A Secretive Neighbor's Disappearance Raises Questions in Death Comes Knocking, a Thea Kozak Murder Mystery from Kate Flora. --Maine, Present Day-- Happy to finally be settling into her new home, a heavily pregnant Thea Kozak is rushing to get the baby’s room finished when she’s surprised by a visit from her new neighbor, Jessica, who is equally pregnant. Thrilled to meet another new mother in the neighborhood, Thea and Jessica bond over their mutual condition. But after many cups of herbal tea and cookies, Thea is puzzled by Jessica's unwillingness to talk about her past. A week later, Thea arrives at Jessica's house for a planned shopping trip to discover Jessica is gone, leaving only a trash bag of women's clothing at the end of the driveway. Returning home, there's a disturbing voice mail from Jessica: "Please, Thea. Don’t worry about me. If anyone comes looking for me, you don’t know me. You’ve never seen me. Don’t tell them anything." Thea’s resolve to avoid getting drawn into any more potentially dangerous adventures crumbles as she sets out to learn who Jessica is and who—or what—she’s running from. Publisher's Note: Kate Flora is known for taking readers on a near breathless experience with a surprise at every turn. Fans of Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly as well as Faith Martin and Chris Collett will not want to miss this series. "...a terrific, in-your-face, stand-up gal...Stephanie Plum and Thea Kozak have a lot to say to each other." ~Janet Evanovich "Kate Flora does what all the great writers do: she takes you inside unfamiliar territory and makes you feel right at home; you climb in and are along for the whole ride." ~Michael Connelly "I'll follow Thea Kozak anywhere. She is simply one of the most refreshing and original heroines in mystery fiction today. And Kate Flora is the rare, graceful writer who pays close attention to how long it takes the body and the heart to heal." ~Laura Lippman THE THEA KOZAK MYSTERY SERIES, in order Chosen for Death Death in a Funhouse Mirror Death at the Wheel An Educated Death Death in Paradise Liberty or Death Stalking Death Death Warmed Over Schooled in Death Death Comes Knocking Death Sends a Message

A Secretive Neighbor's Disappearance Raises Questions in Death Comes Knocking, a Thea Kozak Murder Mystery from Kate Flora. --Maine, Present Day-- Happy to finally be settling into her new home, a heavily pregnant Thea Kozak is rushing to get the baby's room finished when she's surprised by a visit from her new neighbor, Jessica, who is equally pregnant. Thrilled to meet another new mother in the neighborhood, Thea and Jessica bond over their mutual condition. But after many cups of herbal tea and cookies, Thea is puzzled by Jessica's unwillingness to talk about her past. A week later, Thea arrives at Jessica's house for a planned shopping trip to discover Jessica is gone, leaving only a trash bag of women's clothing at the end of the driveway. Returning home, there's a disturbing voice mail from Jessica: "Please, Thea. Don't worry about me. If anyone comes looking for me, you don't know me. You've never seen me. Don't tell them anything." Thea's resolve to avoid getting drawn into any more potentially dangerous adventures crumbles as she sets out to learn who Jessica is and who-or what-she's running from. Publisher's Note: Kate Flora is known for taking readers on a near breathless experience with a surprise at every turn. Fans of Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly as well as Faith Martin and Chris Collett will not want to miss this series. "...a terrific, in-your-face, stand-up gal...Stephanie Plum and Thea Kozak have a lot to say to each other." Janet Evanovich "Kate Flora does what all the great writers do: she takes you inside unfamiliar territory and makes you feel right at home; you climb in and are along for the whole ride." Michael Connelly "I'll follow Thea Kozak anywhere. She is simply one of the most refreshing and original heroines in mystery fiction today. And Kate Flora is the rare, graceful writer who pays close attention to how long it takes the body and the heart to heal." Laura Lippman THE THEA KOZAK MYSTERY SERIES, in order Chosen for Death Death in a Funhouse Mirror Death at the Wheel An Educated Death Death in Paradise Liberty or Death Stalking Death Death Warmed Over Schooled in Death Death Comes Knocking Death Sends a Message

