Dirty Secrets

A fascinating look at compulsive hoarding by a woman whose mother suffers from the disease. To be the child of a compulsive hoarder is to live in a permanent state of unease. Because if my mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make me? When her divorced mother was diagnosed with cancer, New York City writer Jessie Sholl returned to her hometown of Minneapolis to help her prepare for her upcoming surgery and get her affairs in order. While a daunting task for any adult dealing with an aging parent, it’s compounded for Sholl by one lifelong, complex, and confounding truth: her mother is a compulsive hoarder. Dirty Secret is a daughter’s powerful memoir of confronting her mother’s disorder, of searching for the normalcy that was never hers as a child, and, finally, cleaning out the clutter of her mother’s home in the hopes of salvaging the true heart of their relationship—before it’s too late. Growing up, young Jessie knew her mother wasn’t like other mothers: chronically disorganized, she might forgo picking Jessie up from kindergarten to spend the afternoon thrift store shopping. Now, tracing the downward spiral in her mother’s hoarding behavior to the death of a long-time boyfriend, she bravely wades into a pathological sea of stuff: broken appliances, moldy cowboy boots, twenty identical pairs of graying bargain-bin sneakers, abandoned arts and crafts, newspapers, magazines, a dresser drawer crammed with discarded eyeglasses, shovelfuls of junk mail . . . the things that become a hoarder’s “treasures.” With candor, wit, and not a drop of sentimentality, Jessie Sholl explores the many personal and psychological ramifications of hoarding while telling an unforgettable mother-daughter tale.

Set in the upscale DC private school scene, where silence can easily be bought, Aggie Blum Thompson's All the Dirty Secrets asks how far you would go to protect your status and your family, and if some secrets should ever be revealed. One warm summer night twenty-five years ago, Liza Gold and her friends celebrated their high school graduation with a party on the beach. It should have been the best night of their lives, only one of them never came back out of the ocean. The tragedy haunted Liza Gold for years. Now, she's a recently divorced working mom struggling to connect with her standoffish teenager daughter Zoe when history repeats itself. Another young woman has drowned at Beach Week, and this time the victim is Zoe’s secret best friend. Liza begins to suspect that the two deaths are somehow related, which causes her to face hard truths and take an unflinching look at the people she’s called her closest friends for the past two decades. She must discover what really happened to both women before it’s too late. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

When a medical condition threatens to tear apart Lanie Talbot's family, she makes the ultimate sacrifice. With no time and no other option, Lanie puts herself up for sale at an underground, high-end establishment where women are auctioned off to influential, wealthy men with more money than sense. Enter Noah Crawford: millionaire business mogul and Chicago's most eligible bachelor. But Noah's distrust in relationships has led him to make a very desperate decision of his own - purchasing a woman to satisfy his every desire. No strings attached, no heartbreak, and no way anyone will ever know.

A New York Times Bestseller From the New York Times bestselling author of Five Total Strangers and "master of suspense" (BCCB), Natalie D. Richards, comes a pulse-pounding YA thriller about a girl who goes on a mysterious scavenger hunt, only to discover that someone knows her worst secret...and is out for blood. I know seven dirty secrets: One caused the fall. One did nothing. One saw it all. One didn't care. One used their head. One played the hero. One was left for dead. On her eighteenth birthday, Cleo receives a mysterious invitation to a scavenger hunt. She's sure her best friend Hope or her brother Connor is behind it, but no one confesses. And as Cleo and Hope embark on the hunt, the seemingly random locations and clues begin to feel familiar. In fact, all of the clues seem to be about Cleo's dead boyfriend, Declan, who drowned on a group rafting trip exactly a year ago. A bracelet she bought him. A song he loved. A photo of the rafting group, taken just before Declan drowned. And then the phone calls start, Declan's voice taunting Cleo with a cryptic question: You ready? As the clock on the scavenger hunt ticks down, it becomes clear that someone knows what really happened to Declan. And that person will stop at nothing to make sure Cleo and her friends pay. Can they solve the hunt before someone else winds up dead? More twisty mysteries by Natalie D. Richards: Five Total Strangers Six Months Later Gone Too Far One Was Lost My Secret to Tell What You Hide We All Fall Down

Everyone has a secret. But Lucy's is bigger and dirtier than most. It's one she's been hiding for years-that her mom's out-of-control hoarding has turned their lives into a world of garbage and shame. She's managed to keep her home life hidden from her best friend and her crush, knowing they'd be disgusted by the truth. So, when her mom dies suddenly in their home, Lucy hesitates to call 911 because revealing their way of life would make her future unbearable-and she begins her two-day plan to set her life right. With details that are as fascinating as they are disturbing, C. J. Omololu weaves an hour-by-hour account of Lucy's desperate attempt at normalcy. Her fear and isolation are palpable as readers are pulled down a path from which there is no return, and the impact of hoarding on one teen's life will have readers completely hooked.

J.J. Graves has seen a lot of dead bodies in her line of work... She's not only in the mortuary business, but she's also the coroner for King George County, Virginia. When a grisly murder is discovered in the small town of Bloody Mary, it's up to J.J. and her best friend, Detective Jack Lawson, to bring the victim justice. The murders are piling up... The residents of Bloody Mary are dropping like flies, and when a popular mystery writer shows up on J.J.'s doorstep with plans of writing his new book about the Bloody Mary Serial Killer, J.J. has to decide if he might be going above and beyond the call of duty to create the spine tinglers he's so well known for. It only clouds the issue and puts her reputation on the line when the attraction between them spirals out of control. And passions are rising... J.J and Jack are in a race against time. They discover each victim had a shocking secret, and the very foundation of J.J.'s life is in danger of crumbling when it turns out she's harboring secrets of her own -- secrets that make her the perfect victim in a deadly game.

Cold. Dangerous. Always in control. It’s a reputation I worked hard to establish, and it has brought me more wealth, more power, more . . . everything. As the king, the responsibility for the city’s underground weighs heavily on my shoulders. It's been my only focus, my only concern. Then I met my obsession. Allie Bancroft. She’s unpredictable. Chaos to my order. Light to my darkness. Everything I never knew I'd crave. I live in a dangerous world, so she thinks I want to lock her away in a gilded cage. But I want to set her free. I want to make her my queen. As long as she follows my rules. Whatever it takes, I'll have her at my side. I'll Tease and tempt her with sweet words. Fray away at her sanity with secrets. Dare her to accept my depravity by mixing it with pleasure she’s never known. Once we cross that line, will she be able to handle the depth of my passion? Of my possession? Either way, she is mine, marked eternally as such, because she has marked me.

The Panama Papers demonstrated that the superrich hide their wealth from the rest of us. Dirty Secrets shows that this was not by accident, but by design. It was the result of a powerful alliance of the wealthy, their advisers and the state that has undermined all attempts to solve the tax haven problem. This is because tax havens are the unacknowledged heart of globalized capitalism. Their purpose is to provide freedom from regulation. The exponents say this makes markets work and so we all gain. But this argument has now failed. Furthermore democracy itself is being threatened by the political fallout from the mistrust this regime has created. The result is that tax havens are now a threat to the very system that supposedly spawned it. Dirty Secrets is the most revelatory examination of the crisis by a leading expert, but also offers solutions on how governments can regulate havens and what the world might look like without them.