The Face On The Wall

Scholar/sleuth Homer Kelly comes to the aid of his artist niece, who’s implicated in a death, in this “taut, suspenseful, and absorbing” whodunit (Kirkus Reviews). Life has not always been fair to Annie Swann. A bad marriage sullied her youth, but since her divorce she has made enough money illustrating children’s books to add a wing to her house. The new addition’s focal point will be a thirty-five-foot blank wall, where Annie plans an elaborate mural of the fairy tale characters who pay her bills. But as she paints, mysterious markings appear on the mural: first splotches, then a woman’s face, ringed with blond hair and covered in blood. It seems to point to the disappearance of Pearl Small, a Harvard student who took classes from Annie’s aunt Mary. As Mary and her husband, professor and ex-cop Homer Kelly, look for Pearl, Annie continues painting, unaware that with each brushstroke, she marks her wall with another layer of evil.

Excerpt from The Life of Charles Lamb It has been my aim to collect and fuse into a single narrative the sum of this scattered information. As in carrying out that task I have tried as far as possible to keep the story of Lamb's life in his own and his sister's words and in those of their con temporaries, my part will be found to be less that of author than of stage-manager. Thanks to the good sense of the Lambs' friends in preserving their letters, and to Lamb's own inveterate habit of autobiography the more my character comes to be known, he wrote, the less will my veracity come to be suspected the task has not been a very difficult one. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In this beguiling story of good and evil, an eerie face keeps appearing on a mural of fairy tales and folklore--a case for Homer Kelly, the academic with a major in murder.

In the vein of psychological thrillers like We Were Liars and One of Us Is Lying, bestselling and Edgar Award nominated author Caroline Cooney’s JANIE series seamlessly blends mystery and suspense with issues of family, friendship and love to offer an emotionally evocative thrill ride of a read. No one ever really paid close attention to the faces of the missing children on the milk cartons. But as Janie Johnson glanced at the face of the ordinary little girl with her hair in tight pigtails, wearing a dress with a narrow white collar—a three-year-old who had been kidnapped twelve years before from a shopping mall in New Jersey—she felt overcome with shock. She recognized that little girl—it was she. How could it possibly be true? Janie can't believe that her loving parents kidnapped her, but as she begins to piece things together, nothing makes sense. Something is terribly wrong. Are Mr. and Mrs. Johnson really her parents? And if not, who is Janie Johnson, and what really happened?

Jeremy is annoyed about having to go on holiday to France - nothing will happen there. Then he sees the face on the wall - what does it mean and why does it frighten Jeremy? But as he gets drawn into the story behind the face, he realizes the holiday might not be a waste of time after all.

These two plays explore the devastation of war and corruption and were premiered at the Royal Court Theatre.

With an introduction by Jonathan Coe 1930s King's Cross, London. When aspiring film actress Estella Lamare is found dead on the cutting-room floor of a London film studio, Cameron McCabe finds himself at the centre of a police investigation. There are multiple suspects, multiple confessors and, as more people around him die, McCabe begins to perform his own amateur sleuth-work, followed doggedly by the mysterious Inspector Smith. But then, abruptly, McCabe's account ends . . . Who is Cameron McCabe? Is he victim? Murderer? Novelist? Joker? And if not McCabe, who is the author of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor?

The human face was said to be rediscovered with the advent of motion pictures, in which it is often viewed as expressive locus, as figure, and even as essence of the cinema. But how has the modern, technological, mass-circulating art revealed the face in ways that are also distinct from any other medium? How has it altered our perception of this quintessential incarnation of the person? The archaic powers of masks and icons, the fashioning of the individual in the humanist portrait, the modernist anxieties of fragmentation and de-figuration--these are among the cultural precedents informing our experience in the movie theatre. Yet the moving image also offers radical new confrontations with the face: Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, Donen's Funny Face, Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, Bresson's enigmatic Au hasard Balthazar, Antonioni's Screen Test, Warhol's filmic portraits of celebrity and anonymity are among the key works explored in this book. In different ways these intense encounters manifest a desire for transparency and plenitude, but--especially in post-classical cinema--they also betray a profound ambiguity that haunts the human countenance as it wavers between image and language, between what we see and what we know. The spectacular impact of the cinematic face is uncannily bound up with an opacity, a reticence. But is it not for this very reason that, like faces in the world, it still enthralls us?