A millionaire dies…

‘One can see by his face that he was stabbed in the back’ said Poirot.

But the strangest feature of the case was where they found the body – in an open grave!

Hercule Poirot had answered an appeal for help – but he was too late!

MURDER – bizarre and baffling – had come to the Villa Genevieve…

A millionaire dies…

Martha Holly, a lonely woman in her middle years is astonished to learn she has work to do after dying in a car accident. Aaron, the angel in charge of her case, informs her she has to return to earth to help those in need, before she can go on to the next world. Sent to the small town of Dingebury, Martha must turn amateur sleuth to discover who is stalking Katie Brown, and who murdered her father. Laugh-‘til-you-cry, following Martha bumble her way through.

Evil doesn’t become extinct, it evolves. Our world is a violent place. Murder, terrorism, racism and social inequality, these are some of the forces that attempt to destroy our society while the State is forced to increase its response to these actions. Our own annihilation is barely held at bay by the belief that we’ve somehow evolved beyond our ancestors’ base desires.

From this cesspool of emotions emerges a madman, intent on leading the world into anarchy. When his group of computer hackers infiltrate the Department of Defense network, they initiate a nuclear war that will irrevocably alter our world.

Aeric Gaines and his roommate Tyler Nordgren survive the devastation of the war, only to find that the quaint, politically correct world where they’d been raised was a lie. All humans have basic needs such as food, water and shelter…and we haven’t forgotten how to fight for what we desire.

New Second Edition of the 2nd novel in the 14 volume Caribbean Adventure Series.

Jesse McDermitt lives alone on an isolated island in the Florida Keys where he runs a charter fishing business. Retired from the Marine Corps for six years, he wanted nothing more than to relax, fish, dive and enjoy the laid back lifestyle of the islands.

Russ, his former Platoon Sergeant and old friend, dies unexpectedly in a mysterious scuba diving accident and Jesse becomes suspicious. When his friend’s son comes to south Florida to ask Jesse if he would take him to a remote reef to spread his father’s ashes, the two men discover that Russ was murdered and agree to hunt down the psychotic killer together, unaware that their manhunt will lead them to a Caribbean terrorist cell.

Homicide Detective Maude Rogers tries to serve an arrest warrant on a drug dealer but finds a big surprise waiting behind the door.

Murder and mayhem precede her steps as a psycho directs all the moves, but Maude didn’t get old without learning a trick or three. Good police work and a first-rate partner are all she needs to track a violent killer to his lair and put him where he belongs.

Bad habits and sore knees aside, they don’t get much tougher or smarter than Maude.

For sixty years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged. Then came Hollywood’s Circus Maximus—created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King—an entertainment empire called DreamWorks. Now Nicole LaPorte, who covered the company for Variety, goes behind the hype to reveal for the first time the delicious truth of what happened.

Readers will feel they are part of the creative calamities of moviemaking as LaPorte’s fly-on-the-wall detail shows us Hollywood’s bizarre rules of business. We see the clashes between the often-otherworldly Spielberg’s troops and Katzenberg’s warriors, the debacles and disasters, but also the Oscar-winning triumphs, including Saving Private Ryan. We watch as the studio burns through billions of dollars, its rich owners get richer, and everybody else suffers.

It began as a home invasion by the “Manson family” in the early hours of August 9, 1969. It ended in a killing spree that left seven people dead: actress Sharon Tate, writer Voyteck Frykowski, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, hair stylist Jay Sebring, student Steven Parent, and supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.

The shock waves of these crimes still reverberate today. They have also, over time, eclipsed the life of their most famous victim—a Dallas, Texas, beauty queen with Hollywood aspirations. After more than a dozen small film and television roles, Tate gained international fame with the screen adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, but The Fearless Vampire Killers marked a personal turning point, as she would marry its star and director, Roman Polanski. Tate now had a new dream: to raise a family—and she was only weeks away from giving birth the night Charles Manson’s followers murdered her.

