Hollywood agent Charlie Greene gets tangled up in a world of holistic intervention, out-of-body experiences, and murder in this thrilling paranormal mystery Hollywood literary agent and single mother Charlie Greene heads out of town to fog-bound Moot Point, Oregon, to meet a client, reclusive New Age author Jack Monroe. But Charlie barely has time to sample a veggie meal and bond with Jack’s bronze Buddha statue before she runs into trouble: Local gossip Georgette Glick and her Schwinn bicycle have just been found under the wheels of Charlie’s Toyota—which makes Charlie the prime suspect in Georgette’s murder. Luckily, Moot Point sheriff Bennett discovers that Glick was shot, not run over, so Charlie is in the clear. But there are still too many unanswered questions. Who delivered the fatal bullet to Glick’s head? And why was the seventy-eight-year-old riding her bike on a night with zero visibility in the first place? Alongside Sheriff Bennett, whose interest in Charlie seems decidedly more than professional, she resolves to find the murderer among the town’s eccentrics, who include the suspiciously nongrieving widower, a holistic veterinarian, the victim’s terrified neighbor, and a Byronic artist whose painting of a century-old local shipwreck matches the one in Charlie’s recent nightmares. With the killer still at large, Charlie may be tempting an out-of-body experience of her own in this quirky and suspenseful novel.

Used to making a killing, literary agent Charlie Greene arrives in the foggy town of Moot Point, Oregon, and finds herself party to a killing of a different kind--one with a corpse and with herself as a suspect

In 1853 Lexington, Virginia, Mary Evelyn Anderson, one of the most beautiful women in the Commonwealth, spurned the advances of a young law student named Charles Burks Christian. Humiliated and heartbroken, Christian confronted, stabbed and killed the man he believed responsible for Anderson's decision. The man was her cousin, Thomas Blackburn, a VMI cadet and student of Stonewall Jackson. What followed was a circus of inept and brilliant lawyers dragging members of the most prominent families in antebellum Virginia through and all-too-public discussion of seduction, courtship, honor and self-defense. Author and historian Daniel S. Morrow chronicles the history of the events that led to Blackburn's death, the trials that followed and the impact on Lexington, its two colleges and the men and women who would soon find themselves engaged in a great Civil War.

The crime of homicide has long animated academic debate, community concern and political attention. The discussion has often centered on the perceived (in)adequacy of legal responses to homicide, questions of culpability, and divergent representations of victims and offenders. Within this, notions of gender, responsibility and justice are pivotal. This edited collection builds on existing scholarship by examining these concerns not only in the context of the ‘private’ world of domestic murder but also in the more ‘public’ world of the state, the corporation, war, and genocide. In so doing this book draws from key frameworks of criminological thought, legal analysis and empirical evidence to critically examine the relationship between homicide, gender and responsibility. Bringing together leading international criminology and legal scholars, this collection provides a unique contribution to the academic and policy engagement with what is, more often than not, an ordinary and mundane crime. Analysing the crime in a variety of different social contexts alongside an in-depth and critical analysis of the interconnections between the ordinary act of lethal violence, gender and notions of responsibility, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and policymakers working in criminology and socio-legal studies.

Words: A User's Guide is an accessible and invaluable reference that is ideal for students, business people and advanced learners of English. The book is structured in groups of words that may be confused because they sound alike, look alike or seem to have similar meanings, and this approach makes it much more intuitive and easy to use than a dictionary. Contrasting over 5000 words (such as habitable and inhabitable, precipitation and rainfall, reigns and reins), Words: a User’s Guide provides examples of usage adapted from large national databases of contemporary English, and illustrates each headword in typical contexts and phrases. This book gives you straightforward answers, and helps with pronunciation, spelling, style and levels of formality. For those working internationally it presents international standards and compares usage in Britain and the USA. Words: A User’s Guide is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to communicate well in written and spoken English. "At last! A book about the use of words that clarifies and de-mystifies in an eminently usable way. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to write well. It is a book to keep." Sandy Gilkes, Head of the Centre for Academic Practice, University of Northampton "Rigorous, fresh, intriguing and downright useful, it deserves a place on every properly stocked reference shelf." Brian Cathcart, Professor of Journalism, Kingston University "From the pedantic to the permissive, everyone who’s interested in the English language and the way we speak and write it will want a copy of this practical, entertaining book." Wynford Hicks (author of Quite Literally and The Basics of English Usage)

TV shows that retain their popularity over the years do so for obvious reasons: good production values, good acting, and compelling storylines. But detective stories in particular also endure because they appeal to the gumshoe in all of us. America is obsessed with crime solving. Nancy Grace on CNN Headline News, Greta Van Susteren on Fox, and the seemingly annual recurrence of the courtroom sensation all testify to this fact. And these people and cases are able to reach their phenomenal status not simply because of the media-the media only demonstrates the enormous national appetite for this material. Rather, Cold Case, CSI, and Law & Order have achieved their current popularity because they all respond to the same national craving for crime, and do so with great skill and creativity. Round Up the Usual Suspects provides a comparison of the crime fighting models and justice proceedings of each of these TV series. Each series has its own special crime-fighting niche, and each approaches its job with a different set of values and different paradigms of discovery and proof. Their separate approaches are each firmly grounded in different components of human nature — analytical reasoning, for instance, in CSI, memory in Cold Case, and teamwork in Law & Order. After examining each of the individual series in depth, Ruble goes on to investigate some of the historical antecedents in classical TV detective series such as The FBI and Dragnet. It is interesting to note that these crime fighting methodologies are extensions of the way we all process information about the world. Ray Ruble here aims to increase our appreciation for the ingenious manner in which fictional cases are broken and convictions convincingly secured, and also illuminates the deeper human elements that lie under a more implicit spotlight in these runaway hits.

When an eighty-three-year-old curmudgeon is suffocated in her hospital bed, a plethora of relatives make excellent suspects amid a controversy over her will. Can beer-swilling, Letterman-loving Detective Sam Runyon pick through the cast of characters and find out which one murdered her? Or will Sam be next on the hit list?