A Newborn, a Baby Carriage, and an Ice Cream Cone Leads to a Lingering Mystery in DEATH SENDS A MESSAGE by Kate Flora —Freeport, Maine, Present Day— Independent school consultant Thea Kozak is adjusting to motherhood and enjoying maternity leave, having just purchased a hat for her newborn son, when a hysterical woman gains her attention. The woman, also a new mother, claims her baby has just been kidnapped. Determined not to get involved, Thea flags down a police officer and hands off the problem. She returns home to her husband Andre, intending to enjoy their precious weeks of parental leave. But Thea’s kindness soon brings trouble to her doorstep when a police officer asks questions about her relationship with Addison Shirley, the mother of the kidnapped child, who claimed Thea was a friend before she disappeared. The couple’s hopes for a peaceful respite are quickly replaced with a break-in, a stalker, and a private school crisis involving star athletes and sexual assault that only Thea can handle. Thea and Andre wrestle with the lingering mystery and competing priorities while reexamining their future...if they live to face it. Publisher’s Note: Kate Flora is known for taking readers on a near breathless experience with a surprise at every turn. Fans of Sara Paretsky, Laura Lippman, Sue Grafton, and Julia Spencer-Fleming will not want to miss this series. “If you like your heroines smart, brave, tough, and exuberantly aware of the possibilities of the human heart, look no further than Thea Kozak.” ~S.J. Rozan “...a terrific, in-your-face, stand-up gal...Stephanie Plum and Thea Kozak have a lot to say to each other.” ~Janet Evanovich “Kate Flora does what all the great writers do: she takes you inside unfamiliar territory and makes you feel right at home; you climb in and are along for the whole ride.” ~Michael Connelly “I’ll follow Thea Kozak anywhere. She is simply one of the most refreshing and original heroines in mystery fiction today. And Kate Flora is the rare, graceful writer who pays close attention to how long it takes the body and the heart to heal.” ~Laura Lippman THE THEA KOZAK MYSTERY SERIES, in order Chosen for Death Death in a Funhouse Mirror Death at the Wheel An Educated Death Death in Paradise Liberty or Death Stalking Death Death Warmed Over Schooled in Death Death Comes Knocking Death Sends a Message About the Author Maine native Kate Flora’s fascination with people’s criminal tendencies began in the Maine attorney general’s office. Deadbeat dads, people who hurt their kids, and employers’ discrimination aroused her curiosity about human behavior. The author of twenty-four books and many short stories, Flora’s been a finalist for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Derringer awards. She won the Public Safety Writers Association award for nonfiction and twice won the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction. Her most recent Thea Kozak mystery is Death Sends a Message; her most recent Joe Burgess is A World of Deceit. Her crime story collection is Careful What You Wish For: Stories of revenge, retribution, and the world made right. Flora is a founding member of the New England Crime Bake and the Maine Crime Wave and runs the blog Maine Crime Writers. Flora’s nonfiction focuses on aspects of the public safety officers’ experience. She divides her time between Massachusetts and Maine, where she gardens and cooks and watches the clouds when she’s not imagining her character’s dark deeds. She occasionally swims in the shark-filled sea. She’s been married for decades to an excellent man. Her sons edit films and hang out in research labs.

A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers, in particular. Written in the style of a memoir penned by Antonia’s tutor and friend, the book depicts one of the most memorable heroines in American literature, the spirited eldest daughter of a Czech immigrant family, whose calm, quite strength and robust spirit helped her survive the hardships and loneliness of life on the Nebraska prairie. The two form an enduring bond and through his chronicle, we watch Antonia shape the land while dealing with poverty, treachery, and tragedy. “No romantic novel ever written in America...is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.” -H. L. Mencken Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer best known for her novels of the Plains and for One of Ours, a novel set in World War I, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943 and received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1944, an award given once a decade for an author's total accomplishments. By the time of her death she had written twelve novels, five books of short stories, and a collection of poetry.

Fans of Peter James and his bestselling Roy Grace series of crime novels know that his books draw on in-depth research into the lives of Brighton and Hove police and are set in a world every bit as gritty as the real thing. His friend Graham Bartlett was a long-serving detective in the city once described as Britain's 'crime capital'. Together, in Death Comes Knocking, they have written a gripping account of the city's most challenging cases, taking the reader from crime scenes and incident rooms to the morgue, and introducing some of the real-life detectives who inspired Peter James's characters. Whether it's the murder of a dodgy nightclub owner and his family in Sussex's worst non-terrorist mass murder or the race to find the abductor of a young girl, tracking down the antique trade's most notorious 'knocker boys' or nailing an audacious ring of forgers, hunting for a cold-blooded killer who executed a surfer or catching a pair who kidnapped a businessman, leaving him severely beaten, to die on a hillside, the authors skilfully evoke the dangerous inside story of policing, the personal toll it takes and the dedication of those who risk their lives to keep the public safe.

