Every holiday season, Kiki Lowenstein plans 12 days of classes, her Holiday Craft Extravaganza. And every year, it nearly kills her.

This year is no exception. As the holiday season approaches, Kiki over-schedules herself and winds up running herself ragged. To make life even more stressful, she must fend off a stalker, a man determined to possess the object of his affection. But that’s only one problem.

Kiki’s ace full-time employee, Clancy, has HUGE decisions to make. How do you put aside your hurt and disappointment when you’ve been betrayed? Why should you upend your whole life because of another person’s mistake? Is it selfish to think of yourself first? As Clancy ponders questions, Kiki stands on the sidelines, knowing this is not her choice to make. And yet…Kiki feels Clancy’s agony.

A small town with big secrets. A caterer turned amateur detective. A wedding weekend plagued by murder and mystery.

Home is where the heart is for Abby Hirsch, a chef returning to her small Texas hometown to cater a wedding at her aunt’s charming bed and breakfast. But homecoming turns deadly when Abby finds the body of the bride’s rival dumped on the grounds.

With the wedding in jeopardy, a killer on the loose, and sparks flying with the new sheriff in town, Abby teams up with her best friend Cassie and dives into amateur sleuthing to get to the bottom of the murder before the big day. Her investigation soon reveals secret affairs, shady business deals, and more bodies in this quaint small town.

Can Abby cater the perfect wedding feast while narrowing down the suspect list? Or will the killer crash the wedding cake before Abby can serve justice?

Village herbalist Rain Archer never expected her own wedding to be cancelled because of–you guessed it–a rainstorm! It will take the whole town working together to help her pull off A Winter Wedding in Pajaro Bay.

The Pajaro Bay Minis are complete, stand-alone stories that fill in details about the characters in the little coastal village. Like the novels in the series, they can be read in any order.

With a week to spend in paradise, Niko and Elea find themselves in a classic fake dating act, where it’ll take both parties pretending to convince everyone they’re a serious couple. In reality they’re ex-high school peers, both who have very different lives and paths. Could one week really change anything?

Emmy Parish arrives at the university to finish the last two years of college with her best friend, where she meets the handsome and charismatic pre-med student, Johnny Bauer. Johnny and Emmy fall hard and fast for one another, getting engaged and making plans for their future until Johnny’s plane goes missing during his first year of medical school. She is engulfed by grief, drowning in her anger, and abandoning her family and friends. Her one constant is her boss, Rick, teaching her it is possible to heal and that it is okay to love again. Finally, Emmy succumbs to her intense feelings for Rick, and they embark on a passionate and loving relationship and begin building a life together. Emmy finally feels her heart is healing when her past comes chasing after her.

When Lily Sprayberry and her friends decided to have a cookie baking girl’s night, the last thing they expected to find was one of Santa’s helpers dead in the walk in freezer of Millie’s Café.

None of them believed Santa was real, let alone his helpers, but the little guy’s pointy ears made them second guess themselves.

Against Lily’s better judgment, the women forego calling the sheriff, who just happens to be her husband, opting instead to take matters into their own hands. When they find an ominous note lying where the pointy-eared person once did, they know they’re in over their heads.

Soon they discover the helper wasn’t helping Santa, but stealing from the local lot of gifts for Bramblett County’s kids, and they don’t think he was working alone.

Explore the “thinking tools” of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools such as observing, recognizing patterns, modeling, playing, and more.

Sparks of Genius is “a clever, detailed and demanding fitness program for the creative mind” and a groundbreaking guidebook for anyone interested in imaginative thinking, lifelong learning, and transdisciplinary education (Kirkus Reviews).

Cleo Arendse: You know how almost every movie set in Italy seems to be about a woman who travels to Tuscany and is swept off her feet by a charming, gorgeous but arrogant aristocrat? Well, that’s not this story.

Luca Fioravanti:
Challenge accepted.

British Banker Cleo Arendse is nothing like the women lawyer Luca Fioravanti is used to – both because she’s only in Tuscany to oversee his family vineyard’s business and because she’s impervious to the charm that has never failed him before now.

But Luca has never shied from a challenge, and when circumstances arise that allow him to step in as Cleo’s knight in shining armour, he leaps…right into a fake marriage! The romance may be a ruse but the passion burning between Luca and Cleo is very, very real, and as the ‘honeymoon’ glow envelops the pair, all bets are off…

Even as oversized McMansions continue to elbow their way into tiny lots nationwide, a much different trend has taken shape. This return to traditional architectural principles venerates qualities that once were taken for granted in home design: structural common sense, aesthetics of form, appropriateness to a neighborhood, and even sustainability.

Marianne Cusato, creator of the award–winning Katrina Cottages, has authored and illustrated this definitive guide to what makes houses look and feel right—to the eye and to the soul. She teaches us the language and grammar of classical architecture, revealing how balance, harmony, and detail all contribute to creating a home that will be loved rather than tolerated. And she takes us through the dos and don’ts of every element of home design, from dormers to doorways to columns. Integral to the book are its hundreds of elegant line drawings—clearly rendering the varieties of lintels and cornices, arches and eaves, and displaying “avoid” and “use” versions of the same elements side by side.

Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris are forever intertwined in baseball history thanks to the unforgettable 1961 season, when the two Yankee icons spurred each other to new heights in pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record. History has largely overlooked the bond between the two men not as titans of their sport, but as people. Guided by Tony Castro, bestselling author and foremost chronicler of Mantle, readers will journey into history, from the Yankees’ blockbuster trade for Maris, whose acquisition re-ignited Mantle’s career after a horrendous 1959 season, to the heroics of 1961 and far beyond. This dual biography is a thoroughly researched, emotionally gripping portrait that brings Yankees lore alive.

In his acclaimed trilogy, author Stephen Birmingham paints an engrossing portrait of Jewish American life from the colonial era through the twentieth century with fascinating narrative and meticulous research.

The collection’s best-known book, “Our Crowd” follows nineteenth-century German immigrants with recognizable names like Loeb, Sachs, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. Turning small family businesses into institutions of finance, banking, and philanthropy, they elevated themselves from Lower East Side tenements to Park Avenue mansions. Barred from New York’s gentile elite because of their religion and humble backgrounds, they created their own exclusive group, as affluent and selective as the one that had refused them entry.

This exciting title from the folks at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute contains the strangest short history articles from over thirty Bathroom Readers, along with fifty all-new pages. From the twentieth century to the Old West, from the Age of Enlightenment to the Dark Ages, from ancient cultures all the way back to the dawn of time, Strange History is overflowing with mysterious artifacts, macabre legends, kooky inventions, reality-challenged rulers, boneheaded blunders, and mind-blowing facts. Whether it’s B.C. or A.D., you’ll be wondering WTF! Read about . . .
The curse of Macbeth
Stupid history: Hollywood style
The secret LSD experiments of the 1960s
In search of the lost “Cloud People” of Peru
The Swedish queen who declared war on fleas
Unearthing the past with the Outhouse Detectives
The Apollo astronaut who swears he saw a UFO
How to brew a batch of 5,000-year-old beer
The brutal bloodbaths at Rome’s Coliseum
Ghostly soup from ancient China
The bathroom of the 1970s