Every Friday a child's snapshot arrives at the Boston office of P.I. Carlotta Carlyle. There's no note. No return address. Just pictures of the child as a newborn, as a toddler, as a preschooler. Maybe Carlotta should have tossed them all in the trash. Maybe then she wouldn't have gotten mixed up again...in murder. Discovering what happened to the child in the photos draws Carlotta into a shattered picture of private lives sadly out of focus-and big shots mixed up with deadly conspiracy that stretches from a New England hospital to the Third World. And when she finds her own "little sister" from the Boston Big Sisters program in a different kind of danger, the truth jumps out in harsh black and white. In a world filled with killers and innocence, Carlotta Carlyle may be the only avenging angel left....

Samantha gives her naughty big brother Sam a box of birthday chocolates stuffed with mouth-watering surprises--and discovered that revenge is sweet indeed!

Starting at age eight, Dean Sims has worked at being several different kinds of a working journalist. He never has stopped collecting stories to make for a more interesting and better-informed world of people. He did human-interest features for The Kansas City Star, Ottawa, Kans., Herald, the Burlington, IA. Hawk-Eye Gazette, Toledo Blade and The Associated Press. Sometimes he gets into The Reader's Digest as a contributor. But all during these times, he has made his primary living at public relations management jobs, in the U.S. and overseas. His specialty is sharing the ironies of life involving people. He has been called "sardonic observer" by editors more than once, and once his doting mother said to him, "You are rude to write things that are laughing at people." Many years later, he rationalized that he was really laughing with people, even about himself. Night and day, on trips and at home, at meals and in bed, he has scribbled notes on anything handy to remind himself of what somebody had just said or done-something to cheer and light our paths along the way of life, maybe helping us to be better adjusted people. Read on with Dean

A remarkable life and a remarkable voice emerge from the journals, letters, and memoirs of Leo Lerman: writer, critic, editor at Condé Nast, and man about town at the center of New York’s artistic and social circles from the 1940s until his death in 1994. Lerman’s contributions to the world of the arts were large and varied: he wrote on theater, dance, music, art, books, and movies for publications as diverse as Mademoiselle and The New York Times. He was features editor at Vogue and editor in chief of Vanity Fair. He launched careers and trends, exposing the American public to new talents, fashions, and ideas. He was a legendary party host as well, counting Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, and Truman Capote among his intimates, and celebrities like Cary Grant, Jackie Onassis, Isak Dinesen, and Margot Fonteyn as part of his larger circle. But his personal accounts and correspondence reveal him also as having an unusually rich and complex private life, mourning the cultivated émigré world of 1930s and 1940s New York City, reflecting on being Jewish and an openly homosexual man, and intimately evoking his two most important lifelong relationships. From a man whose literary icon was Marcel Proust comes an unparalleled social and emotional history. With eloquence, insight, and wit, he filled his journals and letters with acute assessments, gossip, and priceless anecdotes while inimitably recording both our larger cultural history and his own moving private story.

It's Sam's birthday and his surprise clown is very scary until he reveals his real identity.

Having failed miserably while working for his uncle, Sam finds himself shipped off to America. He would much rather have been headed to Canada as he’d fallen in love with the picture of a women he’d found left behind in a remote cabin when he’d vacationed there. That is, until he sees another picture of her, in America, while visiting an old friend. He discovers his dream girl, Kay, is the niece of Matthew Wrenn who works for Mammoth Publishing Company. Sam takes a job with Mammoth Publishing Company and rents the house next door to the Wrenn’s. From there he sets out to win Kay’s affections. Throw in a mystery of a lost family treasure and a gang of thieves and you have the makings of a spirited romp! P. G. Wodehouse at his very best.