DIVWhen a literary agent is murdered, every bodice-ripping author is a suspect/divDIV The nation’s most famous romance authors are often so over-the-top that they could star in their own work. Catty, eccentric, and vain, they live to make each other miserable—and Patience McKenna does all she can to stay out of their line of fire. Too smart for her own genre, she writes romance novels to pay the rent and investigates stories to stay sane. Now the romance wars are about to hit her on the home front./divDIV /divDIVA few nights before the start of the annual American Writers of Romance conference, Pay comes home to find her apartment locked from the inside. When the police break down the door, they stumble onto Julie Simms, literary agent to the leading lights of romance, lying dead on the floor. When the conference convenes, Pay asks: Which of her colleagues has traded make-believe passion for real-life murder?/div

From a marriage of convenience, a fierce, all-consuming love was born. From the first time Jasmine’s eyes met those of Lord Jamie Cameron in a smoky British inn, theirs was the wrong kind of attraction—not gentle, slow, and easy, but hot, hard, and all-consuming. The illegitimate daughter of an actress and duke, Jassy had dreams no man could wrench from her in a moment of desire. She’d resist this bold nobleman with all the strength of her soul. But her golden hair, fiery temperament, and indomitable spirit obsessed Lord Cameron . . . and he wanted her with him when he sailed for the new wilderness called Virginia. So he had a bargain for the spit-fire Jassy, one that only a very special woman would dare to make.

DIVMcKenna investigates the first casualty in a New York literary war/divDIV The romance boom has ended, and the women who made fortunes writing bodice-rippers are now scribbling mysteries instead. When the genre’s “true” authors fight back, a battle breaks out in every high-class gin joint in Manhattan. It is take-no-prisoners fighting, and Patience McKenna is caught in the middle./divDIV /divDIVThis ex-romance author has just turned to true crime writing when Sarah English comes to visit. A would-be romance writer from the Great Plains, English is dowdy, wide-eyed, and naïve—but she is about to toughen up. When a fading romance writer gets pushed in front of a subway train, English is among the suspects. To prove her new friend innocent, McKenna will need the skills gleaned in both her literary genres. /div

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

As New Year’s approaches, a former FBI investigator—“the Armenian-American Poirot”—resolves to find the killer of a Connecticut exercise guru (Kirkus Reviews). After twenty years in California, Frannie Jay—formerly Frances Jakumbowski—returns to her home turf: New Haven, Connecticut, a university town that has become rife with crime. The depressed aerobics instructor hopes to find new life at the Fountain of Youth—a workout studio whose weight trainer, Tim Bradbury, is the best in the business. But Frannie’s fresh start turns sour just before New Year’s, when she finds Bradbury in the bushes outside the studio, stark naked and stone dead. Former FBI investigator Gregor Demarkian comes to New Haven to assist the local police. Bradbury died of arsenic poisoning—a fate no amount of exercise can stave off—and any instructor and client in the studio could have killed him. Demarkian’s body may not be rock hard, but his mind is sharp, and he will see to it that the next weights the killer lifts will be in the prison yard.

Many bibliographers focus on women who write. Lawyer Barnett looks at women who detect, at women as sleuths and at the evolving roles of women in professions and in society. Excellent for all women's studies programs as well as for the mystery hound. Look at the popularity of such reading guides as Willetta Heising's Detecting Women (3rd ed. 0-9644593-7-X) or Amanda Cross' fiction (Honest Doubt 0-345-44011-0 11/00).

A tale of human emotion that lays bare the heights and depths of love, passion and desire in old and new worlds…as we follow Virginia Brandon, beautiful, impudent and innocent, from the glittering ballrooms of Paris to the sensuality of life in New Orleans to the splendor of intrigue-filled Mexico. A tale of unending passion, never to be forgotten…the story of Virginia's love for Steven Morgan, a love so powerful that she will risk anything for him…even her life.

Edgar Award–Nominated Author: At a convention of nuns, an ex-FBI agent hopes to get a killer’s confession . . . A superfluity of nuns has descended on Philadelphia, and the city is doing all it can to keep them entertained. The spiritual sisters’ convention lined up several speakers, including media mogul Henry Hare, shock-jock extraordinaire Norm Kevic, and the brilliant sleuth Gregor Demarkian, whose lecture “Investigating the Catholic Murder” is sure to cause a sensation. As a former FBI investigator, Demarkian has plenty of first-hand experience solving heinous crimes—religious or otherwise. And he’s about to get a little more practice. At the convention’s first banquet, one of the nuns drops dead after ingesting the wrong cut of the deadly fugu fish. But was Sister Joan really the target, or was someone trying to do away with the loathsome Mother Mary Bellarmine? All of God’s children may go to heaven—but one of His wives is going to jail.

A former FBI agent gets entangled in a financial mogul’s murder in this “superior” whodunit series (Publishers Weekly). Once one of Wall Street’s most powerful forces, Donald McAdam’s life changed when he found himself in a tight spot with the SEC. Either give up everything, they told him, or inform on your friends. Never one for loyalty, McAdam chose the wire, and sent half the stockbrokers in New York to prison. Now he’s filthy rich, isolated, and so paranoid that he buys his cocaine laced with strychnine, in hopes of building up a tolerance for the poison. His caution doesn’t help him, however, when he tumbles off his high-rise balcony and falls headfirst back down to Wall Street. Soon afterward, one of the men McAdam put away invites ex–FBI investigator Gregor Demarkian on a very peculiar cruise—onboard a cramped precise replica of the Mayflower. But when the behavior of the passengers proves rather un-Puritan, Demarkian discovers something that would have shocked Columbus: a New World murder.