A Glint Of Black Stocking

When Tom Barclay returns to the Industrial West Riding of Yorkshire, England shortly after the end of World War II he finds his relationship with his daughter drastically affected. He's served five and a half years abroad in the Army. She was eight when he left and fourteen when he returned. Jonquil Barclay chooses a nursing career against her father's wishes and enters Prelimanary Training School at the local Royal Infirmary in November 1949. Strict imposed and self-discipline is required from day one. Serious illness, death, drudgery, extreme emotions and the traumas of patients and their families become daily life. As do the rewards of working as a team, the joys of seeing patients recover and sheer job satisfaction. Four young nurses rooming together become firm friends. They have fun bending the Infirmary rules and find relief from their tensions in sharing experiences. Young love intrudes in more ways than one and a surprising Infirmary intrigue develops. Christmas 1949 shows a rare, happy atmosphere for patients and staff alike. The joy of getting through her PTS exams at the end of three hard months is more than Joni ever hoped for.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

THE STORY: A wide assortment of characters gather in the play's setting: a gangster-run New York nightclub. They include a brutal and power-mad labor leader; a female singer who thinks she loves him; an idealistic young attorney haunted by memories

Juel is a beautiful young woman but had a cruel and abusive childhood, spending many years in a psychiatric hospital where she suffered further deprivations. She is now an amoral killer, seeking to satisfy her own insatiable desires of greed and pleasure. During a casual robbery she and two brothers kill an antiques dealer while stealing a set of priceless medieval jewels. Kay sees them escape and Juel attempts to silence her. She fails but later persuades the brothers to kidnap Kay so she can force her husband, Jake, to carry out a number of acts of revenge on her behalf, while she establishes her own alibi. Jake reluctantly agrees to these demands, believing that provided he does not inform the police and carries out what he thinks will be relatively minor offences, his wife Kay will come to no harm. He is sure that along the way he will be able to make his escape and rescue Kay. Jake has vowed he will do anything to free Kay but is soon faced with the true nature of Juel's lust for revenge - then it is too late to turn back. In following her instructions he participates in the bloody reprisals that follow but in a desperate shoot-out he saves her life and begins to understand the torment of her childhood. He finds himself drawn to protect her and finds her beauty hard to resist. Kay is locked underground but in her attempts to escape witnesses the true horror of the younger brother's warped imagination. Here he has created his own fantasy world of weapons and artefacts and uses an old dungeon to torture young women he has abducted. In doing so he re-lives the trauma and guilt he suffered the day his mother was killed in a horrific car accident, for which he was responsible. Finally Jake and Kay are reunited but in his heart Jake knows their love will never be the same again. Perhaps one day his memories of Juel will fade away.

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger award, The Wench is Dead is the eighth novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series. As portrayed by John Thaw in ITV's Inspector Morse. That night he dreamed in Technicolor. He saw the ochre-skinned, scantily clad siren in her black, arrowed stockings. And in Morse's muddled computer of a mind, that siren took the name of one Joanna Franks . . . Early in the morning of the 22nd of June, 1859, the body of Joanna Franks was found floating at Duke’s Cut along the Oxford Canal – an event which led to the trial and hanging of two suspected murderers. A hundred and thirty years later Chief Inspector Morse is bedbound and recovering from a perforated ulcer at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital when he is handed an old book to read, one that recounts the trial of a murder aboard the Barbara Bray canal boat: the murder of Joanna Franks. Investigating the account of the trial, Morse begins to question whether the two men hanged were truly guilty and sets out to prove his suspicions from the confines of his hospital bed . . . The Wench is Dead is followed by the ninth Inspector Morse book, The Jewel That Was Ours.

In an age of intolerance, compassion can be dangerous. Pillar of Fire captures the stunning witness of the medieval mystics known as Beguines. Amid the intrigues of kings and knights, against a panorama of church corruption, Crusader campaigns, and Inquisition trials, these bold women broke all the rules. In this sweeping historical saga, young Clarissa flees from a forced marriage, befriends a colorful minstrel, and unravels the mystery of a midwife's murder. After a spiritual pilgrimage to the Egyptian desert, she returns with a Muslim orphan and gathers a community of devoted sisters. Threats come when they offer refuge to people suffering from leprosy and a Jewish family under persecution. When church officials get word of their rituals celebrating the feminine aspects of God and of Clarissa's mystical visions, they charge her with heresy and turn up the heat, as she struggles with the wound of betrayal and discovers the power of forgiveness.

Olga Tufnell (1905–85) was a British archaeologist working in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, a period often described as a golden age of archaeological discovery. For the first time, this book presents Olga’s account of her experiences in her own words. Based largely on letters home, the text is accompanied by dozens of photographs that shed light on personal experiences of travel and dig life at this extraordinary time. Introductory material by John D.M. Green and Ros Henry provides the social, historical, biographical and archaeological context for the overall narrative. The letters offer new insights into the social and professional networks and history of archaeological research, particularly for Palestine under the British Mandate. They provide insights into the role of foreign archaeologists, relationships with local workers and inhabitants, and the colonial framework within which they operated during turbulent times. This book will be an important resource for those studying the history of archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly for the sites of Qau el-Kebir, Tell Fara, Tell el-‘Ajjul and Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish). Moreover, Olga’s lively style makes this a fascinating personal account of archaeology and travel in the interwar era.

The author's world encompasses dilapidated fight arenas, state mental hospitals & chaotic emergency rooms. The inhabitants are his brilliantly etched characters, who battle desperately against fate in a game of life they cannot win but dare not lose. As we approach the end of the century & the millennium, no one writes better or more vividly than Jones does about the personal, private apocalypses we all face in our darkest moments. In one story, a Vietnam vet, a Recon Marine, swims alone across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, & the Bosporus to maintain "the edge" that kept him alive in wartime - & that is all he now has left. In another, a brilliant doctor verges on a breakdown. In the title story, a young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows the world of boxing shields & protects him from the even crueler world outside of the ring. A number of these stories have appeared in different forms in the New Yorker, Playboy, & Esquire.