Showing results by narrator "Liza Ross Ross" in All Categories

Twenty-five years ago, Stella Guzzo beat her daughter to death and then walked up the street to play bingo at her church. V. I. Warshawski grew up with the Guzzo family. She dated Frank Guzzo when they were teens and knew Stella's murderous rages firsthand. She didn't think about the family again until the day Frank came to her office, wanting V. I. to help his mother with an exoneration claim. The detective wants no part of Stella Guzzo's world, but she doesn't feel able to say no.

The Last Time They Met focuses on the relationship between childhood sweethearts Linda Fallon and poet Thomas Janes. We begin in the year 2000 at a writers' festival in Toronto and are propelled backwards in time, via the politically repressive Naiobi, to the small town in Massachusetts for their school days in the 1960s. Along the way the novel delves deeply into the destructive nature of life and the need for forgiveness.

Walt Whitman said, "...poetry is the voice of the nation, expressing its deepest concerns, ambitions and longings," which is certainly true of the great classic poetry of America. This wide-ranging anthology, from the earliest poets of the 16th century to the present day, reflects the changing preoccupations and visions of Americans, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings, and more.

The day 28-year-old Willie Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, New York, in disgrace is the day an enormous monster surfaces in Lake Glimmerglass. So begins The Monsters of Templeton, a novel of mystery, hubris, obession, passion and revenge spanning two centuries, where the dead rise up to tell their sides of the story and the living are haunted by the sins of the past.

This novel anthology, is to mark the 10th anniversary of the "Realms of..." novel anthologies. There have been eight Forgotten Realms anthologies (see below) and Wizards of the Coast are inviting FR fans to select which short stories from those anthologies should be included in this new collection. A new short story by R A Salvatore is to be included in the collection.

An engrossing history of the science of one of the four fundamental physical forces in the universe, electromagnetism, right up to the latest indications that the poles are soon to reverse and destroy the world's power grids and electronic communications. A cataclysmic planetary phenomenon is gathering force deep within the Earth. The magnetic North Pole will eventually trade places with the South Pole. Satellite evidence suggests to some scientists that the move has already begun, but most still think it won't happen for many decades.

Now Anne is sixteen and a half and is about to start teaching at the very same school she hefself attended. Those of you who know Anne will realise that she has always been delighfully, accident prone, falling into scrapes because of her plans and adventures.

When Joseph Weissmann divorced his wife, Betty, he was 78 years old and she was 75. The Weissmann sisters, Miranda, a successful literary agent, and Annie, a library director, unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home. Dumped by her husband of nearly 50 years and exiled from their elegant New York apartment, Betty moves to a small, run-down Westport beach cottage. Joining her are Miranda and Annie, who comes along to keep an eye on her capricious mother and sister.

San Francisco in the 1890s is a town of contradictions. Lizzie Hayes, a docile, middle-aged spinster, is praised for her volunteer work with the Ladies' Relief and Protection Society Home. When the wealthy but ill-reputed Mary Ellen Pleasant shows up with an orphan in tow, Lizzie is drawn to them both. For it is the beautiful Mrs. Pleasant, object of suspicion because of her rumoured voodoo practise, who holds the key to freeing Lizzie's rebellious nature.

Courtney Stone - sassy, smart and suddenly single - has always felt she might have been better suited to life in Jane Austen’s England. Then one evening, having drifted off to sleep after self-medicating with pizza, Absolut, and Elizabeth and Darcy, Courtney wakes up in 19th-century England, in the body and bed of a girl called Jane Mansfield.... A laugh-out-loud romp with a Regency heart, this delightful debut is a truly modern comedy of manners.

Wallace James Stevens was born on October 2nd, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, a lawyer, sent Wallace to Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and worked briefly as a journalist. In 1923 ‘Harmonium’ was published. At last, at age 38, he was an overnight success. His career was not prodigious in quantity but its quality was exceptional and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

On a clear day, you could see America from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather when he had had a drink. Then, in 1818, he left and sailed to the New World with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants. They were a Spartan lot: showing off was frowned upon, and fear was commonplace, at least for females. But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters.

As far as Carol Spencer is concerned, the war has spoiled everything. She and Don had been engaged for years and were on the verge of marriage when he was shot down in the South Pacific, leaving Carol on the verge of spinsterhood at 24. She wants to take some kind of job in the war effort, but her invalid mother demands that Carol accompany her to the family's summer home in Maine. But when they arrive at the faded mansion, they find it completely locked up. The servants are gone, the lights are dark - and there is a body in the closet.

V. I. Warshawski's impossible goddaughter, Bernie, convinces her to look for August, a young filmmaker who has disappeared. The evidence indicates that he has gone to Kansas in the company of Emerald, an older black movie actress who wants to film the story of her life. Her search takes V. I. from the military base Emerald was born on to the farm where she grew up outside a university town, ploughing up past and present-day secrets as she goes.

Elizabeth Bell runs a quiet household, with no family and no more than the usual number of servants. She passes her time thinking about crime and working on her biography of a relative. When a young cousin comes to stay, life in the house becomes uncharacteristically lively. First, cousin Judy burns a hole in Miss Bell's desk. Next, they spy a burglar on the staircase - a shadowy figure who vanishes without a trace. And finally, Sarah, the nurse, takes the dogs for a walk and never returns.

When private eye V.I. Warshawski is called out to a derelict drug house in a rural town just south of Chicago, she discovers something she wasn't expecting: the mutilated corpse of a man, dumped in a cornfield. It is a discovery that throws V.I. into the fascinating world of physics and invention: a design that sparked the construction of the computer as we know it, the development of nuclear weapons, the wonder of Newton's prisms and a train of dramatic events that occurred in wartime Vienna.

Sissy Sawyer, an unredeemed hippy, has an uncanny ability to read the future – and the lives of those she holds dear may soon depend on it... - One afternoon, shadows started to flicker along the corridors of The Red Hotel in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and both guests and staff heard persistent grinding noises that gave them “the freesons” – or goosebumps. Months later, Sissy Sawyer’s step-nephew Billy drops by with his new girlfriend, T-Yon. Sissy has an uncanny ability to read the future using her special Tarot cards, and T-Yon wants her help.

JT Maroney, veteran river guide, is ready to take his 125th trip deep into the heart of the Grand Canyon, one of the most beautiful natural chasms in the world. JT think he’s seen it all before, but this trip will change him forever. For the next two weeks, his 12 passengers - mostly strangers to one another, and certainly to him - will paddle, swim, ride the rapids, sleep under the stars, and breathe in the drama of the landscape. They’ll also learn all about each other; more, perhaps, than they wanted to know.

The March sisters are among the most beloved characters in children's literature, and Little Men picks up the story of fiery, headstrong Jo where Good Wives left off. Intelligent, funny, perceptive, and genuinely touching, the novel is set at a rather unusual boarding school run by Jo and her husband, where the pupils are encouraged to pillow fight and keep pets. When the penniless but talented orphan Nat Blake shows up on her doorstep, Jo takes him in, and his arrival sets in motion a chain of events that will affect all their lives.

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families. For V.I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango?