Town Government

This is the story of a local government manager who got hired by a small mountain town in the Colorado Rocky Mountains in his first city manager job. The job got complicated from the first day and developed into more and more complexity.

"Simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling." ―The New Republic A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take...

Seeking to understand the recent deaths and disappearances in their town, a disgraced homicide detective and a group of grieving high schoolers unwittingly join forces. But what this ragtag bunch of answer-seekers find will not only force them into a fight to save themselves and their town, but all of humanity as we know it... Welcome to Cedar Mills. PRAISE FOR CEDAR MILLS... “Plunges right into the action and never lets up!” Readers' Favorite "Cedar Mills is the kind of horror novel that stays with you..." Independent Book Review "Great action, a scary beast, and a beating heart in the...

Eamonn McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in a Northern Irish ghetto - first published in 1974 - quickly became a classic account of the feelings generated by British rule. The author was at the center of events in Derry which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state. This book describes the people involved in the war and gives an account of the springs of the "Catholic" opposition.

In the idyllic town of Autumn Creek, the annual Harvest Festival is a celebration of life. But as the leaves turn gold, a secret as old as the mountains awakens. Two people have vanished, and a prize steer has been ritualistically slaughtered, its entrails arranged in a perfect, horrifying spiral . The idyllic mask is slipping, and the town’s folklore is about to become its eulogy. They sent a weapon to handle it. Rebuilt from the wreckage of a past massacre, Commander Quinn Mallory is more monster than woman, her body a fusion of scarred flesh and cutting-edge prosthetics . She and her ...

Silent Vector: Rise of the Resistance The virus doesn’t just kill. It recruits. It didn't start with mindless hordes. It started with a quiet reprogramming of the people we trust most. Police chiefs, hospital directors, and government officials—infected and operating with a singular, chilling purpose: to spread the vector before anyone realized the war had already been lost. For five days, the infected look like us. They speak like us. They lead us. Then, the "intellectual phase" ends, and the mindless hunger begins. Sarah Miller saw the pattern when her own supervisor turned. Now, ...

One of the nation's most acclaimed journalists, the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, presents a blistering, penetrating, controversial--and often hysterical--look at Washington's incestuous "media industrial complex."...

Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first nonfiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment that occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.

Dean Mercer was the kind of detective prosecutors asked for by name. At the Woodland Police Department, his cases were clean, his testimony held, and his reputation for excellence reached from courtroom to command. So when the LAPD recruits him into an elite lateral detective role handling the city's most sensitive investigations, it feels like the reward he's earned. Bigger cases. More money. More prestige. The job of a lifetime. Then a woman vanishes from one of LA's most powerful political families. A witness dies under convenient circumstances. A report changes after Dean signs it. And ...

They weren't supposed to exist. In the shadows of Area 51's clandestine labs, the unthinkable has been unleashed: creatures engineered to decimate armies now roam free. Driven by a scientist's ambition, these beasts defy the bounds of nature, but at what cost? When ethical lines blur into oblivion, one scientist's desperate flight for survival awakens the beasts' taste for freedom. As they veer toward Alamo, Nevada, carving a swathe of carnage, the military scrambles to contain an error too fatal to admit. Created to be unstoppable on the battlefield, these creatures are unbound by human ...

In the small town of Ashbrook, the last night of October is sacred. But when a mysterious government alert freezes the clock at 11:59 PM, the town is plunged into a single, repeating, impossible moment. The decorations are still up, but the people are vanishing, leaving only empty costumes behind—perfect, three-dimensional silhouettes of ash. Sheriff Keener and historian Ellen Rourke discover the town isn't just haunted. It’s contained. Trapped in a terrifying temporal sink, they are at the mercy of an ancient entity that has come to 'collect' on a forgotten offering. As the military ...

Hello, Shadowlands takes a deep plunge into crime rings both large and small. It also examines how China’s rise and America’s decline are creating new opportunities for transnational syndicates to thrive. Focusing on human stories on both sides of this crime wave, the acclaimed Bangkok-based broadcaster and journalist Patrick Winn intimately profiles the men and women of the region who are forced to make agonizing choices in the absence of law.

When a “fictional” alien novel starts lining up a little too well with real life, a small TV crew discovers the truth might be aimed straight at them. What’s supposed to be an easy investigation turns into something else entirely: the network sends a charming, fast‑talking host, a producer held together with spreadsheets, stubbornness, and too much coffee, a haunted cameraman who’s seen black‑ops cleanup up close, and a makeup artist who keeps slipping out of frame at exactly the wrong moments. Their job is simple: visit the book’s locations, crack a few jokes, and prove the ...

Part biography, part history, part love story, A Small Town Rises chronicles the lives of two civil rights activists who met in the tiny cotton town of Shaw at the tail end of the Mississippi Summer Project, the voting-rights campaign known as Freedom Summer. Shaw was, like countless segregated towns across the South, a pressure cooker of violent white resistance to the growing civil rights movement. The two young freedom fighters joined forces in 1964 with local Black activist Andrew Hawkins.

In these thrilling stories, Mitchum investigates three dangerous cases -- and learns that chasing the truth means going to the point of no return. Hidden: After being rejected from the Navy SEALs, Mitchum becomes his small town's unofficial private eye. But his investigation skills are put to...

Nobody likes the I.R.S.... But that is Jesse’s job... Could he survive the nightmare coming his way? It wasn’t the life he imagined growing up. He had a wife, but his marriage was in trouble; a career, but it was eating him alive; and enemies? Yes, he had them, too... and they were powerful. Jesse thought if he worked hard and kept his head down, the troubles from his past wouldn’t find him. He was wrong. Los Osos, California, was idyllic in many ways. Jesse and Amber’s love seemed to be taken from the pages of a small-town romance novel, but that was before MacElveign set his ...

A mage on the run. A doctor with a conscience. A city on the brink. Magic is outlawed. Robots enforce the law with deadly precision. In Cairnisle, trust is a risk only the rich can afford. Fourteen-year-old Fia scrapes by in the slums of Dirt Town with a knife in her boot and a secret in her blood: she’s an illegal mage. When a desperate escape lands her in the path of Aldrich Durante—a privileged young doctor from the gleaming streets above—their collision sparks a truth neither can ignore. Aldrich was raised to fear magic. But the girl he saves isn’t a monster—she’s a mirror ...

His drug- and alcohol-fueled antics made world headlines and engulfed a city in unprecedented controversy. Toronto mayor Rob Ford's personal and political troubles have occupied center stage in North America's fourth-largest city since news broke that drug dealers were selling a videotape of Ford appearing to smoke crack cocaine. Reporter Robyn Doolittle was one of three journalists to view the video and report on its contents in May 2013.

Following the 2016 election, writer Heather Lende was one of thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines isn't the sleepy town that it appears to be: from a bitter debate about the expansion of the fishing boat harbor to the matter of how to stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street we witness the nitty-gritty of passing legislation and how the polarizing national politics of our era play out in one small town.

THE BORROWED A Novel by Sylvester Murray When the sky over Strawberry, North Carolina bends in a way no sky should, two ordinary teenagers become the unwilling hosts of something extraordinary—something alive, ancient, and searching. Peter Hale has always felt invisible. Nance Carter has always felt too seen. Neither of them is prepared when a cosmic spark chooses them—splitting itself between their bodies, rewriting their biology, and binding their fates together. At first, the changes are small. A glow beneath the skin. A voice that isn’t theirs. A pull toward something buried deep ...