss.
