In a dead-beat coastal town in North East Scotland, seventeen-year-old Malky Campbell is desperate to help his pregnant and heroin addicted girlfriend. DI Stark, a middle-aged detective, alarmed by the rise of teenage crime in Port Cawdor, uncovers the operations of a county line gang that are flooding the area with drugs and engaging in a vicious turf war with a local family. Malky has just started working on his family's trawler with his cousin Johnny, when their boat pulls up Johnny's brother in its nets. The rest of the crew, the tightly-knit community and the police start to suspect that the cousins are responsible for his death. With his brother dead, Johnny inherits the family trawler, which he plans to use to smuggle drugs into the country for the county line gang, giving him enough money to start a new life. Ewan Gault's debut, The Sound of Sirens is a tough, modern crime novel, presenting the complexities of young life in a town at the end of the line.'The Sound of Sirens reads like Irvine Welsh blended with Ian Rankin. A fast paced and darkly addictive crime story, exploring what it means to be young, male and on the peripheries of 21st century Scotland.' G. R. Halliday, author of Dark Shadows and From the Waters 'Beautifully and darkly written, The Sound of Sirens is redolent with the reek of the boats and ports of the North East coast, and the stench of crime. Ewan Gault's writing perfectly shows the hardship of life at sea, and disaffected youth struggling to survive on dry land, where the only escape is addiction.' Mark Leggatt, author of The Silk Road and The London Cage 'A gritty, murderous crime novel? A Bildungsroman? A scathing indictment of wasted youth in contemporary Scotland? This excellent page turner is all of these and more, and is guaranteed to please to the last breath.' Craig Gibson, One O'Clock Gun

An ancient land protected by a Tower of Light, its people ever tempted by Siren song, and a girl who falls for the wrong boy. On the island of Skylge, electricity is only for the Currents – the rich ruling class who once came from across the sea and brought the holy fire of St. Brandan to Skylge. Ever since, the light in the Brandaris Tower has protected the islanders. Heeding the Siren's call will drown your body and steal your soul, but the sacred light in the Tower will chase the merfolk away. When Skylger girl Enna welcomes her brother back from a long sea voyage, he gives her a special present from the mainland – an electronic record only playable on a Current device. The problem is that Royce Bolton, Current heartthrob and the town’s most gifted pianist, wants it too. After she stubbornly refuses to sell the LP featuring his favorite artist, he suggests sharing the record by secretly meeting up in his private summer house. Taken aback yet thrilled, Enna agrees – and discovers that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to Current society and the history of Skylge. Why do the Sirens tempt the islanders to give themselves up to the sea? And where does the Currents’ monopoly on electricity really come from? While struggling with these questions, Enna begins to fall for Royce, risking everything to be with a guy who is clearly wrong for her. She will learn that the sound of Sirens isn’t the most treacherous thing out there to haunt her dreams. keywords: free ebook, free series starter, fantasy, romance, dystopian, young adult, mermaids

A riveting thriller about a damaged undercover detective navigating a web of politicians, drug lords, missing persons, and his own flawed department, perfect for readers of Tana French, Don Winslow and Dennis Lehane. Infiltrating the inner circle of enigmatic criminal Zain Carver is dangerous enough. Pulling it off while also rescuing Isabelle Rossiter, a runaway politician’s daughter, from Zain’s influence? Impossible. That’s why Aidan Waits is the perfect man for the job. Disgraced, emotionally damaged, and despised by his superiors. In other words, completely expendable. But Aidan is a born survivor. And as he works his way deep into Zain’s shadowy world, he finds that nothing is as it seems. Zain is a mesmerizing, Gatsby-esque figure who lures young women into his orbit—women who have a bad habit of turning up dead. But is Zain really responsible? And will Isabelle be next? Before long, Aidan finds himself in over his head, cut loose by his superiors, and dangerously attracted to the wrong woman. How can he save the girl if he can’t even save himself?

The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn t necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies."

She just ran from the most humiliating moment of her life… … and now she’s trapped on an island full of eccentric old people. How did she go from being a respected ICU nurse to being the sole caregiver for almost one-hundred difficult retirees? Danielle ponders that thought when she learns that the last eight nurses left the job, and that most of the residents don’t want her there either. And then there’s the handsome and wealthy entrepreneur who owns the whole island, of course. Will she choose to create a new life surrounded by people twice her age, or will she go back to the life she ran away from in the first place? In book 1 of this funny and heartwarming southern women’s fiction series, you’ll have plenty of belly laughs as USA Today bestselling author Rachel Hanna tackles the reality of the way the aging population is often treated by their own families and how friends can become true family.

Hailed for its dramatic expressionist visuals, film noir is one of the most prominent genres in Hollywood cinema. Yet, despite the "boom" in sound studies, the role of sonic effects and source music in classic American noir has not received the attention it deserves. Siren City engagingly illustrates how sound tracks in 1940s film noir are often just as compelling as the genre's vaunted graphics. Focusing on a wide range of celebrated and less well known films and offering an introductory discussion of film sound, Robert Miklitsch mobilizes the notion of audiovisuality to investigate period sound technologies such as the radio and jukebox, phonograph and Dictaphone, popular American music such as "hot" black jazz, and "big numbers" featuring iconic performers such as Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, and Rita Hayworth. Siren City resonates with the sounds and source music of classic American noir-gunshots and sirens, swing riffs and canaries. Along with the proverbial private eye and femme fatale, these audiovisuals are central to the noir aesthetic and one important reason the genre reverberates with audiences around the world.

"Lolly Salt's three sisters are sirens--young women who lure ships to their doom--and as Lolly's 13th birthday approaches she's about to become one too. But when it becomes clear that someone in town knows the Salt girls secret, Lolly sets out to learn how this happened to her family and if she can prevent it"--

You cannot make it without God’s mercy. Do we just need God’s grace in dark and shameful moments? Are prayers for mercy only for those times when we really mess up? Jonathan Parnell says we need God’s mercy all the time. In fact, contrary to many church cultures, Parnell shows that asking God for mercy should be as regular as asking God for our daily bread. There’s no doubt that David was in a terrible predicament when he first prayed the words of Psalm 51. It was a dark and shameful moment in the Bible, and one so dark and shameful it seldom feels relevant to us today. But David’s most desperate prayer is really a prayer for all of us—and not just for our worst moments, but for our every moment. In these pages, you'll discover: how to pray a daily, memorable prayer derived from Psalm 51 how to practice daily repentance and soul care how to pursue God and experience his joy in the Christian life This is God’s mercy, and it’s Mercy for Today.

A young girl discovers her mother's secret marriage to a pilot killed during World War II, and over the course of decades, unfolds a captivating love story that lives on long after her mother's passing.