Showing results by narrator "Coleen Marlo" in All Categories

Big hats, big trucks, big oil fortunes — Texas clichés all. And while those elements do flourish throughout Texas, they alone hardly define the place. The Lone Star State is and has always been a great melting pot, home to sprawling cities, trailblazing innovators, and treasured traditions from all over, many of which become ingrained in popular culture and intertwined with the American ideal.

Public defender Ashley Montgomery is shocked when a well-known local is found in a lake at the outskirts of Brine County, dead and locked inside a large toolbox. Ashley has represented the victim and her boyfriend, Noah, for many years. The Brine County sheriff's department goes after Noah as their main suspect, but Ashley is intent on his innocence, and she injects herself into the investigation to protect him. A search of his house turns up a series of letters addressed to Erica. The letters prove that someone else was in contact with the victim before her death.

Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm.

McKenna Sloan saved Lucas Kane's life and then vanished. Lucas moved mountains trying to find her again, and finally McKenna relented - for one fleeting night. The truth is, McKenna's life is all about the dark, deception-filled world of Last Chance Rescue, and for her, there's no hope of love or Lucas. But fate, and Lucas' determination, soon change everything.

Everything changed for Laura Taylor when the South lost the Civil War. The Yankees' arrival in South Carolina drove Laura and her soldier husband, Jesse, westward to seek a new beginning. But Laura's hopes crumble when Jesse dies, and she finds herself pregnant and alone in a wild railroad camp with winter coming in fast. The only one she can turn to is Dr. Spencer Hardin.

On the morning of his 40th birthday, anthropology professor Jackson Jones contemplates his future: Should he go back to Africa, where he did his fieldwork, and live with the Mbuti, or should he marry and settle down in the Midwest, where he now teaches? On the morning of her release from prison, Sunny, who grew up in a snake-handling church in the Little Egypt region of Southern Illinois, rents a garage apartment from Jackson. They become lovers, but they're pulled in different directions.

Working for Last Chance Rescue, Cole Mathison has been to hell and back. But being responsible for the death of an innocent man is a hell like no other. Longing for redemption, Cole finds himself embroiled in the mysterious disappearance of Keeley Fairchild’s young children. Rescuing the children is his mission - but falling in love with the widow of the man he inadvertently killed was never in the plans. When Keeley’s life is threatened, Cole’s demons must take a backseat to the most important mission of his life.

Mitzy Moon finally has a chance to spend a normal, murder-free day with family. And she’s super-excited to support her legendary snowmobile racer dad as he’s honored for his place in the record books. But instead of a celebration on the podium, she finds a corpse under the snow. With a holiday wedding at her bookshop looming, it’s a terrible time to take on a new case and an orphan. Somehow, Mitzy hopes to juggle the investigation, the nuptials, her meddling Ghost-ma, and an interfering feline. But when her new guest sees something he shouldn’t, her secrets start to unravel.

Nikki James is just an ordinary, risk-taking, psychically inclined private eye until she hooks up with Michael Kelly. Now she is something more: one of the few, the chosen, the magic-wielding undercover operatives of the Damask Circle, an organization protecting humanity from a rising tide of evil.

Develop Your Assertiveness offers simple techniques that will help you become more aware of your strengths and weaknesses, so that you can learn how best to modify your behaviour in social and business interactions. Being more confident and learning how best to communicate with your colleagues will enable you to create win-win situations, thus improving your career prospects and enhancing your social life.

To be successful in the 21st century global marketplace you need many things--determination, well-articulated goals, and a bit of luck. But more than anything else, you need kindness. Kindness becomes the key business asset when you couple a caring attitude toward others with a focus on achieving your goals. Often people see business as a choice between being kind and being successful. This is a fictitious trade-off. Nice people are more successful.

On a sunny day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight-year-old Becca Burke was struck by lightning. No one believed her - not her philandering father or her drunk, love-sick mother - not even when her watch kept losing time and a spooky halo of light appeared overhead in photographs. Becca was struck again when she was sixteen. She survived, but over time she would learn that outsmarting lightning was the least of her concerns.

Cut off from the outside world by a blanket of snow, the holidays are usually a time for peace and quiet in tiny Eureka, Colorado. But this year the mountain town is in trouble. Thanks to a corrupt investor, the treasury is bankrupt, leaving residents to struggle through an especially harsh winter. Then there are those with more personal problems, like Maggie Stevens, pregnant and torn between single motherhood or drawing the father-to-be into a life he's not cut out for. And Olivia Theriot, the mayor's prodigal daughter, is harboring a secret so painful she may never be able to settle down.

In recent years, we have gained unprecedented control over choices about our health. But these choices are hard and often full of psychological traps. As a result, we’re liable to misuse medication, fall for pseudoscientific cure-alls, and undergo needless procedures. In Your Life Depends on It, Talya Miron-Shatz explores the preventable ways we make bad choices about everything from nutrition to medication, from pregnancy to end-of-life care.

Brooklyn, 1875: Bird Mallon lives on Water Street where you can see the huge towers of the bridge to Manhattan being built. Bird wants nothing more in life than to be brave enough to be a healer, like her mother, Nory, to help her sister Annie find love, and to convince her brother, Hughie, to stop fighting for money with his street gang. And of course, she wishes that a girl would move into the empty apartment upstairs so that she can have a new friend close by.

In 1977, breast cancer was still shrouded in stigma and shame. Nobody talked about early detection and mammograms. Nobody could even say the words breast and cancer together in polite company. With Nancy at her side, Suzy endured the many indignities of cancer treatment, from the grim, soul-killing waiting rooms to the mistakes of well-meaning but misinformed doctors. That's when Suzy began to ask Nancy to promise....

The FBI has never known quite what to do with Agent Bernadette Saint Clare. Shortly after she’s placed at a desk in the basement of the off-site St. Paul office, bodies begin to appear along the sandy banks of the Mississippi. Soon she’s called on to do what she does best: Use the personal effects found at a crime scene to see through a killer’s eyes.

This investigation is getting very personal. P.I. - in training Valerie LeRoy is dying to get into the field. So when a client asks her to spy on someone, the thrill of her own case is too tempting to refuse. Instead of a cheating fiance, however, Val's actually checking out P.I. Drake Morgan! Worse, she ends up working with the guy. Their differing opinions on techniques - and the instant attraction - make the sparks fly. It's almost impossible to focus on their arson investigation.

Elizabeth Holtzman has been a principled leader and a persistent voice for equality and accountability since she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in 1973, which she remained for 42 years. The Case for Impeaching Trump establishes the requirements for impeachment as set out by the Constitution and proves that President Trump’s actions have already met those requirements. Holtzman makes the definitive, constitutional case that Trump can be impeached - and the process should start now.

America's middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation - that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did. It's the dark flipside of the American Dream - an American Nightmare of our own making.