Obsession Memoir

I spend my nights slinging drinks at Black Magic Bar or taking my clothes off at the local strip club. After my father passed, my stepmother gave me no other choice. But when I break free of the chains binding me to my family estate, I find myself with nowhere to go. Until Nero Voss, the youngest of the billionaire Voss brothers, offers me a room at Midnight Manor. Now, I’m under his watchful gaze and enjoying it more than I should.

The moment he pulled her back from the brink, she became his. Not just his patient, but his obsession. She’s everything he’s ever wanted, and now that fate has placed her in his hands, he’s never letting go. She wants to keep her distance, but he’s not the kind of man to be denied. Her fears? He’ll soothe them. Her heart? He’ll claim it. Because she’s his, and nothing—not even her resistance—will stop him from making her see it.

The bestselling author of No Shortcuts to the Top and K2 chronicles his three attempts to climb the world's tenth-highest and statistically deadliest peak, Annapurna in the Himalaya, while exploring the dramatic and tragic history of others who have made -- or attempted – the ascent, and what...

Four children were abducted and murdered outside of Detroit during the winters of 1976 and 1977; their bodies eventually dumped in snow banks around the city. J. Reuben Appelman was six years old at the time the murders began and had evaded an abduction attempt during that same period, fueling a lifelong obsession with what became known as the Oakland County Child Killings. There were few credible leads and equally few credible suspects. That's what the cops had passed down to the press, and that's what the city of Detroit and J. Reuben Appelman had come to believe.

She was a beautiful, gifted descendant of Lady Astor. But Elizabeth Haysom was also a spoiled, willful daughter of privilege. He was the brilliant young son of a German diplomat. But his love for Elizabeth would draw Jens Soering into a web of madness and murder. When Elizabeth's parents were found savagely butchered in their elegant Virginia country home, she and Jens fled to Europe - igniting an international manhunt that spanned three continents.

It was a bleak November in 2012 when Cari Lea Farver vanished from Omaha, Nebraska. Cari, 37, was a devoted mother, reliable employee, and loyal friend - not the type to shirk responsibilities, abandon her son, and run off on an adventure while her dying father took his last breaths. Yet, the many texts from her phone indicated she had done just that. While Cari's boyfriend, Dave Kroupa, and her supervisor were bewildered by her abrupt disappearance, they accepted the texts at face value. Her mother, Nancy Raney, however, was alarmed and reported Cari missing.

The Emperor of Scent tells of the scientific maverick Luca Turin, a connoisseur and something of an aesthete who wrote a bestselling perfume guide and bandied about an outrageous new theory on the human sense of smell. Drawing on cutting-edge work in biology, chemistry, and physics, Turin used his obsession with perfume and his eerie gift for smell to turn the cloistered worlds of the smell business and science upside down, leading to a solution to the last great mystery of the senses: how the nose works.

Criminal profiling—the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us—holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its history.

When Daniel Duane became a father, this San Francisco surfer and climber found himself trapped at home with no clue how to contribute. Inept at so many domestic tasks, and less than eager to change diapers, he took on dinner duty. Duane had a few tricks: pasta, stir-fry...well, actually, those were his only two tricks. But he had a biographical anomaly: Chef Alice Waters had been his preschool teacher. So he cracked one of her Chez Panisse cookbooks and cooked his way through it.

June 26, 2010. A Pennsylvania state trooper witnesses a car speeding and crashing into trees. Stopping to help, he finds that the driver, Michael Ballard, is alive - and drenched in blood. When asked what happened, the man answers, "I just killed everybody." Not far from the accident, police make a gruesome discovery. In the home of Michael's ex-girlfriend, Denise Mehri, they find four bodies that had been stabbed repeatedly with a knife.

The moment she stumbled into me on the street, my world shifted. Her wide, trusting eyes, her sweet innocence—I can’t stop thinking about her. Can’t stop watching her. She’s mine, even if she doesn’t know it yet. She’s all alone in a world too cruel for someone so delicate, and I’ll destroy anyone who dares to hurt her. Even if it means staying in the shadows, protecting her from afar.But how long can I hold back the storm she’s unleashed inside me? Because one way or another, I’m going to make her mine. Forever.

Hell-Bent explores a fascinating, often surreal world at the extremes of American yoga. Benjamin Lorr walked into his first yoga studio on a whim, overweight and curious, and quickly found the yoga reinventing his life. He was studying Bikram Yoga (or “hot yoga”) when a run-in with a master and competitive yoga champion led him into an obsessive subculture—a group of yogis for whom eight hours of practice a day in 110- degree heat was just the beginning.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

When Ani meets Julian Wade, she thinks he is the answer to all her problems. He has money, a penthouse apartment, and doesn't ask a lot of questions. Or rather, any questions. Who is Ani and what was her past like? She figures what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Or will it? She's ready to play the part of perfect wife. But Julian has been waiting for the perfect moment. He knows who she is. He knows what she did. When the secrets are exposed, she'll have to face the consequences...

Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death―personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable―as "nuanced and subtly intimate"; (NPR) as her lauded essay...

After the untimely death of Prince Albert, the Queen and her nation were plunged into a state of grief so profound that this one event would dramatically alter the shape of the British monarchy. For Britain had not just lost a prince: during his 20-year marriage to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert had increasingly performed the function of King in all but name. The outpouring of grief after Albert's death was so extreme that its like would not be seen again until the death of Princess Diana 136 years later.

Author Leslie Lehr wants to talk about boobs. She’s gone from size AA to DDD and everything between, from puberty to motherhood, enhancement to cancer, and beyond. And she’s not alone - these are classic life stages for women today. At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob’s Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman’s body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women’s liberation movement and moving to the current feminist dialogue and what it means to be a woman.

Marina and Lee is one of the best and truest audiobooks about the Kennedy assassination. Priscilla Johnson McMillan came to the story with a unique knowledge of the two main characters. In the 1950s she knew Kennedy well for a time when he was hospitalized with Addison's disease. She talked to him frequently, brought him books, knew his wife, and formed a strong opinion of the sort of man he was. What is astonishing is that she also knew Lee Harvey Oswald.

Detective Jack Mackinnon has his work cut out trying to track down missing student, Anya Blonski. As Mackinnon follows the trail of obsession and murder to the shady owners of the Star Academy, who thrive on society's obsession with reality TV shows, he realises the fame they offer comes at a price. When a second girl goes missing, Mackinnon is forced to consider a serial killer may be stalking the city.

She thought she had married her soul mate. But when Carol Kennedy could no longer tolerate her husband's reckless womanizing and out-of-control spending, the artist, therapist, and mother of two had to let him go. Just weeks after their divorce, Carol was found in her Arizona ranch home - bludgeoned to death with a golf club. Her ex, Steven DeMocker, was the prime suspect. Yet it took the authorities months to arrest him - and years to convict....