Night Fires

George Edward Stanley's powerful Night Fires explores the influence of the Klan in 1920's Oklahoma, and the danger of succumbing to peer pressure.

Night Fires By: Anne Marie Erskine Night Fires is a collection of poems birthed by the power of creating that lives in all of us – but some people are called to that art through an unstoppable presence that compels expression. That presence I call Night Fires, primarily because for me that urgency awakens me at night when dreams have formed the essence of expression in the dark of the psyche, bringing forth the rhythms of thought demanding form. As such, Night Fires is the essence of the cycle of life: birth and death, birth and death. It is life ever beginning, death transforming it, and life giving it new form again. The cycle is continuous. The subjects of poetry are both personal and universal and found primarily in the human knowing Carl Jung named “the collective unconscious,” which contains archetypes that are universal mental predispositions not grounded in experience, existing independently and known directly by the mind, occurring in all cultures in some form. Critics of this philosophy object to it primarily because it is “difficult to test scientifically,” as if human thought, desire, fear, faith, love, hate can be placed under a microscope. I believe in the “soul of humanity” that connects us all to one another; therefore, I write about things I “know,” communicating the human experience that belongs to no one race, no one culture, no one country, but to us all. All of creation is connected. I believe that all life exists now—those who have died, those who live, those yet to be born exist now—and that the answers to all things exist now. We simply have to search to discover those answers. The human self knows right from wrong. We know when we have chosen one or the other. We know who we are by those choices. We know our form and substance and we are all in need of more consideration to refine our very beings to be a more perfect form. Poetry can give us insight into doing exactly that.

Laura and her husband William Deene have come a long way, from England to Ohio to Indian Territory. With their farm failing and Laura expecting her fourth child, their relationship begins to disintegrate and with another cruel winter coming on, Will's mistrustful and violent nature becomes more apparent. Laura finds relief in the arms of their new neighbour, a young man of wealthy providence setting up as a lone homesteader; James Clappe. Attracted to Clappe's youth, kindness and naivet , Laura struggles to maintain her stoic tolerance of the hard prairie life she has endured for so long. Clappe is not all he seems however. Beneath worn clothes and layers of dirt, is a young socialite fleeing her husband, brought to the prairie by fear and grief. The last thing on earth she expects, is to fall for a lonely prairie wife almost double her age - but it could be the thing that saves her.

A FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR A CrimeReads Best Crime Novel Notable selection Harry Bosch and LAPD Detective Renée Ballard come together again on the murder case that obsessed Bosch's mentor, the man who trained him---new from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective, he had an inspiring mentor who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now that mentor, John Jack Thompson, is dead, and his widow gives Bosch a murder book, one that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD twenty years before -- the unsolved killing of a troubled young man. Bosch takes the murder book to Detective Renée Ballard and asks her to help him discover what about this crime lit Thompson's fire all those years ago. As she begins her inqueries -- while still working her own cases on the midnight shift -- Ballad finds aspects of the initial investigation that just don't add up. The bond between Bosch and Ballard tightens as they become a formidable investigation team. And they soon arrive at a disturbing question: Did Thompson steal the murder book to work the case in retirement, or to make sure it never got solved? Written with the intense pacing and masterful suspense that have made Michael Connelly "the hard-boiled fiction master of our time" (NPR), The Night Fire continues the unofficial partnership of two fierce detectives determined not to let the fire with burn out.

This Book has stories about Little Bobby and me, along with numerous others and some of the calls that we went on during the period of time of about 13 years with the Squad and also away from it. I first met the Mascot in June of 1955 to about 1963 when our lives took different paths, and we drifted away from each other for the next 47 or so years, except for special occasions when we met up at certain functions, including many major calls of the later 60s, and 70s, the riots in 1967, when Martin Luther King was killed, the 14th Street Bridge plane crash in the Potomac River.

We've seen the Devil's Night crew get spooky. Now, let's see them get into the spirit...The clock at St. Killian's chimes as whispers float in the dark staircase above. Snow falls from the black sky beyond the windows, and candles glow--the flames lighting up the longest night of the year. Devil's Night isn't the only holiday we celebrate. Tonight, we're pulling on different masks. Some call it Midwinter. Others call it Yule. We call it Fire Night. *Fire Night is a 28K word Devil's Night holiday novella suitable for readers 18+. It takes place the winter before the epilogue in Nightfall and is told from Kai's, Damon's, Will's, and Michael's points of view.

The heat of passion—and danger—rises like jungle fire in this novel of the Leopard people by #1 New York Times bestselling author Christine Feehan… Called on a dangerous assignment, leopard shifter Conner Vega returns to the Panama rainforest of his homeland, looking every bit the civilized male. But as a member of the most lethal of the shifter tribes, he doesn’t have a civilized bone in his body. He carries the scent of a wild animal in its prime, he bears the soul-crushing sins of past kills—and he’s branded by the scars of shame inflicted by the woman he betrayed. Isabeau Chandler’s a Borneo shifter who’s never forgiven Conner—or forgotten him. The mating urge is still with her, and when she crosses Conner’s path, passions run like wild fire. But as Conner’s mission draws Isabeau closer, another betrayal lies waiting in the shadows—and it’s the most perilous and intimate one of all.