Inspector Agnes Lüthi, a Swiss-American police officer in Lausanne, Switzerland, has just transferred to the Violent Crimes unit from Financial Crimes to try to shed all reminders of her old life following her husband's death. Now, on the eve of the worst blizzard Lausanne has seen in centuries, Agnes has been called to investigate her very first homicide case. On the lawn of the grand Château Vallotton, at the edge of Lac Léman, a young woman has been found stabbed to death. The woman, an appraiser for a London auction house, had been taking inventory at the château, a medieval fortress dripping in priceless works of art and historical treasures.Agnes finds it difficult to draw answers out of anyone—the tight-lipped Swiss family living in the château, the servants who have been loyal to the family for generations, the aging WWII survivor who lives in the neighboring mansion, even the American history student studying at the Vallotton château's library. As the...

Charlie Noble, former coast-guard-officer-turned-marine-PI, is back. This time, he is hot on the trail of a human trafficking scheme that begins in Mexico...and ends in murder.Still reeling from the untimely death of his wife, Charlie begins to warm to the idea of a second chance at true love with new girlfriend Kate Sullivan. These plans are quickly docked when boating friends Marvin and Angela Baynes come to him with a horrifying discovery—the body of an unidentified young woman impaled on the flukes of their boat anchor. The Bayneses themselves lost a child years ago. No stranger to loss, Charlie finds it impossible not to help them—even though it could mean putting his new romance in jeopardy.Charlie enlists a friend, Raven, a Native American salvage diver. Together, the pair plunge beneath the waters of Puget Sound to seek out any clues about the identity of the dead woman and how she wound up there. But they find more bodies instead—all young, all female,...

Erotica/Romance. 11176 words long. First published in 2008, 2008

When Fran Varady is approached by Private Investigator Clarence Duke, she mistrusts him on instinct. But she can't ignore what he has to tell her. Her mother, Eva, who walked out on Fran when she was only seven years old, has hired Clarence to find her daughter. And for good reason. Eva is dying. So Fran is reunited with the mother she hasn't seen for fifteen years, and is soon to lose again. But the biggest bombshell of all is still to come...  

From the New York Times & USA Today bestselling author, Tamara Rose Blodgett New adult fiction: recommended ages 17+ for sexual situations, profanity and violence. The BLOOD Series is a paranormal werewolf/vampire romance with supernatural humans who possess paranormal powers. Books one and two are included in this bundle.

In elegant, sensual prose, Michael Crummey crafts a haunting tale set in Newfoundland at the turn of the 19th century. A richly imagined story about love, loss and the heartbreaking compromises—both personal and political—that undermine lives, River Thieves is a masterful debut novel. Published in Canada and the United States, it joins a wave of classic literature from eastern Canada, including the works of Alistair MacLeod, Wayne Johnston and David Adams Richards, while resonating at times with the spirit of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. An enthralling story of passion and suspense, River Thieves captures both the vast sweep of history and the intimate lives of a deeply emotional and complex cast of characters caught in its wake.Amazon.com Review2002 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award Shortlist: In River Thieves, his first novel, poet and short-story writer Michael Crummey reaches far into Newfoundland's past to tell one of the colony's most tragic stories: the extermination of the Beothuk people. Through the lives and reminiscences of some of the colony's most prominent European residents--David Buchan, a naval explorer and idealist who attempts to bring the isolated Beothuks into productive contact with the British Empire; John Peyton Jr., the obedient son of a relentlessly patriarchal local trader; Cassie Jure, John Peyton Sr.'s literate, aloof housekeeper; and Joseph Reilly, a transported Irish thief and a genuinely decent trapper--Crummey recounts a halfhearted attempt, foiled by the colony's petty tensions, to save the Beothuks.River Thieves is an oddly meandering novel, and this is its greatest appeal. Rather than offering a grisly, guilt-ridden adventure story that rushes from its suitably portentous beginning to its inevitably sombre end, Crummey works with a meandering sort of history, one that has to go over the same events a few times before they begin to give up their secrets, temporarily leaving his readers as disoriented as his benighted characters. The book's real heart--the Beothuks--never becomes fully articulate; the Beothuks remain buried on the shore, or encamped among the snows of Red Indian Lake. Anyone who wants this kind of story to come equipped with heroes and, perhaps, even answers, should turn to Rudy Wiebe, but Crummey's labyrinthine approach has its own distinct appeal. --Jack IllingworthFrom Publishers WeeklyTrudging across the same harsh, icy fictional terrain that's fired the imagination of such writers as William Vollman, Andrea Barrett and Wayne Johnston, Crummey, an award-winning poet (Arguments with Gravity), has produced a poetic but ponderous tale of the colonization of Newfoundland and the last days of its Beothuk Indians. As the novel opens in 1810, grim family patriarch and homesteader John Senior (his face looks "hard enough to stop an axe") has kept up a hostile standoff with the Beothuk for years. But John Senior's blood feud with the Indians doesn't sit well with his idealistic son, John, with his spirited housekeeper, Cassie, or with David Buchan, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who organizes a peacekeeping expedition to the Indian territories. When the mission goes awry and two soldiers are left headless in the snow, John Senior and the settlers set out to exact their revenge on the natives. Fitting for a book about history and the mapping of a lost world, Crummey's story is shaped by the vagaries of memory, perpetually circling back on itself to fill in narrative and historical details. And as is sometimes typical of a first novel by a seasoned poet, Crummey's story struggles to maintain momentum, dilating at length on the meaning and limitations of language. Each Beothuk word that survives, he writes, "has the heft of a museum artifact." The same might be said of Crummey's prose ("Fat dripped into the fire, the smell of it darkening the air like a bruise") and his characters' stilted behavior, which gives rise to a panorama of Newfoundland history and mythology as carefully composed but as lifeless as a dusty museum diorama.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Workmen constructing a new section of the London underground at London Bridge during the Second World War uncover something of unknown origins in an underground cavity, and leading scientists and archeologists are brought in, and discover something buried away deeper below, hundreds of feet down, thousands of years old, and a blurred image of it is detected, and they grasp its colossal size!