Trophies And Dead Things

When a former sixties radical is murdered during a string of random sniper attacks, the All Souls Legal Cooperative must settle his surprisingly large estate. Then private investigator Sharon McCone comes across a new will, made just days before he died, that disinherits his two children in favor of four unknown and unconnected parties. McCone sifts through Perry Hilderly's belongings but finds little to explain this puzzling change. That is, until she uncovers a .357 with the serial number burned off. As McCone tracks down the new beneficiaries she discovers that the shootings aren't so random after all and that the dead man isn't the only one with a lurid past. To link the heirs to the killings, she must follow a treacherous trail of evidence that travels from the Vietnam years to the present. But along the way the elusive sniper waits in a homicidal rage and takes aim-this time at All Souls and Sharon McCone.

Investigator Sharon McCone probes the strange will of murder victim Perry Hilderly, who had disinherited his children to leave his fortune to four strangers, and uncovers a tangled web of old secrets leading back to the Vietnam War

Since the Gold Rush, California prospectors have siphoned off the waters of isolated Tufa Lake, exposing the fragile, otherworldly mineral formations of the lake basin. Now a local environmental group seeks to block the latest incursion by developers—a massive mining operation funded by TransPacific, a US-Hong Kong interest that seems to be behind a series of break-ins, disappearances, and shady land deals. Into this stark, lunar landscape treads San Francisco PI Sharon McCone, searching for a local eccentric now missing after a suspicious land deal. When the bullet-ridden corpse of an investor surfaces in the lake’s silvery waters, McCone finds herself on a twisted trail that leads to San Francisco and then back to where it all began—the eerie desert mesas where a murderer prepares to kill again.

The celebrated New York Times Bestseller A Best Book of the Year pick at the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, TIME, Washington Post, Oprahmag.com, Thrillist, Shelf Awareness, Good Housekeeping and more. What does it take to come back to life? For Jessa-Lynn Morton, the question is not an abstract one. In the wake of her father’s suicide, Jessa has stepped up to manage his failing taxidermy business while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the taxidermy shop to make provocative animal art, while her brother, Milo, withdraws. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. It’s not until the Mortons reach a tipping point that a string of unexpected incidents begins to open up surprising possibilities and second chances. But will they be enough to salvage this family, to help them find their way back to one another? Kristen Arnett’s breakout bestseller is a darkly funny family portrait; a peculiar, bighearted look at love and loss and the ways we live through them together.

Birth, maturity, marriage and death: These are the four cornerstones of human life, the great occasions. *Over 650 memorable selections to commemorate the milestones of life. *Poetry and prose from a broad spectrum of highly regarded writers, including Aiken, Pound, Dickinson, Seneca, Blake, Buddha, Bronte, Marcuse, Stevens, Sexton, Tagore, Lippman, Sandburg, Sarton, Pasternak, Lao Tzu, Yevtushenko, Yeats and many more. This treasury of words pays tribute to the watershed events of life. Prose and poetry selections are sorted by the occasion they honor--birth, coming-of-age, marriage and death. Originally designed for ministers by a beloved New England pastor who spent years officiating at such occasions, this useful reference will be valued by anyone who is called upon to officiate, speak or contribute to ceremonies that commemorate the great passages of life. Includes index of authors, first lines and subjects, plus services for adoption, divorce and memorials.

Our history is littered with heads. Over the centuries, they have decorated our churches, festooned our city walls and filled our museums; they have been props for artists and specimens for laboratory scientists, trophies for soldiers and items of barter. Today, as videos of decapitations circulate online and cryonicists promise that our heads may one day live on without our bodies, the severed head is as contentious and compelling as ever. From shrunken heads to trophies of war; from memento mori to Damien Hirst's With Dead Head; from grave-robbing phrenologists to enterprising scientists, Larson explores the bizarre, often gruesome and confounding history of the severed head. Its story is our story.

Rowland presents a detailed exploration of how the archetypes of ancient goddesses Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite breathe into and shape female-authored detective fiction. Representing aspects of characterisation not bound by gender, the book examines how these archetypes emerge in themes like the home and hearth, hunting, survival and desire. Rowland assesses numerous examples from a range of works, providing a clear illustration of each archetype and illuminating aspects of femininity, psyche and being. This uniquely interdisciplinary work of literary analysis sheds light on the popularity and underlying mystique of the genre.

The mother dies by random accident. The father's friend, swayed by "the crudest concept of tragedy...the simple fall of men from whatever heights they have achieved," kills himself. These are the events that provoke the father to abandon his orderly life as an English professor in the kingdom of a small college campus, taking his son to teach the boy, with travels and a trunkful of tools, about the other kingdoms. "Literature is too redemptive!" That is the father's theme in the exuberant conversation he carries on with his son as they travel back through the places of the father's past and onward to places where both are strangers, making their living by fixing broken things. The father gives all of his sparkling education to this son, teaching him geometry on sandy beaches, botany in fields. Above all, he theatrically quotes poetry and literature, always making his case against the artificial order of literature, always warning his son against expectations of order. The son accepts the father's invaluable love and lessons until the others he meets and he himself being to qualify, reshape, sift his father's lessons. Narrated by the son, this novel of action and quiet places and startling conversation shows a creative vision of how fathers and sons can grow together and separate without the clash of life-stunting conflict.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

New York Times bestselling author, Marcia Muller, brings you another thrilling mystery with her famous private investigator, Sharon McCone. The body of an woman washes up near Point Deception, California--a day after she was spotted near her broken-down car on the highway. Deputy Sheriff Rhoda Swift worries the woman's brutal rape and murder will resurrect fears from the unsolved massacre of two families 13 years before. When Rhoda investigates with journalist Guy Newberry, a shocking truth will test how far she is willing to go for justice.