Showing results by narrator "C.S.E. Cooney" in All Categories

Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in US prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend 23 hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators' discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one "supermax", California's Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners.

To solve her father's murder and save the family-owned glass shop, Savannah Webb must shatter a killer's carefully constructed façade... After Savannah's father dies unexpectedly of a heart attack, she drops everything to return home to St. Petersburg, Florida, to settle his affairs - including the fate of the beloved, family-owned glass shop. Savannah intends to hand over ownership to her father's trusted assistant and fellow glass expert, Hugh Trevor, but soon discovers the master craftsman also dead of an apparent heart attack.

Sora and her companions are the only ones who know of the plague's true source. As the disease spreads, Sora must journey to the City of Crowns to retrieve the Book of the Named, her only hope of stopping the Shade. She and her companions arrive just in time for the winter solstice festival, a notorious two weeks of fine wines, grand parties, and legendary debauchery. Sora must don the guise of a noblewoman and infiltrate the First Tier nobility to stop the Shade before it's too late.

Sora is having visions. Strange, terrifying visions brought on by her Cat's Eye necklace, an ancient and magical device. Spurred to action, she leaves her mother's cabin to find Crash, the mysterious assassin who once changed her life. She is certain that together, they can discover what the necklace is trying to tell her. Crash is still on the run from the dark sorcerer, Volcrian, but now a plague is spreading across the land.

Hannah Yoder loves her quiet life on the banks of the Conestoga Creek. In 1842, this corner of Lancaster County is settled and peaceful - yet problems lurk beneath the placid façade. Hannah's father worries about the spread of liberal ideas from their Mennonite and Brethren neighbors. And Hannah blames herself for a tragedy that struck their home nine years ago. She strives to be the one person who can bind the threads of her family together in spite of her mother's ongoing depression and her sister's rejection of their family. But her world is threatening to unravel.

Restaurant critic Derek Schumaker, notorious for his bitter reviews, is about to visit Daisy's Tea Garden, and Daisy and Aunt Iris are simmering with anxiety. A bad word from the culinary curmudgeon could really hurt their business. But how can he resist her cucumber sandwiches with pimento spread - not to mention the cheesy cauliflower soup and strawberry walnut salad? Schumaker takes a to-go order when the afternoon tea service is done, which Daisy hopes is a good sign. But when he perishes from a seizure, it looks like his food was dosed with something deadly.

Comic Book Women offers a feminist history of the golden age of comics, revising our understanding of how numerous genres emerged and upending narratives of how male auteurs built their careers. Considering issues of race, gender, and sexuality, the authors examine crime, horror, jungle, romance, science fiction, superhero, and Western comics to unpack the cultural and industrial consequences of how women were represented across a wide range of titles by publishers like DC, Timely, Fiction House, and others.

Cassandra Khaw's dynamic and vibrant debut collection, Breakable Things, explores the fragile and nebulous bonds that weave love and grief into our existence. This exquisite and cutting collection of stories showcases a bloody fusion of horrors from cosmic to psychological to body traumas.

With the grand re-opening of her Urban Tails Pet Shop just days away, Shell McMillan has her hands full planning entertainment for the festive event, including a fortune-telling parrot. But her jubilant mood is soon threatened by ominous rumors of the return of Johnny Draco, a former investment guru who swindled money from most of the residents of Fox Hollow and then vanished without a trace. And when the parrot predicts a dire future for Draco and his dead body is found just hours later, no one can say they're surprised—but no one will say who did it.

In the early 20th century over 200 of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names - Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney, and the like - carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause.

Livvy Flynn is a big deal - she's a New York Times-best-selling author whose YA fiction has sold all over the world. She's rich, she's famous, she's gorgeous, and she's full of herself. When she's invited to an A-list writer's conference, she decides to accept so she can have some time to herself. She's on a tight deadline for her next book, and she has no intention of socializing with the other industry people at the conference. And then she hits the detour.

A plague is spreading across the land. Crops are rotting. People are dying in the streets. Sora, with the help of her magical Cat's Eye necklace, is the only one who can stop it. She must travel overseas to the Lost Isles, a place of legend and mystery. Only there can she destroy the bloodmage, Volcrian, putting an end to the curse. She is accompanied by Crash, a lethal assassin who once threatened - and saved - her life. But Sora is beginning to question her dark companion.

In the ruins of his world, Harrison Cody follows a mysterious voice on the radio as he and his pixie sidekick travel on foot across a terrifyingly random landscape. They discover Dorothy O'Neill, who has had to survive among monsters when her greatest worry used to be how to navigate high school. Together they search for what remains of Chicago, and the hope that civilization can be rebuilt.

A year has passed since the Mayhem Wave reshaped the world, erasing most of its population and replacing civilization with random artifacts of advanced technology and magic. Harrison Cody now works as a special agent for the government of New Chicago. When an expedition is launched to determine the Mayhem Wave's origin, Harrison joins them. They learn of other nations that have arisen in the ashes of the old world, not all of them friendly. They find the ruins of a once-great city and the possible source of the wave, the work of a man acting alone with uncertain motives.

You probably don't realize that your supermarket is filled with foods that have a military origin: canned goods, packaged deli meats, TV dinners, cling wrap, energy bars…the list is almost endless. In fact, there's a watered-down combat ration lurking in practically every bag, box, can, bottle, jar, and carton Americans buy. Anastacia Marx de Salcedo shows how the Department of Defense Combat Feeding Directorate plans, funds, and spreads the food science that enables it to produce cheap, imperishable rations.

With these captivating initial glimpses into her storytelling psyche, Jo Walton shines through subtle myths and reinvented realities. Through eclectic stories, subtle vignettes, inspired poetry, and more, Walton soars with humans, machines, and magic-rising from the every day into the universe itself.

In Desdemona and the Deep, the spoiled daughter of a rich mining family must retrieve the tithe of men her father promised to the world below. On the surface, her world is rife with industrial pollution that ruins the health of poor factory workers while the idle rich indulge themselves in unheard-of luxury. Below are goblins, mysterious kingdoms, and an entirely different hierarchy.

When Melissa Moore was 13 years old, her father said to her, "I know how to kill someone and get away with it". At the time she chalked it up to his love of detective novels, but it didn't change the fact that her father had always been someone who made her anxious. Two years later, in 1995, Melissa's father was arrested for the murder of eight women over a period of five years - he was the serial killer known nationally as the Happy Face Killer.

From master anthologist Ellen Datlow comes an all-original of weird tales inspired by the strangeness of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Between the hallucinogenic, weird, imaginative wordplay and the brilliant mathematical puzzles and social satire, Alice has been enjoyed and savored by every generation since its publication. Datlow asked 18 of the most brilliant and acclaimed writers working today to dream up stories inspired by all the strange events and surreal characters found in Wonderland.

Forty-something mother of two Josephine Cortès is at a crossroads. She has just moved to a posh new apartment in Paris after the success of the historical novel she ghostwrote for her sister, Iris. Still struggling with her divorce - the result of her husband running off to Kenya to start a crocodile farm with his mistress - she is now entangled too in a messy lie orchestrated by her sister. And just when things seem they can't get any more complicated, people start turning up dead in her neighborhood.