A MAGICAL MANIAC IS LOOSE IN ALANDA! A magical murderer is loose in Alanda. The victims are always women, always lower-class, and the weapon is always a three-sided stiletto, most often found among Church regalia. But the killers are never churchmen, and they always commit suicide immediately after the bloody deed. Tal Rufen is just a simple constable. But he really cares about his job, and when one of these murder/suicides happens on his beat he becomes obsessed. His superiors don't care¾the victims will never be missed, and their murderers are already justly dead. But every instinct Tal Rufen has cries out that he has seen only one small piece of a bigger and much nastier puzzle.... At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Although she was orphaned at birth, Eden Moore is never alone. Three dead women watch from the shadows, bound to protect her from harm. But in the woods a gunman waits, convinced that Eden is destined to follow her wicked great-grandfather--an African magician with the power to curse the living and raise the dead. Now Eden must decipher the secret of the ghostly trio before a new enemy more dangerous than the fanatical assassin destroys what is left of her family. She will sift through lies in a Georgian ante-bellum mansion and climb through the haunted ruins of a 19th century hospital, desperately seeking the truth that will save her beloved aunt from the curse that threatens her life. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In more than thirty essays, Social Animals examines the role of animals in human society. Collected from a wide range of periodicals and books, these important works of scholarship examine such issues as how animal shelter workers view the pets in their care, why some people hoard animals, animals and women who experience domestic abuse, philosophical and feminist analyses of our moral obligations toward animals, and many other topics.

Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance. Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the "republic of letters," while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature. In the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections. Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic The Scarlet Letter, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, The Story of A accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.

This third edition of An Introduction to Functional Grammar has been extensively revised. While retaining the organization and coverage of the earlier editions, it incorporates a considerable amount of new material.

In Richmond, no other name is more synonymous with dance than Elinor Fry. Helen Keller, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and author Tom Wolfe were just some of the people with whom Fry connected in five decades of dance. From 1920 to 1970, Fry was involved, often accompanied by her beloved students, in nearly every major public event in the River City. Performing in an array of venues and photographed twice by "National Geographic," Fry was a blend of creativity and business savvy and a wonderful role model for thousands of children who learned dance in her studio. Join author and historian Paul Herbert as he celebrates Elinor Fry's spirit and exceptional achievements in the world of dance in Richmond.

The Complete Language of Birds offers stunningly illustrated profiles of nearly 400 bird species, covering both their physical and mystical qualities.