An alien fantasy brought to life... It should have been a simple volunteer job. Keep the events for the Romancing the Capital convention running smooth. But from the moment Brigitte lays eyes on the male model dipped in purple, hired for the galactic party, she is thrown into a tizzy—mostly because of his stolen kiss. Imagine her shock once she realizes he’s not an actor. This purple alien is for real! And Phyr didn’t come to RTC alone. He brought a bunch of his mercenary friends to help him abduct all the single ladies. These readers are about to go on a galactic adventure wilder than anything they’ve ever read in a book—and hotter than anything they could have imagined.
Matt is missing. Bonnie's brother left his classroom to use thebathroom —and disappeared. A police dog traces his scent to the curb, where he apparently got into a vehicle. But why would Matt go anywhere with a stranger? Overwhelmed with fear, Bonnie discovers that her dog is gone, too. Was Pookie used as a lure for Matt? Bonnie makes one big mistake in her attempt to find her brother. In a chilling climax on a Washington State ferry, Bonnie and Matt must outsmart their abductor or pay with their lives.
When Mary Bennett's five-year-old son Justin is kidnapped, suspicion falls on her brother Michael, a former pre-school teacher. To rescue the boy and clear his name, Michael's greatest hope lies in an uneasy alliance with African-American policewoman Gloria Towson, who believes that her supervisor, Louis D'Amecourt, is involved in the crime. As the primary suspect, Michael might not be as innocent as he claims. He and D'Amecourt share a troubling secret. And five years ago, Michael's first nephew disappeared, under remarkably similar circumstances.
When Luke and Mandy start experiencing strange hallucinations and blackouts, they know something is seriously, out-of-this-world wrong Luke Ingram is on his way home one evening when the sky goes black and seems to swallow him whole—but four hours later he wakes up in his own room with no idea how he got there. And Luke isn’t the only one experiencing these strange occurrences. The last thing Mandy Durgin remembers before waking up on her front porch is falling asleep in her bed hours before. When their creepy classmate Quentin starts following them around and harassing them, Luke and Mandy realize Quentin may know more about their lost time than he’s letting on. They know something isn’t right, but what could possibly have caused them to black out at the same time? And why are they having the same terrifying hallucinations about cold operating tables and large, bug-like eyes? Mandy knows there has to be a rational explanation, but Luke isn’t so sure. Those faces in his visions were so . . . alien. Still, the thought of alien abductions is absurd. But when Luke and Mandy black out again the next night, Luke is ready to consider the possibility that their troubles might have an extraterrestrial cause.
A novel defense of abduction, one of the main forms of nondeductive reasoning. With this book, Igor Douven offers the first comprehensive defense of abduction, a form of nondeductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, which is guided by explanatory considerations, has been under normative pressure since the advent of Bayesian approaches to rationality. Douven argues that, although it deviates from Bayesian tenets, abduction is nonetheless rational. Drawing on scientific results, in particular those from reasoning research, and using computer simulations, Douven addresses the main critiques of abduction. He shows that versions of abduction can perform better than the currently popular Bayesian approaches—and can even do the sort of heavy lifting that philosophers have hoped it would do. Douven examines abduction in detail, comparing it to other modes of inference, explaining its historical roots, discussing various definitions of abduction given in the philosophical literature, and addressing the problem of underdetermination. He looks at reasoning research that investigates how judgments of explanation quality affect people’s beliefs and especially their changes of belief. He considers the two main objections to abduction, the dynamic Dutch book argument, and the inaccuracy-minimization argument, and then gives abduction a positive grounding, using agent-based models to show the superiority of abduction in some contexts. Finally, he puts abduction to work in a well-known underdetermination argument, the argument for skepticism regarding the external world.
According to the US Department of Justice, more than 250,000 children are abducted each year. This book explains the types of kidnappings, details government and law enforcement efforts to prevent and solve them, and explores the many practices and programs, such as the AMBER Alert, to help protect children.
In Abducted by Circumstance, David Madden offers his readers a unique experience simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. Carol Seaborg makes a risky visit in zero weather to a lighthouse near her house in The Thousand Islands of New York on the Canadian border. A self-confident, attractive woman of about 55 suddenly appears on the observation deck looking out over frozen Lake Ontario. Carol admires the woman as her ideal. Suddenly, the woman disappears, apparently abducted by a serial rapist and killer, stimulating in Carol an immediate empathy that, enhanced by the power of her imagination, is so great as to make her unique. Carol projects her own emotions, imagination, and intellect into Glenda's experience. To render that empathy and imagination, Madden channels everything that the people around her say and do through Carol's perceptions so intimately that he shifts frequently and without transition into her thoughts, which focus mostly on the abducted woman, whose name newscasters reveal is Glenda Hamilton. As Carol imagines Glenda gradually coping with her abductor, she speaks directly, sometimes out loud, to her, encouraging her, advising her, expressing fear for her. If Carol's external experiences are passive almost to paralysis, her memories reveal that her life has been full of more venturesome relationships and events (she once rode across Greece alone on a bicycle) than most wives and mothers in their late thirties have. Carol's emotions and imagination are highly charged and exquisitely presented. The circumstances and relationships of her past and present predispose Carol to empathize with Glenda. Carol's own life among a crude, remote second husband, a somewhat estranged adolescent son, a bright five-year-old daughter, a father who is a rather cold philosophy teacher, and the strong spiritual presence of her mother who committed suicide, is simple and routine. The events involving Glenda's disappearance take place during the week before Carol's second surgery for breast cancer. Gradually, as she takes late night drives with her little girl, visits her ex-boyfriend's father in a nursing home, drives by her ex-lover's house and business, and visits the campus where her father is a prominent teacher, the reader realizes, some pages before Carol herself does, that she has been abducted by the circumstances of her life. Although it is grounded in the realistic detail of everyday life, Abducted by Circumstance is unique in conception, style, and characterization. Madden immerses the reader in an extraordinarily rich and unforgettable psychological experience. Thoroughly absorbing from start to finish--Abducted by Circumstance explores Carol's troubled psyche with the rare precision and insight that have long distinguished David Madden's fiction.
Thirteen-year-old Bonnie has a feeling of foreboding on the very day that her six-year-old brother Matt and their dog Pookie are abducted, and she becomes involved in a major search effort as well as a frightening adventure.
A Harvard psychiatrist, the author of A Prince of Our Disorder, presents accounts of alien abduction taken from the more than sixty cases he has investigated and examines the implications for our identity as a species. These mesmerizing and thought-provoking stories of alien encounters from a Harvard professor take you through actual case studies of people from all walks of life and ages who have had challenging, sometimes disturbing, and in every case, life changing experiences of alien abduction. “John Mack explores evidence of nonhuman intelligence like an attorney preparing for the ‘trial of the century’—interviewing witnesses, examining physical evidence, consulting with experts in related fields, constantly questioning his own assumptions…As a story of one man’s determination to bear witness to cosmic mysteries with extraordinary implications for the human future, Abduction is bound to become a modern classic” (Keith Thompson, author of Angels and Aliens)
