What is the connection between a failed suicide attempt, a wrongful accusation of theft against a schoolgirl, and the romantic life of a tennis player? To the casual observer, apparently nothing. When a houseparty gathers at Gull's Point, the seaside home of an elderly widow, earlier events come to a dramatic head.Robert Graves, author of I Claudius, was a neighbour of Agatha Christie's in Devon during the Second World War and the two became friends. Christie dedicated this book to Graves: "Dear Robert, Since you are kind enough to say you like my stories, I venture to dedicate this book to you. All I ask is that you sternly restrain your critical faculties (doubtless sharpened by your recent excesses in that line!) when reading it. This is a story for your pleasure and not a candidate for Mr Graves' literary pillory!" The book was dramatised by Agatha Christie and Gerald Verner. It was adapted for TV in 2007 with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple.

Review"In the storied waking-up-into-a-nightmare pulp tradition, Heath Lowrance's The Bastard Hand reads is a lurid thrill. You will finish it in one frenzied sitting, then feel as if you're awakening from a red-misted trance." --Megan Abbott, author of Bury Me Deep "A bastard of a good book. If you like Flannery O'Connor and Jim Thompson, you're going to love this." --Allan Guthrie, author of Slammer "Mean, tough, lurid, intense, and entirely engaging, this novel is a must read for all fans of the hardboiled genre." --Vincent Zandri, author of Moonlight Falls "The Bastard Hand by Heath Lowrance grabs you by the lapels and drags you on a wild, wild bar crawl that leaves you battered and bruised at the gates of hell. Like Jim Thomspon jamming with Robert Johnson and Nick Cave on the eve of the apocolypse." --Paul D. Brazil, Pulp Metal Magazine Product DescriptionCharlie Wesley is not right in the head. He's escaped from a mental hospital up north and hitchhiked his way south, the voice of his dead brother urging him on. But when Charlie hits Memphis, the fine line between his delusions and reality shift in the form of the Reverend Phineas Childe-a preacher bent on booze and women; a Man of God with a dark agenda. Charlie is the perfect pawn in the Reverend's game of retribution. And the small North Mississippi town of Cuba Landing will be the setting for the Reverend's very personal Apocalypse. . . .

Summer is deadly in the mountain community of Mason County, Virginia. Deputy Sheriff Tom Bridger and veterinarian Rachel Goddard are caught in a maelstrom of lies that stretch far into the past and suspicions that threaten the future. Cam and Meredith Taylor are murdered within hours of one another, and Rachel is dragged into the case because she heard "but didn't see" Cam's murder. The Taylors arrived in Mason County as volunteers in the 1960s War on Poverty, and they stayed on, making loyal friends and bitter enemies. The victims' daughter is Tom's former girlfriend, Leslie. She returns home to see justice done and to win Tom back from Rachel. The prime suspect is newcomer Ben Hern, Rachel's childhood friend, and she is desperate to prove him innocent. Leslie pushes for Hern's arrest and launches a campaign of intimidation against Rachel. With the killer targeting Rachel and the community clamoring for an arrest, Tom and Rachel must decide who they can trust.

Masalay: such an ancient and captivating place. Perfect for a tropical vacation — until Callie's mishaps leave her stranded in the remote and war-torn north. Strange urges slowly emerge, drawing her to a lake that Masalayans say is infinitely deep. Drawing her finally to Rika, a man with the same mysterious urges. What follows is dizzily sensual and painfully brief. When Callie wakes, she is entirely alone but for the baby inside her. Determined to find Rika — while also maintaining independence from his clutching family — she must rely on wits, decency, and the help of a Masalayan boy who is even more lost. As Callie struggles to find her direction, a frail librarian in the holy city of Liashe receives a mysterious letter. It tells of a child’s macabre disappearance, a forbidden field that has burst into eerie bloom, a mad woman murmuring a long-forgotten name. Guided by the books of an extinct cult, Brother Carodai arrives at a heretical conclusion: somewhere in Masalay, a Godling has been conceived. Carodai will need to find this dangerously blessed woman while outwitting rebels, his own church, and a primal evil that has risen to stalk the Godling. With tenderness, humor, and swift storytelling, The Godling brings to life a world of powerful characters: There is Carodai’s loyal but acid-tongued assistant who wants nothing to do with heresies. The brilliant and charismatic rebel leader who would use the Godling as a weapon. And the former child soldier who will become Callie’s one true friend and protector. And, through it all, there is Masalay — unique, beautiful, and achingly real. This is the debut novel from author CK Collins. Read a free excerpt at www.thegodling.com and find links to online retailers where you can purchase the e-book.

From the author of comes a wickedly ingenious psychological thriller involving a priceless painting and a murderous plot to use it for revenge. Gripping from first page to last, A MASTERPIECE OF REVENGE is a classic Hitchcockian thriller that will keep the reader guessing every step of the way.

Melina was driven into the arms of her vampire and werewolf mates. Her brother arrives one day to drag her back to her coven. While protecting those she loves, one of her mates falls, leaving her heartbroken. With her brother dead, she uses all her power to hide herself and those she loves from the family who banished her. But using her power unleashes the darkness inside of her soul.   For the next two years, she struggles to mend the rift with her mate. In walks Tannin to bring her to the family she has never known. Learning about her past, she discovers that she's more than a witch. Her attraction to Tannin grows while she learns what the darkness truly is in her soul.   Tannin craves her touch. But he doesn't know if he can open his heart after all the loss he's suffered. He must protect Melina at all costs. Taking a chance, he allows himself to give in to the attraction between them. To do that, he also has to accept the other men in her life and be there when she returns to her coven and unleashes the darkness in her soul.

The world was created for, and because of, an incredible woman. The creator god Hachakyum lived among the ancient Mayans and these are the stories of his life among them. The god's love for one human woman caused the world's beginning, and his loss will ordain it's destruction. There is a sex scene. Please don't read this book if that concerns you! Book 2 of the five book "At the end of the world" series. Book 3 - Hamish and Kate - is also available here. At the end of the world, Book 1, can be found at Amazon or Smashwords.

Former Marine Jason McKay thinks his first assignment as a Military Intelligence officer—as the head of a protection detail for a Republic Senator’s daughter on her humanitarian mission to the star colonies—will be a boring waste of time. Until Aphrodite, the agricultural colony they’re touring, is invaded by an inhuman enemy that may threaten Earth, and McKay and his people are trapped far behind enemy lines. Separated from his team during the attack, McKay has to try to keep Valerie O’Keefe, the idealistic daughter of a powerful politician, alive in the face of threats from an alien menace and a more mundane revolutionary front that is working to free the forced exiles from their servitude to the MultiCorps that run the colonies. Meanwhile, McKay’s second in command, Shannon Stark, leads the remainder of the special operations unit in an effort to sabotage the invaders in their effort to loot the resources of Aphrodite and to learn more about their true identity. Together, these two officers fight to survive, to protect the civilians in their charge… and to do their duty.

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —ModiglianiAmedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso.Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.”In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic.And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another.Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .