After two decades working for a top luxury retailer, she traded fashion accessories for accessories to murder. National bestselling author Diane Vallere writes funny and fashionable character-based mysteries. My mom is anĮxcellent seamstress, and often took my sister and Read More. I have fond memories of playing in fabric stores when I was young. The designer used eighteen karat gold, and the Read More. They knew that this would be an awesome present Read More.ĭiane Vallere | Proprietary Fabric to Die Forīack when I worked in retail, I sat through a training seminar on a My parents gave me a long brown wig for my seventh birthday. When I wrote the first book in the Material Witness Mystery Involved sewing a hood with cat ears and Read More. When I was in first grade, my mom made me a black cat costume for Halloween. Ready for a murder mystery cloaked in a "costume?" Fear not, Diane Vallere is here! We're giving away a copy of DRESSED TO CONFESS
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At one point, Adam recalls watching Avatar on acid and ranting about how “there were people here, on this planet, suffering, being shat on, and there’s this prick painted blue getting all emotional about pixels”. While the squalor is sometimes laid on thick, there’s a thrilling sense that Griffiths is taking seriously lives that many novelists ignore and the book’s riotousness means it’s neither dour nor sermon-like. Adam goes on a cross-country bender that gets him caught up in another addict’s money-lending scam Cowley accepts cash to compete in illicit bloodsports Emma plunges into a vortex of rough, random sex. Pairing Irvine Welsh’s demotic vim with the conspiratorial frisson of a David Peace novel, it's strange and compellingīenefit sanctions and service cuts imperil the trio’s hard-won equilibrium. How poignant that the BBC has chosen the festive season to broadcast Jack Thorne’s virtuosic adaptation of Pullman’s no-less virtuosic inversion of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Welcome to the final series of His Dark Materials (BBC One), one that will cover the action of The Amber Spyglass, the last volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy. “Brace!” he yells to his daemon as he activates an appealingly old-school parachute. How does he propose to complete the recruitment drive for his war against the Authority if his corpse ends up pulled from the wreckage? Let’s not even go there. James McAvoy’s face tightens, because his fascinatingly realised steampunkish flying machine is on a collision course with what air crash investigators call, in their quaint way, the ground. ‘W e’ve lost the rear oscillator,” says the snow leopard to Lord Asriel. Before long he finds himself at tournaments socializing-and competing-with Scrabble's elite.īut this book is about more than hardcore Scrabblers, for the game yields insights into realms as disparate as linguistics, psychology, and mathematics. His curiosity soon morphs into compulsion, as he sets about memorizing thousands of obscure words and fills his evenings with solo Scrabble played on his living room floor. He begins by haunting the gritty corner of a Greenwich Village park where pickup Scrabble games can be found whenever weather permits. Joel" a burly, unemployed African American from Baltimore's inner city the three-time national champion who plays according to Zen principles and Fatsis himself, who we see transformed from a curious reporter to a confirmed Scrabble nut. But the game's most talented competitors inhabit a sphere far removed from the masses of "living room players." Theirs is a surprisingly diverse subculture whose stars include a vitamin-popping standup comic a former bank teller whose intestinal troubles earn him the nickname "G.I. More than two million sets are sold every year and at least thirty million American homes have one. Scrabble might truly be called America's game. Stefan Fatsis, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and National Public Radio regular, recounts his remarkable rise through the ranks of elite Scrabble players while exploring the game's strange, potent hold over them-and him. Rich pickings for any storyteller: the supporting cast includes Icarus, who flew too close to the sun Perseus, who killed the Gorgon Medusa, who turned men to stone and Medea, who murdered her own children in revenge for their father’s taking a new wife. Meanwhile, back on Crete, King Minos was succeeded by his son, who made peace with Theseus, giving him Ariadne’s younger sister Phaedra in marriage as part of the deal, only for Phaedra to fall in love with Theseus’s stepson Hippolytus. Luckily for Ariadne, she caught the eye of the god Dionysus, who fell in love with her - although the god of wine was never going to make the most reliable of husbands. Her reward for betraying her father, King Minos? Theseus abandoned her on the island of Naxos on the way back to Athens and told everyone she’d died. Until, that is, the year when the Athenian party included the Prince Theseus, who killed the Minotaur with the help of the Princess Ariadne. Every year, the Athenians were forced to send 14 young men and women as a human sacrifice. Half-human, half-bull, the Minotaur lived in an underground labyrinth, terrorising everyone in earshot. GREEK mythology has a number of terrifying monsters, and none more so than the horrible Minotaur. He chronicles his travels to oddball geological places such as Italy’s Gargano Peninsula, which really belongs out in the middle of the ocean and which was populated “over the water, with