Hunting Season

Based on his groundbreaking reporting for Vanity Fair, Hunting Season is award-winning journalist James Harkin's harrowing investigation into the abduction, captivity, and execution of James Foley, at the hands of the masked militant known as "Jihadi John" (Mohammed Emwazi), and the fate of more than two-dozen other ISIS hostages. On August 19, 2014, the jihadist rebel group known as ISIS uploaded a video to YouTube. Entitled "Message to America," the clip depicted the final moments of American journalist James Foley's life--and the gruesome aftermath of his beheading at the hands of a masked executioner. Foley's murder--and the choreographed killings that would follow--captured the world's attention, and the Islamic State's kidnapping campaign exploded into war. Hunting Season is a riveting account of how the world's newest and most powerful terror franchise came to target Western hostages, who was behind it, and why almost no one knew about it until it was too late.

The tenth Anna Pigeon mystery When Anna answers a call to historic Mt. Locust, once a producing plantation and inn on Mississippi?s Natchez Trace Parkway and now a tourist spot, the last thing she expects to encounter is murder. But the man Anna finds in the stand?s old bedroom is no tourist in distress. He?s nearly naked, and very dead, his body bearing marks consistent with an S&M ritual gone awry. On a writing table nearby is an open Bible, ominous passages circled in red. It seems the deceased is the brother of Raymond Barnette, local undertaker and a candidate for sheriff, who wants to keep any hint of kinkiness out of the minds of the God-fearing populace. Ray may be hiding a house full of secrets in the old family homestead, but before Anna can start her investigation, she?s waylaid by malevolent poachers, peevish co-workers, and a suddenly turbulent romantic life. And when hidden agendas and old allegiances are revealed, it?s suddenly Anna?s life that's on the line.

YOU DON'T GO ALONE INTO MAD RIVER MOUNTAIN Everything would be okay in the country, thought April Benard, in her new summer home. Here her children would be happy and safe. Here she could spend precious time with the man who had saved her life and given his love. Here she could further her career by researching a clan of remote hill people, an inbred society locked inside their own special, isolated world. Truly, she had nothing to fear in Mad River Mountain. Nothing, that is, until the creatures she considered safe to study stray from the dark woods. Creatures with stunted bodies and pumpkin faces, deformed in flesh and in spirit. Creatures with a hunger for cold vengeance. And a thirst for hot blood. Tourist season is over. The hunting season has begun.

Julia Brennan's debut novel, _Hunting Season_, is part auto-fiction, part lyric essay, part lament, part film journal, part performance, and part exorcism. Challenging traditional victim/perpetrator narratives, _Hunting Season_ is an intimate investigation into the ways we learn to love and wound. "A kind of fortress: elaborately constructed, designed to protect and to withstand the dangers that are everywhere around us. An imaginative, frightening and heartbreaking tour de force." (CAROLE MASO) "Brennan's cinematic fiction moves through the vignette-influenced narrative landscape with an expression of loneliness like a rifle flung over the hard shoulder of postmodern storytelling: you never know when her rifle will go off, leaving you bruised, cut in halves or quarters, or heartbroken. _Hunting Season_ is 'a slow amputation' of love, film, disaster, agony, tamed or nonchalant sadomasochism and sexual fantasies?. Come here and let her destroy you. Tenderly." (VI KHI NAO) "_Hunting Season_ frees the bildungsroman from its orthodox chronologies and wearisome protagonists. As in Ferrante, we see a woman artist come of age. She comes of age, ages, travels back, comes again. How best to repurpose an education in patriarchy? Like Ferrante, or Amina Cain, Eugene Lim, or Cristina Rivera Garza, Julia Brennan refuses to sacrifice to the gods of narrative arc. _Hunting Season_ plots in phenomenological ecotones, those sites produced in the connective tissue between mothers and children, hunters and prey, lovers and lover's ghosts, or the multiple paramours of a single artist." (DANIELLE PAFUNDA)

A teenage girl goes missing. When Hal, an intellectually disabled farmhand, returns from a hunting trip with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight, Alma Costagan and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of.

Hunters in 20 States of the Central and Mississippi flyways participated in an experiment 9-day teal hunting season in September 1965. During this special season, hunters were required to obtain a free permit and could shoot four teal a day (blue-winged teal, green-winged teal, and cinnamon teal (Spatula cyanoptera), singly or in the aggregate) and have eight in possession. Data were obtained by means of a mail questionnaire survey, a teal wing collection survey, and a hunter performance (spy-blind) survey. A total of 201,972 hunting permits was issued, 49,359 in the Central Flyway and 152,613 in the Mississippi Flyway. Of the applicants who obtained permit, 55 percent hunted. Hunters bagged 448,060 ducks, including 404,710 blue-winged teal and 39,610 green-winged teal. The harvest of illegal ducks, not recognized as such, was 3,600 (from the wing collection), but the actual illegal kill, based on the hunter performance survey, was estimated to be 33,736. The species most prevalent in the illegal kill were wood ducks (13,000) and mallards (7,088). Percentages of cripples and unretrieved ducks revealed by the hunter performance survey were added to these totals, which together with a projected kill for the regular season, gave a total hunting loss by species. These totals were converted to percentages of the fall populations and compared with proportions of the populations killed in previous years. These data suggest that the experimental teal season in 1965 provided 111,085 hunters 257,180 days of recreation without adversely affecting the continental population of and waterfowl species. Additional data are needed, perhaps from three special teal seasons, in order to establish whether the bagged ducks add to or reduce nonhunting mortality for the teal species involved.