Showing results by narrator "Caroline Shaffer" in All Categories

Meeting handsome actor Byron Slater after winning a contest, Miranda Peterson enjoys the attention of the media and the glamour of Byron's world, until she stumbles on the private actor's deadly secrets.

Having finished transforming Windy Corner, the grand Victorian mansion she inherited from her great aunt, into a writers’ retreat, widowed literature professor Emily Cavanaugh is ready to receive her first set of guests. But her careful planning is thrown into disarray by the unexpected arrival of outrageous true-crime writer whose unpardonably rude behavior is causing great offence. As a ferocious ice storm rages outside, the guests entertain one another with a game of charades. But their revelries are brought to a sudden halt by the discovery of a body in one of the guest bedrooms.

When fashion designer Maddie Springer is invited to help style contestants in the Hawaiian Paradise Beauty Pageant, she jumps at the chance! The fantastic publicity coupled with a weeklong vacation with her best friends, Marco and Dana, is a win-win. But trouble follows her to paradise when one of the beauty queens winds up dead. Is it a case of a personal grudge, a jealous contestant...or a jealous lover?

All Violet Parker wants is a day off. Better yet, just a “normal” day. But things never go as planned, especially in Deadwood. Someone - or rather something - broke into the local taxidermy shop and took bites out of the critter displays before racing off into the dark. But this is no random crime, and Violet knows it. With a bounty on her head and troublemakers zeroing in on her, she soon goes from being the hunter to the hunted.

For Kate Mitchell, finishing her master's thesis on reclusive photographer Reed O'Connor was just another item to check off her list. She knew exactly what she was doing. Or did she? There's just one portrait that doesn't fit. One portrait... and the passion she sees behind it. Finding the story behind O'Connor's picture becomes Kate's obsession, and the people she meets will challenge everything she thought she knew about life, love, and inspiration. A single picture can tell more than one story.

Dr. Kate is once again on the case (not to mention thin ice) after discovering a young engaged couple frozen to death in the lake. To make matters worse, her temporary receptionist appears to have overdosed from a recreational sedative used at the animal hospital. Kate barely has time to dread Valentine's Day (and the fact that she’s alone on this holiday, once again) as the police investigation shows that all three fatalities are in fact homicides.

Maddie Springer is all about fashion. So when her best friend Dana's movie star boyfriend, Ricky Montgomery, becomes a contestant on the ballroom dance reality hit, Dancing with Celebrities, she is over the moon at the thought of visiting the sparkly, spandexy costumes on the set. That is until Ricky's dance partner is found dead in his dressing room...in the nude!

Morning sickness sucks. Which is why fashion designer turned amateur sleuth Maddie Springer has spent the last six weeks being a couch potato and Moonlight vampire movie devotee. But when Maddie's best friends finally convince her to venture out, Maddie stumbles on a dead body of a girl who has been bitten on the neck, and life suddenly imitates art in the most deadliest of ways. Now Maddie is smack in the middle of a murder investigation involving a deadly dance club and a coven of Hollywood "vampires".

One dead body, one century-old haunted opera house, one zombie musical - one pissed-off detective - will Violet "Spooky" Parker keep her tail out of trouble, or will she end up as one of Deadwood's walking dead?

Halliday resumes the story of Maddie Springer, shoe designer and amateur sleuth, a week before her marriage to hunky Los Angeles police detective Jack Ramirez. When she finds her wedding planner face down in frosting with a knife sticking out of her back, she knows that to leave on time for their honeymoon, she needs to help Jack solve the case. Her two best friends step in, not only to help find the killer, but also to serve as her new wedding planners.

Something has gone foul in the Black Hills, something gravely unnatural. Leave it to Violet Parker to stumble into the middle of it. A creepy phone call, a dead body, two meddling detectives, and a glut of troublemaking ex-partners - can things get any worse? Violet swears to keep her nose out of police business this time. But when her son is linked to the victim, she returns to the scene of the crime. More than just a mystery to solve, now her son might be in mortal danger.

Former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is getting a little bored in Magpie, Montana, where she landed at a small local newspaper after being downsized from her job in Kabul. Then Judith Calf Looking, a local Blackfeet Indian girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriff - whose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in years - thinks Judith probably froze to death while hitchhiking back to the reservation from wherever she'd been.

Plus-sized Rachel Simon has settled into her life. But in a lifetime of not-quite fitting in and battling demon food issues, she has given up on finding love, despite the nagging of her close circle of friends. Now, Rachel has received some big news: a fashion blog, which she secretly wrote on the side, has caught the eye of a major fashion magazine, who not only want her to write a column, but are giving her an award at an upcoming banquet. The problem? She used Lisa’s picture on her bio and believes they expect a tall beautiful blonde to walk through the doors of the magazine.

Food has power to nourish your mind, supporting emotional wellness through both nutrients and pleasure. In this groundbreaking book, journalist Mary Beth Albright draws on cutting-edge research to explain the food/mood connection. She redefines “emotional eating” based on the science, revealing how eating triggers biological responses that affect humans’ emotional states both immediately and long-term.

Charlotte Kingsley loves to write and dreams of having her reimagined fairy tales published, but she keeps getting rejected over and over. And to top it all off, her best friend, Anders, gets engaged, making her realize she’s going to lose the Prince Charming who lives next door. After yet another rejection letter, Charlotte decides to switch gears. What if she wrote a book about celebrating women for who they really are instead of trying to create a fantasy world for them to visit? Then she discovers that Anders has called off his engagement....

Our decisions are expressions of who we are and how we move through the world. Rarely, though, do we examine our decisions or even look inward to consider the psychology of our decision-making. Instead, we often make decisions based on what we call instinct—which relies on cognitive bias, false assumptions, mis-remembering, and mental mistakes. Truthfully, we don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.

Ballerina Lucia del Mar has two great passions: dance, which consumes most of her waking hours, and the Internet, which brings the outside world into her tightly regimented life. These two passions collide when a White House performance and reception leads to an encounter with handsome Moroccan businessman Rashid al-Jazari, creator of a brilliant technology that has set the Internet rumor mill ablaze.

In this powerful, wide-ranging, and emotional story about the limits of medical knowledge, Abel discovers why she wasn't diagnosed with celiac as a child. She considers how environmental fears and Internet anecdotes lead people to avoid gluten. And she grapples with the question that confronts us all: how to live calmly, even joyfully, in the face of uncertainty.

It was in New York that he discovered Sarah. As Simon recovers from a professional disaster - and escapes Chicago for New York - he is drawn to the beautiful, exciting, and mysterious Sarah. Even though the forty-year-old Simon has a wife and child, he falls madly in love with Sarah. Devoting themselves with abandon to the pursuit of happiness, the lovers tour New York, Paris, Venice, and beyond. Their journey takes them deep within their emotions, and reveals dangerous secrets in Sarah’s past.

Professor Emily Cavanaugh has left Windy Corner behind and is back at Bede College on her sabbatical, determined to finish writing her book on Dostoevsky. She is soon reunited with one of her promising students, Daniel Razumov, as well as familiar faces on the teaching staff - her friend, Marguerite Grenier; her half-brother, Oscar Lansing; the abrasive division chair, Richard McClintock; and the predatory Taylor Curzon, known for her relentless pursuit of young male students - and Taylor now has Daniel firmly in her sights.