A Bad Day for Scandal


Book Description

A Bad Day for Scandal is the third in Sophie Littlefield's award-winning, critically acclaimed series. Written with passion, humor, and guts, this is a mystery to be savored. When Prosper homegirl turned big-city businesswoman Priss Porter returns to town with a body in her trunk, she calls Stella Hardesty to dispose of it. Her uppity ways don't convince Stella to take the job, and Priss attempts to blackmail her with a snapshot of Stella doing what she does best: curing woman-beaters by the use of force. Stella refuses to cooperate and goes home, only to hear later that Priss and her brother, Liman, have gone missing after calling in a disturbance. Stella is implicated when Sheriff "Goat" Jones discovers the scarf she left behind at the house. He warns her to stay local but Stella and her partner, Chrissy Shaw, go looking for Priss in Kansas City, where they discover that she runs an unusual business. When Priss herself—along with two other bodies—turns up in a pond belonging to one of Stella's ex-clients, Stella must investigate a host of suspects, including a crooked but libidinous female judge, a coterie of jealous male escorts, and a Marxist ex-professor.




A Bad Day for Sorry


Book Description

Winner of the Anthony Award for Best First Novel! Stella Hardesty dispatched her abusive husband with a wrench shortly before her fiftieth birthday. A few years later, she's so busy delivering home-style justice on her days off, helping other women deal with their own abusive husbands and boyfriends, that she barely has time to run her sewing shop in her rural Missouri hometown. Some men need more convincing than others, but it's usually nothing a little light bondage or old-fashioned whuppin' can't fix. Since Stella works outside of the law, she's free to do whatever it takes to get the job done---as long as she keeps her distance from the handsome devil of a local sheriff, Goat Jones. When young mother Chrissy Shaw asks Stella for help with her no-good husband, Roy Dean, it looks like an easy case. Until Roy Dean disappears with Chrissy's two-year-old son, Tucker. Stella quickly learns that Roy Dean was involved with some very scary men, as she tries to sort out who's hiding information and who's merely trying to kill her. It's going to take a hell of a fight to get the little boy back home to his mama, but if anyone can do it, it's Stella Hardesty. Sophie Littlefield's A Bad Day for Sorry won an Anthony Award for Best First Novel and an RT Book Award for Best First Mystery. It was also shortlisted for Edgar, Barry, Crimespree, and Macavity Awards, and it was named to lists of the year's best mystery debuts by the Chicago Sun-Times and South Florida Sun-Sentinel.




Hallelujah Anyway


Book Description

“Anne Lamott is my Oprah.” —Chicago Tribune The New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night, Dawn, Almost Everything and Bird by Bird, a powerful exploration of mercy and how we can embrace it. "Mercy is radical kindness," Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give others—and yourself—to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. In Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by "facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves." It's up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere—"within us and outside us, all around us"—and to use it to forge a deeper understanding of ourselves and more honest connections with each other. While that can be difficult to do, Lamott argues that it's crucial, as "kindness towards others, beginning with myself, buys us a shot at a warm and generous heart, the greatest prize of all." Full of Lamott’s trademark honesty, humor and forthrightness, Hallelujah Anyway is profound and caring, funny and wise—a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality.




A Mercy


Book Description

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States, when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother, 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novel's heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.




This Dark Road to Mercy


Book Description

The critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller A Land More Kind Than Home—hailed as "a powerfully moving debut that reads as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird" (Richmond Times Dispatch)—returns with a resonant novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, set in western North Carolina, involving two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins. After their mother's unexpected death, twelve-year-old Easter and her six-year-old sister Ruby are adjusting to life in foster care when their errant father, Wade, suddenly appears. Since Wade signed away his legal rights, the only way he can get his daughters back is to steal them away in the night. Brady Weller, the girls' court-appointed guardian, begins looking for Wade, and he quickly turns up unsettling information linking Wade to a recent armored car heist, one with a whopping $14.5 million missing. But Brady Weller isn't the only one hunting the desperate father. Robert Pruitt, a shady and mercurial man nursing a years-old vendetta, is also determined to find Wade and claim his due. Narrated by a trio of alternating voices, This Dark Road to Mercy is a story about the indelible power of family and the primal desire to outrun a past that refuses to let go.




