Obsession Memoir

Icarus may not have flown particularly close to the sun, but he has fallen… right into the rough hands of Olympus's own Poseidon. Being held captive by the gentle giant wouldn't be so bad if Olympus wasn't on the eve of destruction… or if Poseidon stopped looking at him with those irresistibly stormy eyes. Poseidon doesn't have time to babysit his increasingly bratty prisoner, but he has no choice: Olympus is officially at war, and someone has to keep their best bargaining chip out of harm's way.

The Hale family is obsessed with status, power, and control. No problem is too big their money can’t solve. Royce Hale manipulated me into giving him everything. My virginity. My hand in marriage. My heart. And as soon as he got what he wanted, he callously sold me off for a cool $10 million. In the boardroom and the twisted game his family plays, he says the only rule is to win at all costs. Yesterday I learned a painful lesson not to trust the prince of Cape Hill. Today I’ll destroy his carefully laid plans and show him just how badly he’s already lost.

Logan thinks he and Delilah are meant to be. Delilah doesn't know who Logan is. Logan believes no one knows Delilah like him. He makes sure of it by learning everything he can by watching her through a hidden camera. Some might call him a stalker. Logan prefers to be called "romantic". Delilah is keeping secrets though, deadly ones. There's so much more to her than meets the eye.

One act of kindness brought Sophie Parish far more danger than she could have ever imagined. Now she's on the run, leaving behind her family and the only dream she's ever had. Retired EFC fighter Kolan Slade's life has been one endless battle after another. He has a dark past with an even darker desire - the only one he's ever known. Until he meets her. Intrigued by her raw beauty and the secrets she's trying to hide, Kolan craves to know who she is and what she's running from.

Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But in June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves.

Orphaned at birth and living in a small, broken town, one that believes I'm a cursed child. The bringer of bad luck. I tried to escape the stigma, to create something better for myself. It all came crashing down one night and my world shattered. While dealing with the aftermath, an unbelievable opportunity landed in my lap. A scholarship to attend an exclusive university far away. This was my chance to start fresh.

Oxford, 1960. There's a murderer on the loose, and two unlikely heroes are poised to solve the case. Meet Probationary WPC Trudy Loveday - smart, enthusiastic and always underestimated. In the hope of getting her out of the way, Trudy’s senior officer assigns her to help coroner Clement Ryder as he re-opens the case of a young woman's death. She can't believe her luck – she is actually going to be working on a real murder case.

When a series of suspicious fires leaves multiple victims dead in their homes, NYPD hostage negotiator Abby Mullen knows in her bones that the terrors of her childhood have returned. As a young girl, she narrowly escaped a fire set by Moses Wilcox, a fanatical cult leader who’s been presumed dead for thirty years. These murders have his fingerprints all over them.

"Tu es enfermée ici, mais je le suis avec toi. Toujours. Ne l'oublie pas." Que feriez-vous si vous vous réveilliez un matin dans une cellule, pris au piège d'un détraqué possessif et mystérieux ? Que feriez-vous si vous deviez lutter pour votre survie tout en vous battant pour préserver votre esprit ?

Tiffany is trapped in a life she never wanted for herself. The man she fell in love with turned out to be a lazy, good-for-nothing womanizer. Night after night Tiffany comes home to Blake’s physical, mental, and verbal abuse. She’s tried leaving it in the past, but somehow he always finds her. Each time, she comes back and convinces herself things will get better. Then one day Blake beats her for the last time. Tiffany decides death is the only way out - and she’s not the one being buried. Her life takes a drastic turn as she attempts to live the life she’s always wanted.

Going undercover to reveal naughty secrets was my dream job. A dangerous adventure—one that got me severely punished. He's not telling me what he plans to do with me. I should have fought him when he spanked me and then took me on my hands and knees. But I didn't, and now my only choice is total submission or face the shameful consequences I'm starting to crave. This time, I need to ignore my desire and escape. Then he tells me the only way off this island is as his wife.

During his nearly fifteen-year reign of terror, Ronald Lloyd Bailey’s depraved obsession with sexual sadism held communities across southeast Michigan in a shroud of fear. From the early 1970’s to the mid-1980’s, the former patient at one of Michigan’s foremost psychiatric hospitals, abducted as many as fifteen teens and over time became a sadistic serial killer.

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.

In June 1990, Ronald Baker, a straight-A UCLA student, was found repeatedly stabbed to death in a tunnel near Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers once lived. Shortly thereafter, Detective Rick Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, were assigned the case. Yet the facts made no sense. Who would have a motive to kill Ron Baker in such a grisly manner? Was the proximity to the Manson ranch related to the murder? And what about the pentagram pendant Ron wore around his neck? Jackson and Garcia soon focused their investigation on Baker’s two male roommates, one Black, and one white.

Chef and restaurateur Ben Shewry knows obsession well. Whether it's crispy-edged lasagne, saltwater crocodile ribs or the perfect potato, obsession is what motivates him and what makes him tick. It's also what has propelled his Melbourne restaurant Attica into the league of the most innovative, acclaimed dining experiences in the world, and one of the most vital in Australian history.

Naomi Bowes lost her innocence the night she followed her father into the woods. In freeing the girl trapped in the root cellar, Naomi revealed the horrible extent of her father's crimes and made him infamous. Now a successful photographer living under the name Naomi Carson, she has found a place that calls to her, thousands of miles away from everything she's ever known. Naomi wants to embrace the solitude, but the residents of Sunrise Cove keep forcing her to open up - especially the determined Xander Keaton.

On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, 20-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins - some collected 150 years earlier.

In Susan Orlean's mesmerizing true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors.

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.

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.