A Grammar Of Murder

The dark shadows and offscreen space that force us to imagine violence we cannot see. The real slaughter of animals spliced with the fictional killing of men. The missing countershot from the murder victim’s point of view. Such images, or absent images, Karla Oeler contends, distill how the murder scene challenges and changes film. Reexamining works by such filmmakers as Renoir, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Jarmusch, and Eisenstein, Oeler traces the murder scene’s intricate connections to the great breakthroughs in the theory and practice of montage and the formulation of the rules and syntax of Hollywood genre. She argues that murder plays such a central role in film because it mirrors, on multiple levels, the act of cinematic representation. Death and murder at once eradicate life and call attention to its former existence, just as cinema conveys both the reality and the absence of the objects it depicts. But murder shares with cinema not only this interplay between presence and absence, movement and stillness: unlike death, killing entails the deliberate reduction of a singular subject to a disposable object. Like cinema, it involves a crucial choice about what to cut and what to keep.

Now retired from the British Secret Service, former spy George Smiley agrees to do a favor for an old friend and investigates the mysterious demise of the wife of an assistant master at the distinguished Carne School. But Smiley gets more than he bargains for and is plunged headlong into a labyrinth of skeletons and hatreds.

“My head is spinning. I couldn’t figure out who was out for revenge!! My eBook froze as I quickly tried to turn the pages!! Could not put it down!!… Don’t want to give anything away but don’t miss this book!!!” Goodreads Reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ It’s a sleepy morning in the leafy town of Oakhurst when Jo finds Britney’s body on a running trail. She stares into the girl’s blue eyes as she gently lifts her off the ground—and finds a tarot card… A few days ago, Detective Jo Fournier stood in the middle of the local college, looking at a truly horrifying scene: a well-respected staff member murdered in his office. And it was there that Jo met Britney—a smart and pretty student in the same department who was utterly distraught about the killing. One thought is now racing through Jo’s mind: who would want to kill them both? When another body turns up inside a cabin in the woods, Jo is the only person who can see the link between the murders—the killer left a tarot card with all three bodies. She desperately wants to stop the killing before anyone else dies. Jo knows how it feels to lose someone you love. Her failure to protect her fiancé on the night he was murdered has always haunted her. As the body count rises, no one else will take Jo’s theory seriously. She’s absolutely sure that the cards are the clue that will break this entire case wide open and lead them to the person who has stolen so many innocent lives. But she’s out on her own—can Jo track down the dangerous killer or will they find her first? From USA Today bestseller M.M. Chouinard, Taken to the Grave is a completely addictive detective thriller that will keep you guessing into the early hours of the morning. If you love Kendra Elliot, Melinda Leigh and Lisa Regan, you’ll be utterly gripped! Everyone is utterly addicted to Taken to the Grave: “Keeping you enthralled and on the edge of your seat till the final page… Like a pressure cooker that keeps building up as you wait for the explosion!… Chock full of mystery and suspense, with twists and turns at every corner… A reveal that will knock your socks off.” Once Upon A Time Book Blog ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “OMG what a great lead character… I DID NOT FIGURE OUT THE TRUE BAD GUY UNTIL THE END!” NetGalley Reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “Amazing… Gripping and suspenseful… Five stars from me. Jo Fournier is one of the greatest characters ever written.” NetGalley Reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “If you haven’t already added this to your series lists, DO IT NOW… Highly recommend it, it’s full of twists and turns, red herrings, you will be left guessing, everything you want in a book.” Goodreads Reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “I could not stop turning the pages of this book… I wasn’t able to figure out who the killer was.” Fireflies and Free Kicks Book Reviews ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ “A gripping and intense thriller… Fast-paced and will keep you up well into the evening.” Sinfully Wicked Book Reviews ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Hamas has taken power in Palestine, and the Israeli government is rounding up threats. When Palestinian policewoman Rania Bakara finds herself thrown in prison, though she has never been part of Hamas, her friend Chloe flies in from San Francisco to get her out. Chloe begs an Israeli policeman named Benny for help—and Benny offers Rania a way out: investigate the death of a young man in a village near her own. The young man’s neighbors believe the Israeli army killed him; Benny believes his death might not have been so honorable. Initially, Rania refuses; she has no interest in helping the Israelis. But she is released anyway, and returns home to find herself without a job and suspected of being a traitor. Searching for redemption, she launches an investigation into the young man’s death that draws her into a Palestinian gay scene she never knew existed. With Chloe and her Palestinian Australian lover as guides, Rania explores a Jerusalem gay bar, meets with a lesbian support group, and plunges deep into the victim’s world, forcing her to question her beliefs about love, justice, and cultural identity.

A major new study of Sergei Eisenstein delivers fresh, in-depth analyses of the iconic filmmaker’s body of work What can we still learn from Sergei Eisenstein? Long valorized as the essential filmmaker of the Russian Revolution and celebrated for his indispensable contributions to cinematic technique, Eisenstein’s relevance to contemporary culture is far from exhausted. In Movement, Action, Image, Montage, Luka Arsenjuk considers the auteur as a filmmaker and a theorist, drawing on philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Gilles Deleuze—as well as Eisenstein’s own untranslated texts—to reframe the way we think about the great director and his legacy. Focusing on Eisenstein’s unique treatment of the foundational concepts of cinema—movement, action, image, and montage—Arsenjuk invests each aspect of the auteur’s art with new significance for the twenty-first century. Eisenstein’s work and thought, he argues, belong as much to the future as the past, and both can offer novel contributions to long-standing cinematic questions and debates. Movement, Action, Image, Montage brings new elements of Eisenstein’s output into academic consideration, by means ranging from sustained and comprehensive theorization of Eisenstein’s practice as a graphic artist to purposeful engagement with his recently published, unfinished book Method, still unavailable in English translation. This tour de force offers new and significant insights on Eisenstein’s oeuvre—the films, the art, and the theory—and is a landmark work on an essential filmmaker.

It's 1952. Reporter Sydney Lockhart checks into the historic Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Before she even unpacks, she discovers the brutally murdered body of the hotel's bookkeeper. What had begun as a simple travel-writing assignment now turns into a murder investigation. The bad news is that Sydney is a suspect. Determined to clear her name and prove herself a reporter deserving more than just travel assignments, Sydney becomes embroiled in the underworld of gangsters and gamblers. In her fight for the truth, she soon faces a more urgent battle: saving her own skin.