ancestrally small animals-mice and dormice, for example, blown across on bits of floating plant, and birds flying over.” The monkeys that made their ways from Africa to South America had a tougher journey, crossing more than 1,000 miles of sea long after the continents broke apart 140 million years ago. One of the latter is his observation that grasses are only 70 million years old, meaning that grassland animals are younger than that. He takes pains, therefore, to write with clarity about what is “directly observable from the fossil record,” allowing for a few alternate theories and surprises. The author recognizes that geologic time is mind-boggling given a record of life that stretches back 4 billion years and a planet another half-billion years older than that. He begins along the banks of the Thames, which “now enters the sea more than 100 miles south of where it used to flow” thanks to changing sea levels in times of glaciation and glacial melt: Britain was once a tropical swamp. A tour of the past worlds that the geological history of Earth reveals.īritish paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Halliday roams the globe to examine the geological maxim that Earth’s past is its present and future-that the processes that once placed the continents into a single supermass will do so again. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The faintly incestuous family relationships the bourbon the sex down on the levee and the soft singsong of "baby" and "Everett baby".Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. While the scene here is California, the climate seems more somnolently southern in character: the fretful dissolution. So that now Lily, always more or less alone, drifting through occasional sexual episodes, only discovers too late what she has jeopardized and forfeited. Her only closer connection is Martha, Everett's sister, Martha who had first known Ryder Channing and accidentally drowned after his defection with another girl. Most of it centers on and around Lily whose rather fragile beauty harmonizes with her rather vague lostness in spite of her reasonably satisfactory marriage to Everett, and their two children, she is disengaged and more or less suspended in the past of her childhood (looking to be loved as her father had loved her). From the time when Everett McClellan kills Ryder Channing, his wife Lily's latest lover, this reviews the earlier personal history which led to this one finite, unnecessary gesture. This identification between fictitious family (the Samsas) and true family (the Kafkas) also inspired a change into the time context: the story is placed at Central Europe subjugated by national socialism, grotesque regime that Franz Kafka didn't know, but it was what, some years after his death, annihilated his family. He added some winks to other Kafka's works (and Borges', and Piranesi's.) and above all, he dressed the story with a lot of allusions and references to the author's private and familar life, especially to his father, Hermann Kafka, whom Franz always had complicated relationship. He took advantage from what producion achieved (as a magnificent location with a library with more than 60,000 volumes). He made the risky decision to don't limit himself too much to the text. Two years after finishing film studies, Carlos Atanes, great fan of Franz Kafka, directed this adaptation very freely. Cast: Antonio Vladimir, Manuel Solàs, Arantxa Peña, José María Nunes, Anne Sofie Nilsson, Xavier Villena. Featuring stories by Liz Leo, Kristina Horner, Katrina Hamilton, Sunny Everson, Jennifer Lee Swagert, Maria Berejan, Stephen Folkins, Shay Lynam, and Rachael Sterling. One thing is certain: you'll never look at mistletoe the same way again. isitorsThe new drug all the kids are doingWet snowballs to the faceAn incredibly awkward office partyMonday Night Anthology presents a multi-genre collection of stories exploring the many surprises that lurk beneath the most festive time of year. Nine stories of holiday cheer gone awry Reasons to think twice before kissing under the mistletoe: An accidental trip through space and timeThe zombie apocalypseA stranger in the woodsThe VHS that never should have been rentedA moonshine recipe from outer spaceUnwanted midnight v. The Mistletoe Paradox: A Monday Night Anthology (Trade Paperback / Paperback)īy Horner, Kristina Hamilton, Katrina Lynam, Shay In the meantime, I ordered this grand illustrated hardcover. I set it aside thinking I might try again later when not in midwinter. Early on in the story, there seemed not to be a single ray of mercy, kindness, love, or hope breaking through the grim darkness. I am not sure if this was due to listening to an audio version, which sometimes works for me and sometimes not, or something else, but mostly, I believe that it was the loathing and malice of the characters towards one another that put me off. Villainous Steerpike seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.’ A grand miasma of doom and foreboding weaves over the sterile rituals of the castle. Here is the blurb for that part of the trilogy, for anyone not familiar with it: ‘Titus Groan starts with the birth and ends with the first birthday celebrations of the heir to the grand, tradition-bound castle of Gormenghast. The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn PeakeĪh, Gormenghast! I (td) have only got through Titus Groan, so far, which is the first book of the trilogy. Book review: The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy, by Mervyn Peake td Whittle Posted on July 28, 2017 |