Wanda McCaddon
Lord Pastern fired his revolver. The figure in the spotlight fell and the coup-de-theatre had become murder. Could Inspector Alleyn believe Pastern had let hatred of his future son-in-law go too far?
When Lord Pastern Bagott takes up with the hot music of Breezy Bellair and His Boys, his disapproving wife Cecile has more than usual to be unhappy about. The band's devastatingly handsome but roguish accordionist, Carlos Rivera, has taken a
...For twenty years, Anna Bouverie has been the dutiful wife of a village rector, scraping by on his pitiful salary, making cakes for the church bake sales, ironing her husband's surplices, and clothing herself and her children in hand-me-downs. But when an expected promotion to archdeacon falls through, her husband retreats into bitterness.
Faced with isolation, the lost hope of a better life, and the bullying of her daughter at school, Anna
...65) July's people
68) Memento mori
Unforgettably astounding and a joy to read, Memento Mori is considered by many to be the greatest novel by the wizardly Dame Muriel Spark.
In late 1950s London, a group of aging eccentrics is brought together by a series of uncanny events. Lettie Colston is the first to receive an anonymous phone call from an insinuating voice reminding her that she must die. Soon, ten of Lettie's friends also receive the call. In the flurry that results
...Known to millions as the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and the bestselling author of a dozen detective novels, Dorothy Leigh Sayers was in reality a complex woman––moved, she said, by "a careless rage for life." It is this complex Sayers, brilliant student, controversial apologist, witty, bawdy, intolerant of fools––the woman "terrified of emotion"––who is revealed in this new biography.
The production of Sayers'
...College Sunrise is a vaguely disreputable finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into his creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots and the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, has already excited the interest of publishers.
..."Excellent...oozes with suspense and intrigue." —Booklist
As the autumn storms of 1271 ravage the East Anglian coast, Crowner Ralf finds the corpse of a brutally murdered soldier in the woods near Tyndal Priory. The dagger in the man's chest is engraved with a strange, cursive design, and the body is wrapped in a crusader's cloak. Was the murder the act of a member of the Assassin sect, or was the weapon meant to mislead him in finding
...Bookish, sensitive, and given to wild enthusiasms, Rickie Elliot is virtually made for a life at Cambridge, where he can subsist on a regimen of biscuits and philosophical debate. But the love-smitten Rickie leaves his natural habitat to marry the devastatingly practical Agnes Pembroke, who brings with her, as a sort of dowry, a teaching position at the abominable Sawston School.
Out of this misalliance comes Forster's most stylistically daring
...80) Trilby
Trilby opens in the Latin Quarter of nineteenth-century Paris, where Trilby O'Ferrall is working as an artist's model. Her grace and ingenuous charm make a poignant contrast to the cruel magnetism of Svengali, under whose spell she falls. Using hypnotic powers, Svengali shapes her into a virtuoso singer—Europe's most captivating soprano—but her golden voice, and even her life, become fatally tied to him.
A precursor to The Phantom
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