USA TODAY bestselling author of The Givenchy Code Julie Kenner reloads for her second novel of high-heeled thrills as another woman gets pulled into a mysterious world of extreme gaming where she must play or die. Aspiring actress Jennifer Crane knows all about games—the games girls play to get a guy; the games actresses play to land a part; and the good old game of credit-card roulette. (How else is a girl supposed to afford her shoes?) But she never expected to be playing a game with life-or-death consequences. Unable to successfully score an acting gig, she has, instead, been cast in the role of reluctant bodyguard to a real-life assassin's target— a dashing FBI agent of all people!—and must embark with him upon a scavenger hunt across Manhattan in search of the ultimate prize: survival. Before this, Jenn's definition of fighting dirty has been elbowing her way to the front of the line at a Manolo sample sale. Now, if she wants to stay alive, she's going to have to learn a few new uses for her stilettos...and they ain't pretty. Fast, flirty, and full of great footwear, The Manolo Matrix is another electrifying adventure in this breakout series for fashionistas who love a perfectly appointed mystery.

As if bad-hair days, scrounging for rent money, and lusting after designer shoes wasn't enough to make Melanie Prescott's life interesting, suddenly she's chasing after obscure clues tossed her way by a madman.

USA Today bestselling author Julie Kenner follows up her acclaimed thrillers The Givenchy Code and The Manolo Matrix with a whip-smart new adventure in code-breaking -- Hollywood-style! Devi Taylor was one of Hollywood's fastest-rising starlets -- until a crazed fan held her at knifepoint and she retreated to a life of privacy and Valium. Now recovered and ready for a comeback, Devi dreams of endorsing all things Prada, whose Rodeo Drive store she can't resist. Instead, she lands the starring role in The Givenchy Code, a high-budget action-adventure flick. But with the tabloids all over Givenchy and her recent split with her drop-dead handsome costar, Blake, Devi can't shake the feeling that another crazed fan is going to strike. Then a frightening message -- "Play or Die" -- is delivered to Devi's house, and she finds herself sucked into a deadly and cryptic game not unlike the one in the movie she's starring in. Hollywood has always been her life, but does Devi know its secrets well enough to follow the cinematic clues that might save her and her favorite Prada bag? Julie Kenner is the author of two previous novels in this series,The Givenchy Code and The Manolo Matrix, both available from Downtown Press. Her novel Aphrodite's Kiss was a USA Today bestseller, and Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom was a Book Sense Summer Paperback Pick. Her other acclaimed novels include Nobody But You and The Spy Who Loves Me. She lives in Georgetown, Texas, with her husband and daughter.

THE WHOLE TRUTH . . . Rich has always been skeptical about falling in love. Natasha has always fully expected to. And when these two find each other, they win the entire True Love package -- tenderness and hot sex and open-eyed kisses. Long weekends in bed and talk of marriage and babies. The kind of love where there's no room for secrets. That, after all, is what Tash says will keep them going strong: total and complete honesty. . . . AND NOTHING BUT? Now Rich and Tash are engaged, and Rich's old school friends crash into their love cocoon with big plans for celebrating, along with spouses and significant others, on a trip to a stunning French ski resort. But a lot can happen in a week that's meant to capture the free-spirited fun they all shared a decade ago. And in the glare of a whiteout on the slopes, Tash crosses paths with the one secret Rich should have kept: his colorful, vivacious, needy ex-lover, Jayne. . . .

New and improved -- now with added goats! Welcome to advertising executive Jill Campbell's life, version 2.0. Gone are the cheating ex-husband and the chaos of New York. Brand-new features include a prestigious job at a Boston ad agency, a stronger father-daughter relationship, and a gorgeous old farmhouse. It's bliss -- until a snazzy car account evaporates, leaving her branding...beef. Un-snazzy, un-sexy beef -- which she hasn't eaten in twenty years. Talk about false advertising. Owning a two-hundred-year-old house in a one-store hamlet is not the nirvana Jill imagined, even with the addition of a dog, two needy goats, and unexpected encounters with the town's most eligible -- and probably only -- bachelor. Peace of mind sold separately. Wondering how she sold herself on this new existence, Jill forms an unlikely bond with Sarah Watson, a feisty twelve-year-old with an aversion to training bras, makeup, and all the trappings that supposedly make sixth grade worthwhile. While Sarah teaches Jill the basics of home maintenance and animal husbandry, Jill helps Sarah deal with impending womanhood. And as men start to complicate matters, every idea Jill ever had about love and advertising gets turned on its head. Suddenly, her life looks nothing like the picture on the box, but it could turn out to be exactly what she didn't know she needed.

This work is based on a set of lectures and invited papers presented at a meeting in Murcia, Spain, organized by the European Commission's Training and Mobility of Researchers (TMR) Programme. It contains information on the structure of representation theory of groups and algebras and on general ring theoretic methods related to the theory.

"Despite the persistent, unparalleled popularity of the romance fiction genre, good biographical information for its authors is neither abundant nor easily accessible ... this source provides both biographical and up-to-date bibliographical information for more than 100 American romance writers"--Foreword.

This book gathers the proceedings of the Multidisciplinary International Conference of Research Applied to Defense and Security (MICRADS), held at the Eloy Alfaro Military Academy (ESMIL) in Quito, Ecuador, on May 13–15,2020. It covers a broad range of topics in systems, communication, and defense; strategy and political–administrative vision in defense; and engineering and technologies applied to defense. Given its scope, it offers a valuable resource for practitioners, researchers, and students alike.

This book addresses the key problems that computational intelligence aims to solve, including (i) the involved computational process might be too complex for mathematical reasoning; (ii) it might contain some uncertainties during the process, or (iii) by nature, the computational process is a randomly determined one (heuristic). The contributors make use of methods that are close to the human's way of reasoning, that is, available information might be inexact or incomplete, yet it would be able to produce controlled actions in an adaptive way. Approaches presented in the book include swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, image processing, data mining, natural language processing, text mining, and other solutions involving artificial intelligence methodologies.