A fascinating, first-hand account of a murder investigation in a rural state

Lorna Kepler was beautiful and willful, a loner who couldn't resist flirting with danger. Maybe that's what killed her. Her death had raised a host of tough questions. The cops suspected homicide, but they could find neither motive nor suspect. Even the means were mysterious: Lorna's body was so badly decomposed when it was discovered that they couldn't be certain she hadn't died of natural causes. In the way of overworked cops everywhere, the case was gradually shifted to the back burner and became another unsolved file. Only Lorna's mother kept it alive, consumed by the certainty that somebody out there had gotten away with murder. In the ten months since her daughter's death, Janice Kepler had joined a support group, trying to come to terms with her loss and her anger. It wasn't helping. And so, leaving a session one evening and noticing a light on in the offices of Millhone Investigations, she knocked on the door. In answering that knock, Kinsey Millhone is pulled into the netherworld of unavenged murder, where only a pact with the devil will satisfy the restless ghosts of the victims and give release to the living they have left behind. Eleven books into the series that has won her readers around the world, Sue Grafton takes a darkside turn, pitching us into a shadow land of pain and grief where killers still walk free, unaccused, unpunished, unrepentant. With "K" is for Killer she offers a tale that is dark, complex, and deeply disturbing. "A" Is for Alibi "B" Is for Burglar "C" Is for Corpse "D" Is for Deadbeat "E" Is for Evidence "F" Is for Fugitive "G" Is for Gumshoe "H" Is for Homicide "I" Is for Innocent "J" Is for Judgment "K" Is for Killer "L" is for Lawless "M" Is for Malice "N" Is for Noose "O" Is for Outlaw "P" Is for Peril "Q" Is for Quarry "R" Is for Ricochet "S" Is for Silence "T" Is for Trespass "U" Is for Undertow "V" Is for Vengeance "W" Is for Wasted "X"

Since the beginning of television, Westerns have been playing on the small screen. From the mid-1950s until the early 1960s, they were one of TV's most popular genres, with millions of viewers tuning in to such popular shows as Rawhide, Gunsmoke, and Disney's Davy Crockett. Though the cultural revolution of the later 1960s contributed to the demise of traditional Western programs, the Western never actually disappeared from TV. Instead, it took on new forms, such as the highly popular Lonesome Dove and Deadwood, while exploring the lives of characters who never before had a starring role, including anti-heroes, mountain men, farmers, Native and African Americans, Latinos, and women. Shooting Stars of the Small Screen is a comprehensive encyclopedia of more than 450 actors who received star billing or played a recurring character role in a TV Western series or a made-for-TV Western movie or miniseries from the late 1940s up to 2008. Douglas Brode covers the highlights of each actor's career, including Western movie work, if significant, to give a full sense of the actor's screen persona(s). Within the entries are discussions of scores of popular Western TV shows that explore how these programs both reflected and impacted the social world in which they aired. Brode opens the encyclopedia with a fascinating history of the TV Western that traces its roots in B Western movies, while also showing how TV Westerns developed their own unique storytelling conventions.

When a student is found drowned in the campus pond of a prestigious New England boarding school, Thea Kozak is called in for crisis management. Cooperation abounds until Thea discovers that the young victim was pregnant and the death may not have been an accident. Then administration and students turn tight-lipped. When Thea digs deeper, she unearths a host of nasty secrets beneath the school’s genteel facade. Now everyone wants her gone, everyone except the killer who has a very different fate in mind for Thea Kozak. REVIEWS: "If a sleep-losing page turner is your thing, keep an eye on Thea." Richard Barre, award-winning author of the Wil Hardesty Series THE THEA KOZAK MYSTERY SERIES, in order Chosen for Death Death in a Funhouse Mirror Death at the Wheel An Educated Death Death in Paradise Liberty or Death Stalking Death Death Warmed Over