Birthday Mystery

Meet Jenny Starling: travelling cook and reluctant amateur detective. Jenny Starling is catering the 21st birthday party of upper-class twins Alicia and Justin. She arrives at their parents' country house and is immediately met by the police. A young man has drowned in the pond. Was it an accident or murder? But the birthday party goes ahead. Then, just after midnight, everyone gathers for a champagne toast...and one of the guests falls down dead. The police are baffled, and there is a whole party full of suspects.

Cam Jansen's plans for her parents' surprise birthday party work out perfectly. Unfortunately, the party is interrupted by news that Cam's grandparents have been robbed in the parking lot at the airport. Cam and her parents rush to help them.

This introduction to Nichiren Buddhism explores the philosophical intricacies of life and reveals the wonder inherent in the phases of birth, aging, and death. Core concepts of Nichiren Buddhism, such as the 10 worlds and the nine consciousnesses, illustrate the profundity of human existence. This book provides Buddhists with the tools they need to fully appreciate the connectedness of all beings and to revolutionize their spiritual lives based on this insight.

Lily and Ian's families come to Frederickport to celebrate Connor's first birthday. Bringing the in-laws together is not always easy, especially when uninvited guests from the spirit realm show up....

When young wife and mother Tara Burke goes missing with her baby girl, all eyes are on her husband, Lucas. He paints her not as a missing person but a wayward wife — until a gruesome piece of evidence turns the investigation criminal. While Chronicle reporter Cindy Thomas pursues the story and M.E. Claire Washburn harbors theories that run counter to the SFPD’s, ADA Yuki Castellano sizes Lucas up as a textbook domestic offender...who suddenly puts forward an unexpected suspect.

By revealing the Virgin Mary as a trained holy woman and a conscious actor in the conception of Jesus, the author corrects the impression we have been given of a passive and bewildered girl who had no idea how or why she was pregnant. She also restores Mary as the empowered feminine orchestrator of these significant events, paralleling the redemption of Mary Magdalene in recent years. Explaining how and why virgin birth was accomplished, this book allows us to make sense of miraculous conception and reveals the power that lies in all women’s wombs.

Despite a happy childhood, successful entrepreneur Addison Fox has always yearned to find her birth mother. And with the unexpected death of her adoptive parents comes a renewed determination to fill in the missing pieces of her life - to find her "other" family. But she's too late. Addison is the sole survivor of her bloodline - a line that a killer is determined to make extinct. World-weary detective Randall Talbot has little regard left for life, but he may be the only man capable of saving hers....

Kathy Hamilton drives away from her sister-in-law’s pristine-white suburban house in Maple Falls certain she’s left her daughter in safe hands. On the hottest day of the year, a birthday is the perfect excuse to gather friends, family, and neighbors around the pool for a barbecue. But when she returns hours later to find her little girl has vanished, her world shatters.

Listen to Blood and Smoke and go back to when America was first falling in love with automobile racing. Take the driver’s seat on this audio-venture and experience the early days of the Indy 500, the controversies that shaped this iconic race, and the young drivers who risked everything for fame, fortune, and first place.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . . He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life....

When five-year-old Ava Sawyer goes missing from a birthday party at a local garden center, the police are bewildered by the lack of leads. That is, until two years later, when Ava’s body is found and another little girl, Audrey Briggs, goes missing. Audrey also attended that party. Leading the investigation is Detective Natalie Ward. A mother of two teenagers, this case chills her to the bone and is a disturbing reminder of the last job she worked on. One that still keeps her awake at night.

The whole town of Tinker's Cove is looking forward to the celebration marking former librarian Julia Ward Howe Tilley's 90th birthday. Lucy Stone dreamed up the party idea - at about the same time she decided she's not getting old without a fight. But Lucy realizes her daughter's 14th birthday bash, a coed sleepover, may turn her hair white overnight. She wasn't thinking about the hormonal rampages of young teens. On her mind, instead, was the shocking death of Sherman Cobb, the town's oldest attorney, an apparent suicide. His law partner, however, thinks Sherman was murdered.

Danny Cartwright and Spencer Craig never should have met. One evening, Danny, an East End cockney who works as a garage mechanic, takes his fianceé up to the West End to celebrate their engagement. He crosses the path of Spencer Craig, a West End barrister posed to be the youngest Queen's Counsel of his generation. A few hours later Danny is arrested for murder and later is sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, thanks to irrefutable testimony from Spencer, the prosecution's main witness.

Fleeing assailants through alleyways in Denver late one night, Thomas Hunter narrowly escapes to the roof of an industrial building. Then a silent bullet from the night clips his head and his world goes black. When he awakes, he finds himself in an entirely different reality, a green forest that seems more real than where he was. Every time he tries to sleep, he wakes up in the other world, and soon he truly no longer knows which reality is real.

With a beautiful baby daughter and a devoted husband, Detective Lindsay Boxer can safely say that her life has never been better. In fact (for a change), things seem to be going well for all the members of the Women's Murder Club as they gather to celebrate San Francisco Medical Examiner Claire Washburn's birthday. But the party is cut short when Lindsay is called to a gruesome crime scene, where a woman has been murdered in broad daylight.

It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come.

If Danny Cartwright had proposed to Beth Wilson the day before, or the day after, he would not have been arrested and charged with the murder of his best friend. And when the four prosecution witnesses are a barrister, a popular actor, an aristocrat and the youngest partner in an established firm's history, who is going to believe his side of the story. Danny is sentenced to twenty-two years and is sent to Belmarsh prison, the highest security jail in the land, from where no inmate has ever escaped.

Amateur sleuth Isabelle "Izzy" James proudly serves her famous boozy pies at the hundredth birthday party of Sunshine Springs' oldest citizen. But the celebration ends with a bang when the guest of honor himself is shot dead. At first, everyone thinks it's obvious who killed him. But what if everyone is wrong? Izzy has a hunch that there's more to this murder than meets the eye, and she's determined to get to the bottom of things. With her trusty Dalmatian Sprinkles at her side, she chases down clues.

Built at the end of the last ice age around 9600 BCE, Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey was designed to align with the constellation of the celestial swan, Cygnus - a fact confirmed by the discovery at the site of a tiny bone plaque carved with the three key stars of Cygnus. Remarkably, the three main pyramids at Giza in Egypt, including the Great Pyramid, align with the same three stars. But where did this ancient veneration of Cygnus come from?

Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her 13th birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front – Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and terrified. Every year another card: each one worse than the last. The tabloids call him The Birthday Boy. He’s been snatching girls for 12 years, always in the run-up to their 13th birthday, sending the families his homemade cards showing their daughters being slowly tortured to death.