Eager to escape their families’ annual blended vacation, lifelong “frenemies” Maura and Liz take a ferry to an island deep in the Chesapeake Bay. While beautiful on the outside, the girls soon discover something sinister haunts the island residents. A centuries-long curse demands a yearly sacrifice to keep a vengeful evil at bay, and the islanders will risk everything to keep their secret. Kidnapped and trapped underground, Maura tests her mettle as she navigates through tunnels that are a maze of horrors at every turn. Maura knows she may not win the battle, but she won’t be taken out easily. She’s going to make certain that the person who abducted her will remember her as the one he misjudged. Meanwhile, Liz scours the island looking for her lost friend. With help from Jacy, one of the islanders, Liz soon learns that Maura has been chosen to be this year’s island sacrifice. Both girls must push past their physical and mental limitations and find the strength to escape Caethian Island and the evil that it was built upon. “...perfectly planned... “The Tourist Trap”...is a crime, mystery, thriller and horror book that will leave you questioning your guesses...an unpredictable web...” Online Book Club Review “...horrifying, thrilling and heart-stopping... A definite must read for horror lovers.” - Michael Bradley, Award Winning Author of Dead Air

As the sun dipped below the horizon, casting long shadows over the deserted highway, a group of five friends found themselves hopelessly lost in the middle of nowhere. The hot summer air had given way to an eerie chill, sending shivers down their spines. With their car's GPS system on the fritz and cell phone service nonexistent, they had been driving aimlessly for what felt like hours in search of civilization. "This is ridiculous, we're going in circles," groaned Tim, slumped in the backseat. "Are we even going the right way?" Sarah asked, her voice tinged with anxiety as she peered out the window at the darkening landscape, the twisted shapes of dead trees looming like gnarled hands reaching for them. "I don't know," replied Mike, the designated driver. He gripped the steering wheel tightly, his knuckles white. "But we can't just sit here. We need to find a gas station or something before we run out of fuel." The gas gauge hovered perilously close to empty. Jenna leaned forward, fiddling with the radio dials, but the static crackled ominously-no stations came through in this desolate area. Just as they were about to resign themselves to another round of aimless driving, a flickering neon sign appeared on the horizon like a beacon. "Tourist Trap," it read in bold, flashing letters that buzzed and hummed. "Thank god, maybe we can get directions or at least use a phone," Jenna exclaimed, relief evident in her voice despite the unsettling name.

Sinister twins, Edgar and Ellen, descend into Nod's Limbs vast sewer system to uncover the mystery of a rival mischief-maker.

Roi and his best friends from slavery are taking a challenge journey on Falaron, a planet terraformed from Earth during the Ice Age. They look forward to a vacation of dog sledding, hang gliding, horseback trekking, sailing, whitewater rafting, and rock climbingbut the friction developing within the group is adding its own level of challenge to the trip. Their guide, Penny, finds the four a refreshing change from her usual spoiled clients. She is worried, however, by the unusual number of accidents the group is experiencing. Even though they are vacationing on a wilderness planet, this foursome seems particularly accident prone. But they arent all accidents. Rois half-brother Zhaim, a brilliant and malicious sociopath, has decided that the journey is an ideal opportunity to rid himself of his rival. He is capable of manipulating not only the weather but affairs on distant planets. His schemes distract the only two adults who would be able to protect the young people and draw them far enough away that they can be of no help. He has even managed to plant an unsuspecting agent in the party. As the group travels, their journey becomes a far more serious challenge than any of them could have imagined.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

An investigation of tourism and its transforming impact on cities, by urban experts from a variety of disciplines. They examine such tourist meccas as Las Vegas, Orlando and Boston, and take up themes such as the marketing of cities and how tourists perceive places.

A top expert explains why a social and economic understanding of complex systems will help society to anticipate and confront our biggest challenges Imagine trying to understand a stained glass window by breaking it into pieces and examining it one shard at a time. While you could probably learn a lot about each piece, you would have no idea about what the entire picture looks like. This is reductionism -- the idea that to understand the world we only need to study its pieces -- and it is how most social scientists approach their work. In A Crude Look at the Whole, social scientist and economist John H. Miller shows why we need to start looking at whole pictures. For one thing, whether we are talking about stock markets, computer networks, or biological organisms, individual parts only make sense when we remember that they are part of larger wholes. And perhaps more importantly, those wholes can take on behaviors that are strikingly different from that of their pieces. Miller, a leading expert in the computational study of complex adaptive systems, reveals astounding global patterns linking the organization of otherwise radically different structures: It might seem crude, but a beehive's temperature control system can help predict market fluctuations and a mammal's heartbeat can help us understand the "heartbeat" of a city and adapt urban planning accordingly. From enduring racial segregation to sudden stock market disasters, once we start drawing links between complex systems, we can start solving what otherwise might be totally intractable problems. Thanks to this revolutionary perspective, we can finally transcend the limits of reductionism and discover crucial new ideas. Scientifically founded and beautifully written, A Crude Look at the Whole is a powerful exploration of the challenges that we face as a society. As it reveals, taking the crude look might be the only way to truly see.

"Consistently rated the best guides to the regions covered...Readable, tasteful, appealingly designed. Strong on dining, lodging, and history."—National Geographic Traveler At the intersection of Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron is one of America’s best-kept secrets: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Westervelt’s friendly and knowledgeable advice points you to secret waterfalls, breathtaking vistas, excellent trout-fishing, romantic dinner spots, and the best hot pasties in the U.P. It’s like having a Yooper travel companion! Distinctive for their accuracy, simplicity, and conversational tone, the diverse travel guides in our Explorer's Great Destinations series meet the conflicting demands of the modern traveler. They're packed full of up-to-date information to help plan the perfect getaway. And they're compact and light enough to come along for the ride. A tool you'll turn to before, during, and after your trip, these guides include chapters on lodging, dining, transportation, history, shopping, recreation, and more; a section packed with practical information, such as lists of banks, hospitals, post offices, laundromats, numbers for police, fire, and rescue, and other relevant information; maps of regions and locales, and more.

This volume shows the relevance of the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘belonging’ for understanding the dynamics of identification through language. It also opens up a new terrain for sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological study, namely the margins. Rural, as well as urbanized areas that are seen as marginal or peripheral to places that are overtly recognized as mixed and hybridized have received relatively little sociolinguistic attention. Yet, people living in these supposedly less ‘spectacular’ margins are not immune to the effects of globalization and rapid technological change. They too constantly form new ensembles from linguistic and cultural resources which they invest with novel, instable, often ambiguous meanings. This volume focusses on the purportedly unspectacular in order to achieve a full understanding of the relation between language, place and belonging. The contributors to this volume, therefore, focus on language practices analyzing them as dialectically related to political-economic processes and language ideologies.