Ophelia And Her Forest Friends

Ophelia is a little girl who lives deep in a far-off great forest where her widowed father is a woodcutter and her home a tiny cottage with a thatched roof and flower-filled window boxes. Blessed at birth by fairies, she is friends with all the little forest animals who live around her, and with no school or other children to fill her playtimes, she is never lonely, sharing adventures with many, like Sammy Skunk, Rory Raccoon, Oscar Owl, Betsy Bunny, Patrick Porcupine, Benjamin Beaver, and others—all joining with her in keeping their forest home peaceful and safe.

Love for a poor old plow horse sees Jessica on an exciting new adventure when pitted against malicious wheels-for-legs Wheelies, Mesozoic-era Pterodactyls, deadly stone Gargoyles, and enthroned as a Goddess Queen by fun-loving Pixies. Join her until, with Beak, a wise know-everything hummingbird, Junk Dog, an itinerant peddler, and Dinky, an exuberant little Unicorn, she wins ultimate victory over Esmeralda, the ageless evil-scientist leader of a band of mercilessly militant girls the same age as Jessica herself.

Chase Morse and his brother, Haydn, heirs to an auction-house empire, split their time between Manhattan and The Moorings, the idyllic family estate on Nantucket, but when a body turns up at The Moorings and a priceless painting goes missing from inside the tight-security vault at the auction house, family secrets get harder to keep. As Gabrielle, a French journalist sent to write features on the glittering New York art world, becomes entangled with the family, the police start digging, and the stakes are high—eighty million dollars, pilfered and then lost in risky Russian investments. Can an entitled one-percenter with expansive resources, and enlisting the help of a wily art forger, outsmart the art cops and the old guard within the company? The glittering, exalted world of art auctioning hides love, hate, and murder in a wealthy and socially prominent family when the forgery of an anonymous Cape Cod painting threatens to destroy them all.

Washington DC—and terror in an isolated government-sanctioned medical laboratory as the potential of medicine goes horrifyingly wrong. When Susan, a young researcher, loses her fiancée in a terrible accident, she is seduced by Michael, a friend and the head doctor on a top-secret neurometric project backed by the White House and the famed Borg-Harrison Foundation. Joining Michael’s team, Susan is unaware of the terrible danger she faces in the high-security facility and from Katherine, the team psychologist, who will go to any lengths to protect the lab’s vital secrecy—and her own carnal desires. When Susan stumbles onto the true nature of the project, it’s to find herself in it too deep to walk away and, trapped in the worst kind of nightmare, threatened every second to becoming a ghastly medical experiment herself. In The Head Hunters, David Osborn explores the murky boundaries between ethics and medical research, between volunteer and victim, ambition and ruthlessness, and between life and death when a team of responsible doctors plays a deadly game in which any of the players can be condemned to a purgatory more ghastly than hell.

Artist Andretta Salinger awakens one day in an old stone country house she’s bought from a family ownership of six generations to find she’s been living for two years with the bones of someone murdered and buried in the floor of her cellar. When Andretta finds herself drawn willy-nilly into the small-town police investigation of a homicide committed in 1868, it’s into the scandal-ridden lives of the great railroad barons of the day and to identifying the murderer.

On yet another exciting adventure In Fairyland, now to rescue little Prince Benjamin of the land of No, held hostage by the evil sorceress Lady Citronella, Jessica teams up with two old friends: Greta, the fairy princess, often disguised as a witch, and Sir Percival, the doughty monocled Englishman who fantasizes hunting hares with his trusty gun. Flying them about is Greta’s irrepressible witch’s broom, Sweepy, who saves the day while all the time thinking he’s the old-fashioned Wabash Cannonball train made famous in country-western music.

Alicia, a young American girl in England, visits an old churchyard and evokes Elvira, a sprightly, mischievous young ghost who in turn introduces her to three extraordinary women from three critical moments in history, when each triumphed in a male-dominated society. Considered the greatest English queen, Matilda of Flanders came from Normandy with William the Conqueror and was at the forefront of politics and culture in her era. Sofonisba Anguissola was an accomplished Renaissance artist who studied with Michelangelo and became his protégé, and Lucie Dillon, once a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette at Versailles, survived the Terror, living in the new United States as a farmer for a time before returning to France to aid Napoleon and Josephine build the social connections they needed to manage their political power. In their own words, these ghostly women describe their widely different lives and loves, and the three periods in which they lived—the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution.

Revelation after his death by an elderly priest of a serious crime, reported in the sanctity of the confessional, leads a police officer friend to follow from birth the strangely connected fate of two girls, one from wealth, the other from poverty, whose paths through all their growing years are unknown to each other but which cross dramatically in the arrest of one for assault and deadly arson.