Shooting Martha

The Breakfast Club meets We Need to Talk About Kevin A lockdown catches five grade 12 students by surprise and throws them together in the only unlocked room on that empty third floor wing: the boys' washroom. They sit in silence, judging each other by what they see, by the stories they've heard over the years. Stuck here with them--could anything be worse? There's Alice: an introverted writer, trapped in the role of big sister to her older autistic brother, Noah. Isabelle: the popular, high-achieving, student council president, whose greatest performance is her everyday life. Hogan: an ex-football player with a troubled past and a hopeless future. Xander: that socially awkward guy hiding behind the camera, whose candid pictures of school life, especially those of Isabelle, have brought him more trouble than answers. Told in five unique voices through prose, poetry, text messages, journals, and homework assignments, each student reveals pieces of their true story as they wait for the drill to end. But this modern-day Breakfast Club takes a twist when Isabelle gets a text that changes everything: NOT A DRILL!! Shooter in the school! Suddenly, the bathroom doesn't seem so safe anymore. Especially when they learn that one of them knows more about the shooter than they realized...

In Shooting Star, ninety-two-year-old poet Victoria Trumbull becomes embroiled in controversy at the community theater on Martha's Vineyard. The new artistic director has announced plans to replace local amateur talent with off-Island professionals, and the cast and crew react murderously. Victoria intended the theater's current production, her adaptation of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, to debunk the common farcical movie-monster interpretation by returning to Shelley's original serious commentary on the Industrial Revolution. However, after the night of the dress rehearsal, Victoria loses control over the production, and her drama begins to take a strange course. On that night, the eight-year-old boy playing the part of Frankenstein's young brother disappears, and before a search can begin, a killer strikes. The Vineyard's police forces mobilize for an Island-wide search. In the original story of Frankenstein, the boy is the first victim of the monster, and Victoria fears that a copycat killer is following her playscript. She determines to find the missing boy and track down the killer before more deaths occur. Along with familiar Island characters from her previous books, the author introduces a cast of new and often eccentric players. Shooting Star, the seventh book in the Martha's Vineyard mystery series, explores the rich setting of the Island that author Cynthia Riggs knows well, from the rose-covered Dukes County jail on Edgartown's Main Street to the quaint ferry terminal in Oak Bluffs. It's a delightful read that both fans and newcomers to the series will be sure to enjoy.

Hector Kipling is a famous artist. But Hector is not as famous as his best friend, Lenny Snook. And as they are standing in the Tate Gallery one afternoon, Hector's life begins to unravel. For a painter, this existential crisis is the place from which great art is born. If the painter happens to be a forty-three-year-old man with a girlfriend away from home, it is the recipe for disaster. Soon it's all Hector can do to keep it together -- between his therapist who shows up drunk at a party and introduces herself to his parents, an irresistible young female poet with a terrifying taste for S&M, and a deranged stalker with an oil-and-canvas-inspired vendetta, just trying to cope is enough to make a man cry. As the events in his life threaten to drive him toward full-blown dementia, Hector finds himself in a bizarre and murderous pursuit of a man threatening to kill him in return, spiraling into a hysterically surreal Hitchcocklike thriller -- the story of how a man can become desperate enough to shoot his way out of a midlife crisis. At turns warm, witty, and joyfully absurd, David Thewlis's wicked comedy marks the debut of a savagely funny and observant literary talent.

A collection of “first-rate frontline journalism” from the Spanish Civil War to US actions in Central America “by a woman singularly unafraid of guns” (Vanity Fair). For nearly sixty years, Martha Gellhorn’s fearless war correspondence made her a leading journalistic voice of her generation. From the Spanish Civil War in 1937 through the Central American wars of the mid-eighties, Gellhorn’s candid reporting reflected her deep empathy for people regardless of their political ideology. Collecting the best of Gellhorn’s writing on foreign conflicts, and now with a new introduction by Lauren Elkin, The Face of War is a classic of frontline journalism by “the premier war correspondent of the twentieth century” (Ward Just, The New York Times Magazine). Whether in Java, Finland, the Middle East, or Vietnam, she used the same vigorous approach. “I wrote very fast, as I had to,” she says, “afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place.” As Merle Rubin noted in his review of this volume for The Christian ScienceMonitor, “Martha Gellhorn’s courageous, independent-minded reportage breaks through geopolitical abstractions and ideological propaganda to take the reader straight to the scene of the event.”

In March 1912, Gene Grace, a young Atlanta businessman, was found shot in the locked bedroom of his fashionable home "between the Peachtrees." Daisy Grace, his flashily dressed Yankee wife from Philadelphia, was soon arrested on a charge of assault with intent to murder. Gene Grace was left paralyzed but, more importantly, he was powerless legally. Under Georgia law, he could not testify against his wife. Prosecutors were forced to rely instead upon the circumstantial evidence of an alleged "diabolical plot." The Atlanta newspapers--led by the Georgian, under the very new control of Mr. Hearst, that giant of "yellow journalism"--covered the case relentlessly. Papers across the country followed the drama for months, which concluded with a five-day trial held in the searing heat of a Georgia summer. This is the never-before-told story of the tragic romance between "the Adonis of a country town" and the woman known to all as "Daisy of the Leopard Spots."

Cephas Paulson was born to solve puzzle that nobody else can solve, a talent the U.S. government has exploited with deadly results. Living in 2202 A.D., his is a world dominated by apathy and hedonism where religion is banned and the few remaining Christians hide in the shadows. Known worldwide as “The Cult Hunter,” Cephas is largely responsible for putting them there. Now living a quiet life as a religious history professor, Cephas is reluctantly called out of retirement when the government sends him on a high stakes mission designed to crush Christianity once and for all. As the puzzles begin to unravel, Cephas struggles to find the one answer that has always eluded him, the solution to his own desire to explore faith rather than destroy it. To do so, he finds himself walking a dangerous line between two worlds and two beautiful women. One represents the temptations of the outwardly utopian world of man, while the other the Godly world that he’s secretly trying to understand. Unfortunately, neither these worlds nor these women are truly what they appear to be, leaving Cephas to wonder if “the Cult Hunter” has become the hunted.