Shadow Point

Fantasy-roman.

The Shadow Saga continues with in this “fun, fast, action-packed novel” of magic, mystery, and monstrous evil (Elitist Book Reviews). After helping his lover Josephine lay claim to the throne of Nimea, the assassin Caim has ventured north to the land that has haunted his dreams—cold, unforgiving Eregoth. He departs seeking answers to his parents’ murder and hoping that this knowledge will explain his ability to bend the shadows to his will. In searching for his past, Caim wanders into war. But Eregoth is threatened by a power more terrifying than any army—the witch Sybelle, Queen of the Dark. If given the chance, her aims at destruction would not cease at Eregoth but storm through Nimea where Josey struggles to secure her reign. With nothing more than a force of ragtag warriors at his side, Caim knows that standing against Sybelle’s onslaught may be suicide. But as a son of the Shadow, he has no choice but to fight. Even if every life he takes brings him closer to the blackness that would claim him body and soul...

This graphic novel chronicles the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City through moving individual stories that bear witness to history and the ways it shapes the future.

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Favorite Book of 2011 The New York Times Book Review has praised Richard Burgin’s stories as “eerily funny . . . dexterous . . . too haunting to be easily forgotten,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer calls him “one of America’s most distinctive storytellers . . . no one of his generation reports the contemporary war between the sexes with more devastating wit and accuracy.” Now, in Shadow Traffic, his seventh collection of stories, five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin gives us his most incisive, witty, and daring collection to date as he explores the mysteries of love and identity, ambition and crime, and our ceaseless, if ambivalent, quest for truth. In “Memorial Day,” an aging man at a public swimming pool recalls a brief but momentous affair he had with a young British woman in London thirty years ago and the paradoxical role his recently deceased father played in it. In the highly suspenseful “Memo and Oblivion,” set in the near future in New York, two rival drug organizations engage in a dangerous battle for supremacy—one promoting a pill that increases memory exponentially, the other a pill that dramatically eliminates memory. “The Interview” centers on a B-movie starlet married to a much older and more famous director and her tragic yet comic interview with an ambitious but conflicted young reporter. Shadow Traffic justifies the New York Times’ claim that Burgin offers “characters of such variety that no generalizations about them can apply” and why the Boston Globe concluded that “Burgin’s tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice.”

It wasn’t easy getting to Shadow Point. Turns out it’s even harder to leave. Madison McPeake, not in the best mood most of the time, has just been not-quite fired, told her brother is dead, discovered she’s responsible for a five-year old niece she’s never met and realized she has to go all the way to San Diego to see to her brother's affairs. Isolated from the world by geography and a navy base bristling with security, Shadow Point is scarcely habitable—at least Madison thinks so. Coping with the living conditions while getting to know her niece is a daily challenge. Things get easier when the next-door neighbor, Dr. Alice Piper, seems as eager to share smoldering glances as Madison is. But something’s not right and Madison’s questions about her brother’s death go unanswered. Madison’s not sure if unnerving events are actually subtle warnings to stop her inquiries. The sexy, alluring Pipe doesn’t seem to think anything’s amiss, which only compounds Madison’s fears. And every time she makes up her mind to pack up her niece and go, it's as if someone—or something—has decided she should stay. Debut writer Amy Briant has crafted a heroine with more vices than graces in Madison McPeake, who narrates the mystery and passion—and hair-raising surprises—of Shadow Point.

A wish is the strongest form of magic. It's also the most dangerous. For psychic Charlie Payne being haunted is an everyday experience. When Charlie agrees to help her cousin forage for furniture at an auction she expects to steer her cousin clear of any lingering spirits. But a child's wish makes that impossible. When her cousin brings home an object with a ghost-child attached to it, Charlie finds herself drawn into a sixty-year-old mystery. Her instinct is to help the child move toward the light. But the deeper she digs, the more she realizes that some things should stay buried, because a spirit guarding a secret will do whatever it takes to protect it, including kill. Shadow Child is the sixth book in the Witches of Palmetto Point series. If you like spine-tingling supernatural suspense, witches, ghosts, and other paranormal creatures then you will love the Witches of Palmetto Point series. Get your copy now and get comfy because once you start reading, you won't put it down.

The excellently received call for papers of the 13th Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, June 29-July 2 (SCIA 2003) resulted in the selected articles of this proceedings. Additionally the volume also contains invited contributions from - Ivar Austvoll, Stavanger University College (NO), - Lars B? a? ath, Halmstad University (SE), - Ewert Bengtsson, Uppsala University (SE), - Rasmus Larsen, Technical University of Denmark (DK), - Jussi Parkkinen, University of Joensuu (FI), - Pietro Perona, California Institute of Technology (US) which brings the total number of articles to 152. The theme of the papers are dominated by the categories - Feature extraction - Depth and surface - Medical image processing - Shape analysis - Segmentation and spatial grouping - Coding and representation - Motion analysis - Texture analysis - Color analysis - Indexing and categorization which also represent the topical groupings of this book. The particularly strong response to the feature extraction, depth and surface, and medical image processing themes makes us believe that these areas are c- rently expansive, partly because of the rich set of problems which remain to be addressed.

Online applications have been gaining wide acceptance among the general public. Companies like Amazon, Google, Yahoo! and NetFlicks have been doing extremely well over the last few years largely because of people becoming more comfortable and trusting of the Internet. The increasing acceptance of online products makes it increasingly important to address some of the scientific techniques involved in developing efficient 3D online systems.The topics discussed in this book broadly cover four categories: networking issues in online multimedia; joint texture-mesh simplification and view independent transmission; view dependent transmission and server-side rendering; content and background creation; and creating simple online games.

While working on a project translating letters from sixteenth-century Prague, high school senior Nora Kane discovers her best friend murdered with her boyfriend the apparent killer and is caught up in a dangerous web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all searching for a mysterious ancient device purported to allow direct communication with God.