Foul Play At The Fair

When a rotten apple spoils the local harvest festival, event coordinator Liv Montgomery becomes an unplanned amateur sleuth in the first mystery in the Celebration Bay series. As more and more tourists flock to Celebration Bay, New York, to enjoy their seasonal festivals, the town is in need of a professional coordinator. Enter Manhattan event planner Liv Montgomery, tired of big-city stress and looking for an idyllic spot where she and her Westie terrier, Whiskey, can put down roots. The Harvest by the Bay Festival is Liv’s first chance to prove herself, and everything from apple bobbing to pumpkin painting goes perfectly—until the body of an itinerant juggler is discovered stuffed into an antique apple press. With a murderer on the loose, town leaders threaten to shut down the upcoming Halloween and Christmas festivals. But the town’s livelihood is at stake, and there is no way Liv is going to let that happen, even if she has to solve the murder herself. No matter how many balls she needs to keep in the air, Liv is determined to find a killer who’s rotten to the core...

Explains America's love of sport just as it reveals sport's darker side--the influence of big business, corruption, price gouging, political maneuvering, and media grandstanding. Visit our website for sample chapters!

There is cheating. And then there is cheating. But where does one end and the other start? Doping. Fixing. Sledging. Intimidating. Time-wasting. Diving. Ever since sporting contests began there have been rules, and for many competitors those rules have been there to be broken. Or maybe just bent a little . . . Foul Play offers an inside track on the dark arts employed in sport to gain an unfair advantage-on the football or rugby field, on the tennis or squash court, on the athletics track and the golf course, even on the bowling green or the Subbuteo table. Some cheating in sport is considered virtually par for the course, while other forms are completely unacceptable. But who, ultimately, makes that judgement? From ball-tampering and bribery in cricket to rugby union's 'Bloodgate' scandal; from Diego Maradona's Hand of God to Alex Ferguson's managerial mind games; from the dodgy dealing of the ancient Greeks and the wily cunning of W.G. Grace to the doping scandals engulfing Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong, it's all here. Foul Play-sometimes funny, sometimes shocking-provides all the evidence you'll ever need that the sporting world is often anything but.

"Daisy and Hazel must solve another murder at Deepdean when a bullying Head Girl turns up dead on Bonfire Night"--

Sometimes, we find friendship in the most unexpected places. When neighbourhood vandals smash the windows on the family car, ten-year-old Jordy is crushed. His old hand-me-down winter jacket has a big hole in the armpit, but now his parents won't be able to afford the new jacket they had promised him. Many of Jordy's neighbours have also been victims -- including Mrs. Brundle, an elderly woman whose precious lawn ornaments have been destroyed at the hands of the vandals. When Jordy hears that his new hockey teammate, Ryan, is the younger brother of one of the teens picked up for the vandalism, he isn't sure how to feel. But when Ryan shows up wearing a new winter jacket of his own, and it's the very one Jordy had wanted, Jordy is furious. In the end, an unexpected act of kindness from Mrs. Brundle gives Jordy the encouragement he needs to reach out to Ryan. And Jordy discovers that sometimes the best friendships appear when we least expect them.

A summer on an idyllic island surrounded by water and wildlife. What could possibly go wrong? When eleven-year-old Becca returns to her grandmother’s rustic cottage for another summer, she finds herself seeing her beloved island in new ways. A hunting owl mistakes a bobbing ponytail for prey. A cozy sleepover on the beach takes on the tinges of a nightmare when a family of river otters shows up to claim their territory. An argument between a nestbound baby eaglet and its haranguing mother reaches operatic dimensions. Becca finds a dead bear on the beach and helps to give it a burial at sea. Then there are dramas of the human variety. Aunt Meg is grieving over a miscarriage, and Aunt Clare’s medical work in Africa has brought on a sadness that even the love of family and the island’s beauty can’t cure. And there is the burning question of whether Aunt Fifi and the local plumber will ever become an item, and would that mean losing the only plumber on the island? Meanwhile, cousin Alicia claims to be too old to participate in the kids’ summer project — a performance of The Tempest, a play that seems to find unsettling echoes in the natural surroundings Becca thought she knew so well. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3 Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.

Foul and Fair Play is an examination of classic detective fiction as a genre--an attempt to read a wide variety of texts by different authors as variations on a common and relatively tight set of conventions. Marty Roth covers the period from the "prehistory" of detective fiction in Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells up to the 1960s, which marked the end, he says, of the classical period--"the end of an extremely conservative paradigm." The detective fiction genre, as Roth defines it, includes analytic detective fiction, hard-boiled detective fiction, and the spy thriller. Roth insists on the structural common ground of these three types of writing and places them in the larger system of mystery fiction that preceded and surrounds them. The first part of the book consists of a reading of conventions: conventions of character (the detective, the criminal), of gender and sexuality, of narrative style, of settings, and of the curious rules of exchange and coincidence that operate in the realm where detective stories take place. The second section deals with the convoluted epistemology of mystery and detective fiction, depending as it does on other major intellectual developments of the late nineteenth century, such as psychoanalysis. An extremely original study, Foul and Fair Play offers many insights into the literary and cultural history of a popular genre.

Shows how our belief in the value of sport is misplaced. Tracing the history of organised game-playing, this book argues that sport is a last refuge for sexism, racism, homophobia and animal cruelty. It cites neglected research in psychology, showing how playing sport tends to impinge negatively on your morals.