When Claire Linden’s job sends her to the sleepy town of Gull Harbor, she never expects to encounter her ex-boyfriend. As a medium, the prospect of tackling a haunted house is less daunting than seeing Max Baron again. Throughout their passionate college relationship, he promised to love her forever. Then, without explanation, he abandoned her on graduation day.

Max never intended to break Claire’s heart–a cruel ultimatum forced him to disappear from her life. While he’s shocked to find her in Gull Harbor, he isn’t surprised by the bitter resentment she feels for him…or the fiery attraction that remains between them.

Claire is determined to rid her temporary home of its aggressive ghost, but Max soon realizes she’s facing a danger beyond the paranormal.

Douglas Ashton is the cold and unfeeling owner of the gothic Victorian Mansion, Sommersgate House. Julia Fairfax is his stubborn American sister-in-law. After tragedy strikes, Douglas and Julia are forced to live together at Sommersgate and raise their newly orphaned nieces and nephew.

Douglas has no desire to raise his dead sister’s children nor does he want the distraction of the tempting Julia living under his roof. Julia is struggling with grief and trying to make a go in a new country without much help from impossibly handsome but even more impossibly remote Douglas. Not to mention, she has to deal with the active hostility of Douglas’s frosty, Attila-the-Hun-in-a-skirt mother, Monique.

“Damian Baxter was a friend of mine at Cambridge. We met around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while….”

Nearly forty years later, the narrator hates Damian Baxter and would gladly forget their disastrous last encounter. But if it is pleasant to hear from an old friend, it is more interesting to hear from an old enemy, and so he accepts an invitation from the rich and dying Damian, who begs him to track down the past girlfriend whose anonymous letter claimed he had fathered a child during that ruinous debutante season.

The search takes the narrator back to the extraordinary world of swinging London, where aristocratic parents schemed to find suitable matches for their daughters while someone was putting hash in the brownies at a ball at Madame Tussaud’s. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing—and it was, but not always quite as expected.

There aren’t many books more beloved than The Tale of Peter Rabbit and even fewer authors as iconic as Beatrix Potter. Her characters—Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, and all the rest—exist in a charmed world filled with flowers and gardens. In Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life, bestselling author Marta McDowell explores the origins of Beatrix Potter’s love of gardening and plants and shows how this passion came to be reflected in her work. The book begins with a gardener’s biography, highlighting the key moments and places throughout her life that helped define her. Next, follow Beatrix Potter through a year in her garden, with a season-by-season overview of what is blooming that truly brings her gardens alive. The book culminates in a traveler’s guide, with information on how and where to visit Potter’s gardens today.

Fans of television’s Mad About You and its star, Paul Reiser, will be delighted with his second foray into the self-deprecating self-help genre. Couplehood, his first book, leads logically to this next phase–Babyhood. In a chatty voice Reiser takes us from the “Maybe someday we’ll have kids” step into the deep-sea dive of commitment.Babyhood begins on an airplane, with Paul and wife blissfully unencumbered by children. They are seated across from the young parents (graying before his eyes) of a terrorizing 2-year-old and a screeching infant. This sobering reality manages magically to pale in a transcendent moment of the baby’s bliss, uncomplicated by drool or colic, and the two decide: “Now.”

Well, more or less now. First they try to get pregnant, making expeditions to the bookstore to case out the shelves of baby books; then there are the bouncy reflections on who is, after all, cut out to parent (“I don’t know if, for example, Mozart actually had kids, but certainly there is no record of him ever leaving the office early to coach Peewee Soccer League”).

In The Statesman and the Storyteller, documentarian Mark Zwonitzer presents a compelling dual biography of writer Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and statesman John Hay (who served as secretary of state under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt). Covering the last ten years of their lives, Zwonitzer provides an intimate look into the friendship—and rivalry—of these influential men, as well as an elucidating portrait of the United States on the verge of emerging as a world power.

It was the era of the Spanish-American War, a controversial conflict in which the United States would eventually wrest control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In what many consider one of the most shameful periods in American history, Filipinos who believed they had been promised independence were instead violently subdued in a brutal war. The United States also used its growing military and political might to grab the entirety of the Hawaiian Islands and a large section of Panama.