Résultats lu par "Jennifer Pickens" dans Toutes les catégories

You can’t have a good tale of monster hunting without monsters. And sometimes the monsters don’t need to be hunted. Sometimes it’s fun sitting back at minimum safe distance and watching the mayhem.

It was supposed to be a road trip to reconnect with my younger sister. We weren’t getting any younger and life had thrown us a few curves lately. Like her divorce and my…well, I’m not getting into that. Just two days into the trip, (getting lost, but that’s beside the point!) our world tipped off its axis. It began that frightening morning when we woke up, still sitting in the front cab of the RV. We were never the same women after that.

Former FBI agent Karen Pantelli lives by a simple philosophy: never, ever care. Three years after a tragic mistake ends her once-stellar career, she drifts from one dead-end job to another, quickly moving on when she finds herself getting too attached. A new city. A new life. A new way of forgetting and being forgotten. Until one chilly night behind a seedy bar, when a frightened girl leaps out of the back of a speeding van.

Her assignments were always to kill someone. That's what a hitman—or hitwoman—is paid to do—and that is what she does. Then comes a surprise assignment—keep someone alive! She is hired to protect Virginia Martin, the stunning and brilliant chief technology officer of a hot startup with an innovation that will change the world. This new job catches her at a time in her life when she's disillusioned, even depressed. She's confused about the “why”, but she addresses her charge as she always does, with skill and stealth, determined to keep this young CTO alive.

When six-year-old Charlotte Mercer disappears from her front yard in Silver Spring, Maryland, rookie FBI Agent Daisy Adams is thrust into a case that feels more like a haunting. There are no witnesses. No clues. Daisy has seen horror before—but nothing like this. As the investigation deepens, so does her fear. Because every missing child reminds her of her own daughter, Lila. And the more she digs into Charlotte's disappearance, the more she's forced to confront the question she's spent years avoiding: What if one day, it's Lila who vanishes?

The oldest mystery specialty bookstore in the world, The Mysterious Bookshop, has for most of its forty-five-year history commissioned an original short story as a holiday gift for its customers. Written exclusively for the store, the stories were given as a holiday gift to its customers as a thank you for their business, handed out or mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day.

Things are going well for Jane Murphy, or so it seems. She’s making it in New York, a sort of wunderkind at the social media marketing startup where she works. She’s put an experimental writer, Jeremy Miller, on the map by helping him concoct a viral internet novel, told in fragments through various fake social media accounts. But privately, Jane feels trapped, ruled by her routines and her compulsions, caught up in an endless cycle of soothing and punishing herself.

Described by Jeffrey Masson as "the single best introduction to animal rights ever written, Tom Regan's Empty Cages stands as an essential guide to the ongoing animal rights debate. In a style at once simple and elegant, Regan dispels the negative image of animal rights advocates as portrayed by the mass media, unmasks the fraudulent rhetoric of "humane treatment" favored by animal exploiters in both familiar and less well-documented contexts, and explains why existing laws function to legitimize institutional cruelty.

Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. And some have been searching for—and finding—more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus. This is the story of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers” dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Philadelphia’s Circle of Hope grew for forty years, planted four congregations, and then found itself in crisis.

When Jess was thirteen, her mother went for a walk and never returned. Jess and her older sister, Liz, never found out what happened. Instead, they did what they hoped their mother had done: survive. As soon as she was old enough, Jess fled their small town of Knife River, wandering from girlfriend to girlfriend like a ghost in her own life, aimless in her attempts to outrun grief and confusion. But one morning, fifteen years after their mother’s disappearance, she gets the call she’s been bracing for: Her mother’s remains have been found.

Intersexion is a life-giving true story about choosing between social acceptance or health, fear or authenticity. Cynthia, an adjunct professor with a trunk full of ungraded papers and snack wrappers, has been an LGBTQIA+ ally for years—in convenient ways. She enjoys the company of her queer friends—but her support isn’t risky; it hasn’t cost her anything. Until she meets Danny.

Set over the course of a fateful week, Vivienne deftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the questions: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art? What connects creation and procreation, a life and an afterlife?

Keep your head up, put one foot in front of the other, and never stop. For Bunny Beckman, former cop-turned-stripper, that motto had always been enough to keep the gun out of her mouth. Now, her beliefs, and her life, will be challenged in a way she never even imagined as the dead rise with a hunger for the living. To survive, she must face the monsters outside, and the demons within.

Two shocking words, torching a marriage of over 20 years. Totally blind-sided, Shannon, a middle-aged, stay-at-home mom, is traded in for a newer model. One of the few possessions her cheating ex didn’t swipe from under her nose, was the mountain resort she inherited from her dear aunt Maeve. With limited funds and bleak job prospects after being out of the workforce for so long, the decrepit resort is a lifeline.

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

Jane Grabowski hauls herself to her nine to five office job at New York City’s most acclaimed newspaper to sit in stale air under severe fluorescent lights and mask her rage by sending emails with too many exclamation points. Luckily, Jane has a reason to keep coming into the office: Madeline, the distractingly beautiful intern. Madeline has never dated a woman and is uncomfortable with labels, but with carefully timed lunch breaks and painstakingly crafted texts, Jane works her way into her life.

Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things she cared about. Describing the ups and downs of beekeeping from one springtime to the next, A Country Year transports listeners to a different, simpler place.

If you experienced trauma or neglect as a child, you may struggle with depression, anxiety, loneliness, and low self-esteem in adulthood. You are not alone. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect millions of people, and have led to many of the greatest unaddressed public health problems facing our world today. If you struggle with shame or lack of confidence, or if you have difficulty creating or sustaining healthy relationships with others, take heart. There are techniques you can learn to heal the pain of your past and take charge of your future.

In this terrifying novella from Tyler Jones, a young musician receives a custom, otherworldly guitar pedal created by a mysterious recluse with an unusual skill.

Don't You Dare is a compelling story that weaves together a current-day journey of discovery and a true-life love story between two women that took place over a hundred years ago. Newspaper headlines and stories back then didn't mention LGBTQ people. The LGBTQ community loved and lived in the background of society because it was too dangerous to do otherwise. All were hidden, just like the wedding photos belonging to author Gayla Turner's grandmother–Ruby.