Property Of A Lady

“An inventively plotted, goose-bumps inducing ghost story.” —Booklist A house with a sinister past—and a grisly power . . . When Michael Flint is asked by American friends to look over an old Shropshire house they have unexpectedly inherited, he is reluctant to leave the quiet of his Oxford study. But when he sees Charect House, its uncanny echoes from the past fascinate him—even though it has such a sinister reputation that no one has lived there for almost a century. But it’s not until Michael meets the young widow, Nell West, that the menace within the house wakes . . . “Rayne spins eerie yarns within yarns like a latter-day Isak Dinesen or Wilkie Collins.” —Kirkus Reviews “A chilling mystery from another era. . . . Once again Rayne delivers.” —Booklist

Supernatural agent Eddie Drood is on the job and out of luck as New York Times bestselling author Simon R. Green continues his Secret Histories series. Where there are monsters, I am there to stop them. The name’s Eddie Drood. The Droods have been taking on the unnatural baddies of this world for ages, fighting the good fight while you normal types go on with your lives. But even we have a limited lifespan. And when my grandmother passes away and leaves me a gift that would make me the official head of the family, I just knew there had to be a catch. That catch being I had to give up my love, Molly. Forever. But even that life-changer takes a back seat when a group of heavy hitters start taking out the Department of the Uncanny with a special target on the Droods. Naturally, a lot of people (including my own family) think Molly and I are behind the mayhem. With my grandfather KIA and my parents MIA, I have to figure out a way to save my folks, clear my name, and root out the enemy. Which may require a bit of thievery from a very powerful, very mysterious, and very scary entity known as the Lady Faire. But she’s not just a lady. And she definitely doesn’t play fair...

"The Property of a Lady" is a short story written by Ian Fleming featuring his fictional secret agent James Bond. It was included in the 1966 short story collection Octopussy and The Living Daylights from 1967 onwards. "The Property of a Lady" was written in early 1963 after Fleming was commissioned by Sotheby's to use as a story in their annual journal, The Ivory Hammer. It later appeared in a serialized form in the January 1964 issue of Playboy magazine, months before Fleming's death.

The magnificent Ivanoff emerald: It surfaced at Christie's at Geneva, "The Property of a Lady"--a lady now sought by powerful men intent on seizing a legacy that could tilt the world balance of power . . . The terrifying Ivanoff secret: She lived like a pauper with a royal ransom in gems, determined to carry her secret to the grave . . . until an act of love and a public auction brought the world--and the curse--to her door . . . The last of the Ivanoffs--pawns in a deadly game: The royal gems are merely the lure to the hidden billions for which nations are willing to kill. The last of the Ivanoffs should have died in 1917. Now, two generations later, they are the prize--and the prey . . . From war-torn Russia to New York's teeming Lower East Side . . . from Ziegfeld's Broadway and the Hollywood of the moguls to contemporary Washington, Geneva, and Berlin, Elizabeth's Adler's novel of passion, power, and royal privilege will command your attention to the very last page.

From the legacy of Ian Fleming come these two recently discovered short novels—superb examples of JAMES BOND AT HIS BEST They were written by 007’s creator before his death and are published here in book form for the first time. OCTOPUSSY is set in Fleming’s favourite pleasure paradise, Jamaica in the British West Indies. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS takes place in, what is for Fleming, a new kind of locale: the border territory that divides East and West Berlin. In both novellas Fleming gives the audacious Bond the power of life—or death—over two very different adversaries. Bond’s first quarry is a rather odd Englishman, the very proper Major Dexter Smythe. Smythe is a retired officer of the Royal Marines. He is a man of no visible wealth, yet he lives in luxurious idleness. His pet diversion—indeed his obsession—is a dangerous experiment that he is conducting with a predator of the deep, with a many-tentacled beauty whom he fondly has named Octopussy.... Bond’s second target is one of Fleming’s most tantalizing villains, a person whom Bond, and the reader, glimpses but never meets. M. sends Bond to West Berlin to safeguard the escape of Number 272, a British agent who is privy to Russia’s top-secret atomic plans. Agent 272 is to make his break for freedom across the East Berlin frontier. The big trouble is: the KGB knows the escape plan and that plan cannot be changed. They have assigned their best sniper, Trigger, to shoot 272 on the run, on a certain street, at a certain time. Armed with a .308-caliber International Experimental Target rifle, Bond must stake out the sniper and kill him before he kills 272...

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham) Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

The release of Skyfall in 2012 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the James Bond film franchise. It earned over one billion dollars in the worldwide box office and won two Academy Awards. Amid popular and critical acclaim, some have questioned the representation of women in the film. From an aging M to the limited role of the Bond Girl and the characterization of Miss Moneypenny as a defunct field agent, Skyfall develops the legacy of Bond at the expense of women. Since Casino Royale (2006) and its sequels Quantum of Solace (2008) and Skyfall constitute a reboot of the franchise, it is time to question whether there is a place for women in the new world of James Bond and what role they will play in the future of series. This volume answers these questions by examining the role that women have historically played in the franchise, which greatly contributed to the international success of the films. This academic study constitutes the first book-length anthology on femininity and feminism in the Bond series. It covers all twenty-three Eon productions as well as the spoof Casino Royale (1967), considering a range of factors that have shaped the depiction of women in the franchise, including female characterization in Ian Fleming's novels; the vision of producer Albert R. Broccoli and other creative personnel; the influence of feminism; and broader trends in British and American film and television. The volume provides a timely look at women in the Bond franchise and offers new scholarly perspectives on the subject.

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.