Blood in the Snow, Marlene Fanta Shyer, Maggie Kaufman Smith, Very Good Book

Simple Pleasures presents "Two Daughters" by Marlene Fanta Shyer Hardcover ~ Large Print ~ New Synopsis The picture-perfect Ehrlich family's problems are hardly problems to the rest of the world. As Dr. Peter Ehrlich and his wife, Libby, an antiques dealer, work long hours, 16-year-old Claudia dates a boy they don't approve of and 13-year-old Ellery tries to outgrow her sister's shadow. But secrets shaped this family, and when the unthinkable occurs, Libby must confront the unspoken truths no o

A mysterious plague of slain animals leads Sean Kendall and U.S. Wildlife Officer Adam Raines hot on the trail of a deadly poaching ring. The deeper they get into catching the killers, the more horrific of a reality they uncover. Their poachers are the fringe of a far more sinister enemy - a group of radicals who call themselves the Blue Army . As Sean and Adam edge closer to the truth, they reveal an insidious plot to assault a Free Trade Conference being held in Seattle. Further complicating his once peaceful world, Sean finds himself falling for Miranda Shaw, a vivacious auburn-haired visitor to the North Cascades. The budding romance swiftly becomes one of volatility as Sean begins to indict Miranda s cousins as prime suspects in the Blue Army s plans. Sean struggles against his feelings for Miranda, a government that won t listen and a deadly race against the clock to stop the terrorists and save thousands of lives.

What Would You Give Up for Immortal Life and Love? By day, Elise draws and paints, spilling out the horrific visions of her tortured mind. By night, she walks the streets, selling her body to the highest bidder. And then they come into her life: a trio of impossibly beautiful vampires: Terence, Maria, and Edward. When they encounter Elise, they set an explosive triangle in motion. Terence wants to drain her blood. Maria just wants Elise . . . as lover and partner through eternity. And Edward, the most recently-converted, wants to prevent her from making the same mistake he made as a young abstract expressionist artist in 1950s Greenwich Village: sacrificing his artistic vision for immortal life. He is the only one of them still human enough to realize what an unholy trade this is. In the Blood is a novel that will grip you in a vise of suspense that won't let go, forcing you to stay up long past midnight, turning page after page, until the very last moment, when a surprising turn of events changes everything and demonstrates, truly, what love and sacrifice are all about.

The Utu festival was only three days old when the first body was found, 22 year old Gloria Ashlock, naked except for her shoes, leashed to a column in a warehouse and stabbed 35 times. The discovery was a shock but not a surprise to the police on Procrustes; they'd found eleven bodies during last year's festival and nine the year before. The humans, who had arrived a quarter century before, would scream and blame it on the indifference of the native Zherghi to crimes against anyone but themselves. The Council had agreed if the murders began again they would take action. They brought in a human detective. When Sam Dane arrived he found a city given over to drunken debauchery, with the police overwhelmed by the manic festival and the killer leaving new victims day after day. Not speaking the language and unable to read clues on alien faces, Dane looks for any thread to follow back to the predator. Amid the chaos, where every action is colored by species, alcohol, sex, violence, greed, ambition and politics, Dane works against time and the odds to keep the murders from destroying the city. He discovers that it's easier to bury bodies than secrets, and that there are worse crimes than murder.

DANTE LIVES. Vampire. Rock star. Begotten son of the fallen angel Lucien. Dante Baptiste still struggles with nightmares and seizures, searching for the truth about his past. It is a quest as seductive as his kiss, as uncontrollable as his thirst, and as unforgiving as his determination to protect one mortal woman at any cost. KNOWLEDGE KILLS. FBI Special Agent Heather Wallace now knows the extent of the Bureau corruption that surrounds her, but worries she is losing the battle. And when Dante and his band Inferno come to Seattle on tour, Heather can't help but be drawn back to the beautiful, dangerous nightkind. But what Heather and Dante don't know is that new enemies lurk in the shadows, closer than they think...and even deadlier than they fear. DESTINY UNFOLDS. Shadowy government forces have pledged to eliminate all loose ends from Project Bad Seed -- and Heather and Dante are at the top of the list. Elsewhere, the Fallen gather in Gehenna, intent on finding their long-awaited savior, the True Blood nightkind whom Lucien DeNoir would die to protect. And a damaged and desperate adversary, with powers as strange and perilous as Dante's own, plots to use Dante as a pawn in a violent scheme for revenge. But only one of these lethal forces holds the key to Dante's past -- a key that could finally unlock the secret of his birth and the truth of his existence...or destroy him completely.

DANTE LIVES. Vampire. Rock star. Begotten son of the fallen angel Lucien. Dante Baptiste still struggles with nightmares and seizures, searching for the truth about his past. It is a quest as seductive as his kiss, as uncontrollable as his thirst, and as unforgiving as his determination to protect one mortal woman at any cost. KNOWLEDGE KILLS. FBI Special Agent Heather Wallace now knows the extent of the Bureau corruption that surrounds her, but worries she is losing the battle. And when Dante and his band Inferno come to Seattle on tour, Heather can't help but be drawn back to the beautiful, dangerous nightkind. But what Heather and Dante don't know is that new enemies lurk in the shadows, closer than they think...and even deadlier than they fear. DESTINY UNFOLDS. Shadowy government forces have pledged to eliminate all loose ends from Project Bad Seed -- and Heather and Dante are at the top of the list. Elsewhere, the Fallen gather in Gehenna, intent on finding their long-awaited savior, the True Blood nightkind whom Lucien DeNoir would die to protect. And a damaged and desperate adversary, with powers as strange and perilous as Dante's own, plots to use Dante as a pawn in a violent scheme for revenge. But only one of these lethal forces holds the key to Dante's past -- a key that could finally unlock the secret of his birth and the truth of his existence...or destroy him completely.

Elizabeth Goodweather and her husband built a rewarding life in the hills and hollows of their adopted Appalachian home. But now Elizabeth is alone, her husband tragically killed, her children grown, the land around her filled with customs and beliefs she cannot share. It’s still a good life–tending the small herb and flower business–but Elizabeth’s fragile peace is about to be shattered.Cletus Gentry vanished while hunting ginseng in the hills–and his mother is sure the childlike man was murdered. As Elizabeth retraces Cletus’s last wanderings, she will discover that a killer has been waiting all the while in the coves and hollows near her farm for her to see the light…and then come willingly to her own death.

William Faulkner's character Quentin in The Sound and the Fury repeatedly observes that "temporary" is "the saddest word of all." Despair over human impermanence and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, reverberate at the heart of British Poet Laureate Motion's memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A pæan to his family, to the birds, brambles, and secret hollows of his beloved Hertfordshire and Essex, this memoir evokes with care, clarity, and detail, a whole world long disappeared. The book begins in the present tense in December of 1968, hours before the event that precipitated Motion's desire to capture and preserve unchanged the life he had known heretofore: his mother's foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. "My childhood has ended suddenly. In a day, " writes Motion at the close of the first chapter. "I want to lock into my head everything that's happened in my life up to now, and make sure it never changes."Whether recounting his first time salmon fishing with his father in Scotland, the horrors of prep school at the tender age of seven, or discovering Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan, Motion imbues these recollections with the quicksilver emotions of the boy he was and the perceptions of the poet he would become; readers of his verse will recognize many of these experiences as the antecedents of the poems. Yet this memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, " is, as the epigraph from Wordsworth suggests, an integral substance of our anatomy, a part that can be neither taken from us nor lost.