The Driveway Diaries

Irresistably warm and wry observations by a migrant essayist from old England to New England.

When my family moved out from Burlington, Vermont, to a dirt road in rural Essex Center, our life immediately began to suffer the series of challenges and small disasters that quickly sort out the clueless city guy from the true Vermonter. This collection of stories is mainly about those challenges, almost all of which I failed - and about the most important, most evil challenge of all: our driveway. A gravel driveway, especially a steep one, is an umbilicus between home and the outside world, an index of change that can wash out or burst into flower overnight, and the cause of more sweat and backache than all the rest of the property combined. In many ways, this book celebrates the glories of the countryside; in many ways it is appalled. If Thoreau had read this book, he would never have made the mistake of moving to Walden Pond - or at least he'd have made damn sure not to have a driveway.

He looks like the boy next door. He could be the young man dating your daughter or sister. He could be the boy who cuts your lawn. He considers himself an artist, creating twisted art using human canvases. Leaving a trail of once beautiful, but now shattered female bodies in his wake, he always stays one step ahead of the police. He is highly organized. He is highly motivated. He has been operating with impunity for years. He does not believe he can be caught. And the body count is rising...

Everything in this book actually happened - in the courtrooms across the country and in the judge’s chambers associated with these courts. Whether or not the incidents described in each trial were true was up to a jury to decide. Even though the private discussions between judges and attorneys are kept from the juries, they aren't kept from the reader in this book. You will be joining them in the judges' chambers and eavesdropping on them in their asides during the trials to help you form what might possibly be a different reaction than the jury's.

A seductive psychological thriller about a woman facing the dark truths at the heart of her family Jeanne Cross’s contented suburban life gets a jolt of energy from the arrival of Ali Mather, the stunning new music teacher at the local high school. With a magnetic personality and looks to match, Ali draws attention from all quarters, including Jeanne’s husband and son. Nonetheless, Jeanne and Ali develop a deep friendship based on their mutual vulnerabilities and long-held secrets that Ali has been recording in her diary. The diary also holds a key to something darker: Ali’s suspicion that someone has been entering her house when she is not at home. Soon their friendship will be shattered by violence—and Jeanne will find herself facing impossible choices in order to protect the people she loves.

The discovery of Christopher’s diary in the ruins of Foxworth Hall brings new secrets of the Dollanganger family to light in this riveting novel from V.C. Andrews, the author of Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind, both major Lifetime TV events. Christopher Dollanganger was fourteen when he and his younger siblings—Cathy and the twins, Cory and Carrie—were locked away in the attic of Foxworth Hall, prisoners of their mother’s greedy inheritance scheme. For three long years he kept hope alive for the sake of the others. But the shocking truth about how their ordeal affected him was always kept hidden—until now. Seventeen-year-old Kristin Masterwood is thrilled when her father’s construction company is hired to inspect the Foxworth property for a prospective buyer. The once grand Southern mansion still sparks legends and half-truths about the four innocent Dollanganger children, even all these decades later. Foxworth holds a special fascination for Kristin, who was too young when her mother died to learn much about her distant blood tie to the notorious family. Accompanying her dad to the “forbidden territory,” they find a leather-bound book, its yellowed pages filled with the neat script of Christopher Dollanganger himself. Her father grows increasingly uneasy about her reading it, but as she devours the teen’s story page by page, his shattering account of temptation, heartache, courage, and betrayal overtakes Kristin’s every thought. And soon her obsession with the doomed boy crosses a dangerous line…