Blood Orchid

Through stark observations and visceral experiences, Blood Orchid begins Charles Bowden’s dizzying excavation of the brutal, systemic violence and corruption at the roots of American society. Like a nightmarish fever dream that turns out to be our own reality, Bowden visits dying friends in skid row apartments in Los Angeles, traverses San Francisco byways lined with clubs and joints, and roams through village bars and streets in the Sierra Madre mountains. In these wanderings resides a yearning for the understanding of past and present sins, the human penchant for warfare, abuse, and oppression, and the true war between humanity, the industrialized world, and the immense tolls of our shared land. Deeply personal, hauntingly prophetic, and bracingly sharp, the start to Bowden’s harrowed quest to unearth our ugly truths remains strikingly poignant today.

“Savvy, sexy”* police chief Holly Barker gets introduced to the cutthroat world of Florida real estate in this New York Times bestselling thriller from Stuart Woods. Blood Orchid: the name of Ed Shine’s favorite flower—and his latest real-estate venture. New to town, the dapper developer makes the acquaintance of Holly, her father Ham, and her wily Doberman, Daisy. It’s just as Holly’s trying to get her life back together after the shattering loss of someone very close to her. But before she can settle back into her routine, bullets crash into the home of a friend and a floater is found bobbing in the Intercoastal Waterway. Joining forces with a handsome FBI agent, Holly tracks the clues straight back to their source, only to find a scam more lucrative and more dangerous than any this idyllic town—or Holly—has ever seen...

Trauma surgeon Kate Marshall won’t be forced into hiding after an ominous warning. Not even after a patient with connections to a vicious crime lord with a taste for revenge dies on her table. But when a ghostly figure appears just before bullets start flying, Kate might be forced to admit she’s in trouble. Ex-Army doctor Jason Nolan should have been on duty at the hospital. Instead, he’s numbing the pain of his past in a waterfront bar. When the tall, leggy, Grace Kelly lookalike stalks in to give him a piece of her mind, he deserves it. Kate doesn’t deserve to be stalked by a serial killer with a motive that extends all the way to the Louisiana bayou and has ties to a past Nolan would like to forget. And only Nolan can help Kate navigate the terrifying path. A path riddled with voodoo, superstition, and death. Each book in The Shadow Sisters Series is a standalone story that can be enjoyed in any order. Book #1: Black Rose Book #2: Blood Orchid Book #3: Scarlet Bells Book #4: Dark Lily

The second book in the Night Flower Series.

Stuart Woods brings back small-town police chief Holly Barker—and her extraordinary Doberman, Daisy—for another exhilarating adventure in this New York Times bestseller. When Holly Barker’s wedding festivities are shattered by a brutal robbery, she vows to find the culprits. With nothing to go on but the inexplicable killing of an innocent bystander, Holly discovers evidence that leads her into the midst of a clan whose members are as mysterious as they are zealous. Holly’s father, Ham, a retired army master sergeant, is her ticket into their strange world. What he finds there boggles the mind and sucks them all—Holly, Ham, and Daisy—into a whirlpool of crazed criminality from which even the FBI can’t save them...

"An entertaining suspense story. . . . Barker is tough when she needs to be, and clever and persistent in following her hunches." — School Library Journal #1 New York Times bestselling author Stuart Woods delivers a riveting thriller that introduces his first female protagonist, Deputy Chief of Police Holly Barker. Forced into early retirement at thirty-seven, smart and fiercely independent Major Holly Barker trades in her bars as a military cop for the badge of deputy chief of police in Orchid Beach, Florida. But below the sunny surface of this sleepy, well-to-do island town lies an evil that escalates into the cold-blooded murder of one of Holly's new colleagues. An outsider, Holly has little to go on for answers and no one to help her—except Daisy, a Doberman of exceptional intelligence and loyalty that becomes her companion and protector. The closer Holly gets to the truth, the more she knows that it'll take one smart dog with guts to sniff out this killer—before he can catch her first.

From one of the world's foremost researchers and pioneers of pediatric health--a book that offers hope and a pathway to success for parents, teachers, psychologists, pyschiatrists, and child development experts coping with "difficult" children. A book that fully explores the author's revolutionary discovery about childhood development, parenting, and the key to helping all children find happiness and success. In The Orchid and the Dandelion, Dr. W. Thomas Boyce writes of the "dandelion" child (hardy, resilient, healthy), able to survive and flourish under most circumstances, and the "orchid" child (sensitive, susceptible, fragile), who, given the right support, can thrive as much as, if not more than, other children. For the past four decades Boyce has been working with troubled children. The Orchid and the Dandelion offers help to those who have lost their confidence in the promise of a child gone seriously adrift--into drug abuse, delinquency, depression, or destructive friendships, the dark territory of psychological trouble, school failure, or criminality. Boyce's breakthrough research reveals how genetic makeup and environment shape behavior. Rather than seeing this "risk" gene as a liability, through his daring research, Boyce has recast the way we think of human frailty and shows that while variant genes can create problems (susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors), they can also, in the right setting and with the right nurturing, produce children who not only do better than before but far exceed their peers. He describes what it is to be an "orchid" child, to live a life far more intense, painful, vivid, and variable than that of a dandelion. For orchid children, the world is often a frightening and overwhelming place. He makes clear that orchids are not failed dandelions and shows people how to embrace the unique gifts, abilities, and strengths of orchid children and how to create and environment at home and work that will allow them to flourish. Boyce writes, as well, of dandelions: how vital they are to what George Eliot describes as "the growing good of the world," even in the midst of their own struggles and life challenges. He writes of his own family, particularly of his sister, the inspiration for his work, an orchid child overcome by the family's tragedies and sadnesses to which the author, as a dandelion child, was impervious. And we come to understand that beneath the servicable categories of "orchid" and "dandelion" lies the truer reality of a continuum, a spectrum of sensitivities to the world, along which we all have a place.