Long Road to Mercy


Book Description

Introducing a remarkable new character from #1 New York Times bestselling writer David Baldacci: Atlee Pine, an FBI agent with special skills assigned to the remote wilds of the southwestern United States who must confront a new threat . . . and an old nightmare. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a tiger by its toe. It's seared into Atlee Pine's memory: the kidnapper's chilling rhyme as he chose between six-year-old Atlee and her twin sister, Mercy. Mercy was taken. Atlee was spared. She never saw Mercy again. Three decades after that terrifying night, Atlee Pine works for the FBI. She's the lone agent assigned to the Shattered Rock, Arizona resident agency, which is responsible for protecting the Grand Canyon. So when one of the Grand Canyon's mules is found stabbed to death at the bottom of the canyon-and its rider missing-Pine is called in to investigate. It soon seems clear the lost tourist had something more clandestine than sightseeing in mind. But just as Pine begins to put together clues pointing to a terrifying plot, she's abruptly called off the case. If she disobeys direct orders by continuing to search for the missing man, it will mean the end of her career. But unless Pine keeps working the case and discovers the truth, it could spell the very end of democracy in America as we know it... "Love it!" --Lisa Gardner"Atlee Pine is unforgettable." --James Patterson "David Baldacci's best yet." --Lisa Scottoline "Heart-poundingly suspenseful." --Scott Turow "A stunning debut." --Douglas Preston "A perfect blend of action, secrets, and conspiracies." --Steve Berry "Baldacci is at the top of his game." --Kathy Reichs




Silent Mercy


Book Description

New York Times bestselling author Linda Fairstein is at her explosive best as she plunges into the byzantine world of New York City’s most powerful and sacred institutions—and unearths the most sinister of secrets… Prosecutor Alexandra Cooper has been called to a Harlem Baptist Church, where a woman has been decapitated and set on fire on the church steps—with the imprint of a Star of David necklace seared into her flesh. Then a second body is found at a cathedral in Little Italy. Alex is blind to the sick and inconceivable motives feeding a particularly vicious serial killer—until she mines the depths of the city’s vast and serpentine religious history. What Alex follows is a dangerous path that takes her far beyond the scope of her investigation, and directly into the path of a frightening and inescapable truth.




No Mercy


Book Description

Police officer Ellery Hathaway and FBI profiler Reed Markham take on two difficult new cases in this stunning follow-up to The Vanishing Season. "A gripping and powerful read. It is what we call an edge-of-your-seat, rollercoaster of a thriller. You will not be able to put it down before you finish it."—The Washington Book Review on The Vanishing Season No Mercy is award-winning author Joanna Schaffhausen’s heart-pounding second novel. Police officer Ellery Hathaway is on involuntary leave from her job because she shot a murderer in cold blood and refuses to apologize for it. Forced into group therapy for victims of violent crime, Ellery immediately finds higher priorities than “getting in touch with her feelings.” For one, she suspects a fellow group member may have helped to convict the wrong man for a deadly arson incident years ago. For another, Ellery finds herself in the desperate clutches of a woman who survived a brutal rape. He is still out there, this man with the Spider-Man-like ability to climb through bedroom windows, and his victim beseeches Ellery for help in capturing her attacker. Ellery seeks advice from her friend, FBI profiler Reed Markham, who liberated her from a killer’s closet when she was a child. Reed remains drawn to this unpredictable woman, the one he rescued but couldn’t quite save. The trouble is, Reed is up for a potential big promotion, and his boss has just one condition for the new job—stay away from Ellery. Ellery ignores all the warnings. Instead, she starts digging around in everyone’s past but her own—a move that, at best, could put her out of work permanently, and at worst, could put her in the city morgue.




Grave Mercy


Book Description

In the fifteenth-century kingdom of Brittany, seventeen-year-old Ismae escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the sanctuary of the convent of St. Mortain, where she learns that the god of Death has blessed her with dangerous gifts--and a violent destiny.




A Bad Day for Romance


Book Description

That’s no cupid, it’s a bridesmaid with a crossbow. Stella Hardesty is a seamstress with a sideline job in vigilante justice in this entertaining ebook in the Edgar-nominated and award-winning Bad Day series. Two days before her best friend gets married, Stella Hardesty has nothing more pressing on her mind than fitting into her fluffy pink bridesmaid gown, mixing her next cocktail, and enjoying a romantic weekend with her sometimes beau, BJ Brodersen. Just as she’s headed to the bridal shower, word comes that BJ and smokin’ hot sheriff Goat Jones have gotten into a dustup over Stella’s affections. Before Stella can recover from this startling development, more bad news comes along. The minister’s niece, the hard-to-love pageant princess Divinity Flycock, has been arrested for the murder of her fiancé. The bride begs Stella to clear Divinity’s name so that her minister will be able to perform the nuptials. When Stella starts digging into the case, however, she uncovers a world of jealous nightclub singers, firearms dealers, and the ugly underbelly of reality TV. Hot on the trail of the truth, she’s distracted by the arrival of the sheriff, who finally seems ready to make a claim for her affections.