Showing results by narrator "Cat Gould" in All Categories

Muffin maker Olivia Roberts has had it with her awful exes taking advantage of her good nature. The theft of her nana's beloved stuffed penguin is the absolute last straw. She puts up an ad at her local crime bookstore for a henchperson to help her enact a little mild revenge. To her astonishment, Margaret Blackwood, the mysterious, icy, and annoyingly opinionated bookstore owner, applies.

Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler collects more than 50 of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories - many of which are difficult or nearly impossible to find anywhere else. From classic Victorian tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy, to contemporary stories by Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain, this collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant.

Woo Woo follows Sabine, a conceptual artist on the verge of a photo exhibition she hopes will be pivotal, as she plunges deeper into her neuroses and seeks validation in relationships—with her frustratingly rational chef husband, her horde of devoted Gen Z TikTok followers, and even a mysterious, potentially violent stalker. Accompanying her throughout are Sabine’s strange alter egos, from hyperrealistic puppets of her as a baby to the ghost of conceptual artist Carolee Schneemann, who shows up with inscrutable yet sage life advice.

Accountant Allie Lane would do anything for her injured twin sister, including pretend to be her to save Sophie's fledgling event-planning business. All Allie has to do is fake being a lesbian for a few weeks and coordinate a rural gay wedding festival. Simple. Except she's nothing like her outgoing sister and, last Allie checked, she was straight. Tarryn Harris cannot stand weddings. Now her small Australian town of Quandong is being overrun by matrimonial madness for its first gay wedding festival. The other hitch is she's been roped into being the assistant to the cute lesbian event planner

Ants number in the ten quadrillions, and they have been here since the Jurassic era. Inside an anthill, you'll find high drama worthy of a royal court; and between colonies, high-stakes geopolitical intrigue is afoot. Just like us, ants grow crops, raise livestock, tend their young and infirm, and make vaccines. And, just like us, ants have a dark side: They wage war, despoil environments, and enslave rivals - but also rebel against their oppressors.

After finding herself the subject of a powerful psychic attack in the 1930s, famed British occultist Dion Fortune wrote this detailed instruction manual on protecting oneself from paranormal attack. This classic psychic self-defense guide explains how to understand the signs of a psychic attack, vampirism, hauntings, and methods of defense.

For decades after the identification of the structure of DNA, scientists focused only on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions that make up 98 percent of the human genome were dismissed as "junk," sequences that serve no purpose. But researchers have recently discovered variations and modulations in this junk DNA that are involved with a number of intractable diseases. Junk DNA can play vital and unanticipated roles in the control of gene expression, from fine-tuning individual genes to switching off entire chromosomes.

A young man's mutilated body is found on top of the Agglestone. It seems that he was involved in a human trafficking and prostitution gang. But why is DCI Sophie Allen keeping something back from her team? Is it linked to the extraordinary discovery of her own father's body at the bottom of a disused mineshaft, more than 40 years after he disappeared? Find out.

Andi Barrons has no time for kids or the chaos they bring—certainly not when she runs a high-end decorating business. Mischief and little fingers around expensive materials? No thanks! But then her gorgeous friend, Sarah Santoro, winds up in a custody battle with Sarah's former in-laws and now . . . Well, somehow Andi's agreed to pretend she's Sarah's live-in partner. She's still not quite sure how she got stuck playing a role she's so utterly clueless about and that's everything she doesn't want in life.

A successful anaesthetist, Anna is focused on herself, her career, and her girlfriend. Everything changes abruptly when her brother's and sister-in-law's deaths devastate her and her family. Left responsible for her young niece and nephew, Anna finds herself dumped and alone in Melbourne, a city she doesn't even like. She tries to navigate the shock of looking after two children battling with their grief while managing her own.

Two soccer stars share a secret along with a rivalry that stretches halfway around the world in this lighthearted, second-chance lesbian romance.

When eighteen-year-old Ellie Canning is discovered wandering the countryside, dazed and traumatized, she tells a harrowing story of abduction, captivity, and escape. An overnight symbol of survival and empowerment, Ellie enthralls an outraged nation. Then authorities zero in on an unlikely suspect: high school teacher Suzannah Wells, identified by Ellie as the woman who kept her drugged and bound in a basement. The evidence against Suzannah is damning—vilified by the media, Suzannah’s only defense is that not a single word Ellie says is true. Suzannah has no reason to lie.

Maplemead Castle is crawling with ghosts, and the new owners need them gone. When Melody Bittersweet and the Girls' Ghostbusting Agency arrive on scene, they quickly identify the troublemakers swinging from the chandeliers...literally. A century ago, stunning trapeze artist Britannia Lovell plunged to her death, and has done every night since. But did she really just fall, or was there something more to her demise?

You, Beauty, are the love of my life. Steel was one of the best snipers the commandos had ever seen. He was the VP of the Wounded Souls MC and ran the club's Bar and Grill. Steel was also desperately lonely. He tried to fill the void in his heart with the wrong woman. Callie was easy, she didn't make him use his heart. The path he secretly wanted to take, would lead him to the woman he really wanted. Can he trust her enough to show that part of him he hides behind the playboy image?

Whether you're starting a new business or you've been trading for a while, Creating a Business Plan for Dummies covers everything you need to know. Figure out whether your business idea is likely to work, how to identify your strategic advantage, and what you can do to gain an edge on the competition. Discover why a business plan doesn't have to be a 30-page document that takes days to write, but can be a simple process that you do in stages as you work through your business concept.

A family move into their dream home in Dorchester. It seems perfect, particularly for their two children, but when Philip and Jill Freeman move a buddleia bush, what they find buried beneath its roots will haunt them forever. DCI Sophie Allen is forced to probe crimes that occurred many years before, crimes that cause emotional upheavals within the local community. In a complex investigation, Sophie Allen unearths family secrets which carry on having devastating effects to this day and risk taking new lives.

Tilly's been running from her secrets for far too long. Evie, carrying a buried flame for Tilly since they met, has always been there to welcome Tilly back with open arms. That is, after all, what one does for a friend. When Evie unexpectedly falls pregnant, she's left with a lot of hard decisions to make. That includes choices about Tilly and the way she's been disappearing on her randomly for over a decade.

The Dowager Lady Worthington isn't quite sure what to make of country-girl Dorothea Stern. As the granddaughter of the Duke of Bristol, Dotty is schooled in the ways and means of the nobility. But her sharp wit and outspoken nature has everyone in a tizzy. Especially their cousin, Dominic, the Marquis of Merton. Prematurely stuffy, Dom was raised by his cheerless uncle to be wary of a host of things, including innovation, waltzing, and most perilous of all: true love. Still, there's something about Dotty, beyond her beauty, that Dom cannot resist.

Miss Belle Heartstone - heiress and savvy businesswoman - needs a husband. Immediately. As in, yesterday would not have been soon enough. Her mother's attempts at matchmaking have been disastrous. So Belle decides to solve the problem her way - survey the market and purchase the best groom available.

Inside The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women, a fascinating book about life during medieval times, you will discover tantalizing true stories about medieval women and a myriad of historical facts.