Bird Mystery

She left the big city police force to start life over as a private investigator in a small mountain town, where things prove to be a little too quiet...until she lands in jail next to a drunk hippie with a missing son and ends up tied to a tree in the forest.

Laurel Nightingale wants to start again. However, after discovering a dead body shortly after arriving in the tight-knit community, she wonders if village life is as wholesome as she first thought. . . Local police are convinced the death was accidental, but Laurel suspects murder, and enlists new friend Maggie to join her quest in uncovering the truth. When a second body is found, Laurel ruffles feathers by pointing the finger at one of the locals. But, when her accusation backfires, she's left alienated and afraid.

In an untouched corner of Craynebrook, the lifeless body of a local farmer is found, his blood mingling with the mud of Blackbird Farm. For Detective Inspector Matthew Stannard, still nursing wounds from a brutal assault, this grisly scene marks the beginning of an investigation unlike any he’s worked on before.

The first English publication of Georges Simenon's compelling novel about summer escape and elusive obsessions. 'The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a bell jar under the sun, the scorpion in his son's bed, the deafening sound of cicadas.' During his first holiday on the island of Porquerolles, Dr Mahé caught a glimpse of something irresistible. As the memory continues to haunt him, he falls prey to a delusion that may offer an escape from his conventional existence - or may destroy him.

Acclaimed scientist and author Bernd Heinrich has returned every year since boyhood to a beloved patch of western Maine woods. What is the biology in humans of this deep-in-the-bones pull toward a particular place, and how is it related to animal homing? Heinrich explores the fascinating science chipping away at the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory; how scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home if they are displaced from it; and more.

When Professor Wilson Bledsoe is brutally murdered, two loathsome white supremacists seem like the obvious culprits. But Bledsoe's younger brother Sterling, an FBI agent in New York, has other ideas. A look around Wilson's lab and interviews with his students, his fellow professors, and the college's president pique Sterling's curiosity about Wilson's nearly-completed project on the mysterious death of hundreds of local blackbirds.

On his first combat mission of the Vietnam War, US Air Force pilot Sol Rall is shot down over the jungles of Laos. Stranded in a valley teeming with enemy troops, Sol scrambles to survive and evade capture. Pararescueman Bo Bolick has been given just twenty-four hours to find Sol before a US carpet bombing destroys every living thing in the valley, friend or foe.

Jack Terrington, the nation's most prolific serial killer, returns to the scene of his first murders, a small town he'd escaped only by dumb luck. Jack Terrington has an aptitude for getting away with murder; he’s been doing it for twenty years. He’s a drifter, leaving a trail of fear and death from coast to coast. And though he’s always avoided capture, he’s haunted by the memory of Liberty, Virginia—Jack had escaped capture only by dumb luck. And that’s always bothered him. Now, before he retires for good, he’s returning to the small town to settle the score. Meanwhile, ...

The Last Layover is a fiction novel based on real places and potential scenarios where an out of control government pushes America to the brink of financial and social collapse. This vulnerable state allows the unthinkable to happen, causing the comfort, security, and conveniences of our modern first world society to quickly come to an end.

Every year, the president pardons one turkey for Thanksgiving. One. But KC and her best friend, Marshall, think one isn't enough! This year, they want to gather lots of turkeys to be spared. The night before the holiday, the turkeys are in a big flock on the National Mall waiting to be set free. The next morning, they're gone! Who would steal 117 Thanksgiving turkeys? KC and Marshall have to ruffle some feathers to find out!

A mind-expanding, deeply humane tour of language by the best-selling author of Born on a Blue Day and Thinking in Numbers.

Adventure-loving penguin Jackson dreams of being a secret agent like his Uncle Bryn, who works for the Frosty Bureau of Investigation. Jackson and his gadget-inventing best friend, Quigley, might officially be too young to join the FBI, but they aren’t going to let that stop them! They just need to come up with the right plan to prove they are worthy. But when one of Q’s inventions goes dangerously wrong, Jackson suddenly finds himself dropped right in the middle of an FBI stakeout. There’s fishy business afoot at the city’s aquarium....

London, 1894. Inspector Henry Cutter is in an unconvivial temper. Then the murders begin. The first to die is Sir Aneurin Considine, a decorated but long-retired civil servant, is found dead amongst his beloved orchid collection, killed by a wound inflicted with surgical precision. Soon, other victims suffer similar fates. More men in powerful positions; more murders that are gruesome but immaculately orchestrated. Hot on the tails of this invisible adversary are Inspector Cutter, along with his hapless but endlessly enthusiastic sidekick, Sergeant Gideon Bliss.

Florence Samuels was living the life shed always dreamed of: married to the love of her life and about to become a mother after years of trying. Everything was perfect. She never imagined that the love of her life would also be the one to destroy them forever. On the anniversary of losing both her husband and her unborn child, Florence returns to her once favorite place to pick up the broken pieces of her life and find some closure. But, what she doesn't expect is to see the man who saved her life on that fateful day.

Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be. Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning.

Blue birds were spreading the epidemic, but were they really?

For Janet MacPhail, photographing retrievers in training is the perfect way to spend an evening. But a photo session at Twisted Lake takes a peculiar turn as Drake, her friend Tom's Labrador, fetches a blood-soaked bag holding an exotic feather and a torn $100 bill. When one of her photography students turns up dead at the lake, Janet investigates a secretive retreat center with help from Australian Shepherd Jay and her quirky neighbor Goldie.

A mind-expanding, deeply humane tour of language(s) - and those who speak, study and invent them - by the best-selling author of Born on a Blue Day and Thinking in Numbers. Is vocabulary destiny? Why do clocks 'talk' to the Nahua people of Mexico? Will AI researchers ever produce true human-machine dialogue? In this mesmerizing collection of essays, Daniel Tammet answers these and many other questions about the intricacy and profound power of language.

While docked at Marina de la Paz, in Mexico's hauntingly beautiful Sea of Cortez, Hetta gets a surprise visitor that sets off a chain of events like only Hetta can manage to get herself embroiled in. With her best friend, Jan, and her dog, Po Thang, they are hot on the trail of some dastardly smugglers.

Maxx King is a former Army Ranger turned cybercrime investigator trying to get his life back on track when he has an unexpected confrontation with a ruthless Chinese spy. Struggling to understand the escalating violence, he discovers a clandestine US-China conflict centered around a device of unknown origins with the power to trigger massive natural disasters.