Louisiana Coffeewith lots of cream is Dr. Betty Reynolds fifth book to be published. Not surprisingly, this book is not about coffee, nor is it about cream. Instead, it is a delightful medley of intriguing tales covering four generations of a New Orleans Creole family. Since Creole usually denotes a mixing of bloods, the color of their skin can be as varied as the color of ones coffee ranging from dark, dark chocolate to the lightest of rich cream. This fictional memoir appropriately starts a hundred years ago in New Orleansthe home of the family matriarch, Bertha Mayberry. Berthas story is a mysterious one that she preferred to be kept locked among other family secrets. She was particularly sensitive about having to reveal her misfortune of being trapped in a bordello when she first arrived in New Orleans as a young girl. Her romantic rescue ended in tragedy, but she did transcend in the end and married a popular Black jazz musician named William Sweetwater Lewis. Together they gained respectability by working hard and providing their five daughters with a good education, a passion for music, and a young life filled with parties and gala events in a city that was known for them. Berthas children as well as her childrens children follow their own paths in choosing where and how they will live out their lives. Their accounts of triumphs and mishaps take you on a fascinating journey to experience the mysteries of black magic in the Louisiana swamps, a numbers racket in Detroit and the casinos in Las Vegas when the mob was in control. Some leave the safety of their ancestral home on Bourbon Street to carve out new lives in other far-away places such as the Jersey Shores, Philadelphia, or New York. Whatever their destination, each member of the Lewis clan brings to the saga an interesting storyline that shares his/her unique motivations, desires and actions that sometimes lead to less than favorable consequences. Louisiana Coffeeis meant to inform, rather than to alarm. It is a tell-all fiction that might open some eyes as what goes on in a different world on the other side of the cultural divide.

Billie Marie Ferry was born in 1871 and died in 1984, dying just seven days shy of her 113th birthday. She was the youngest of seven and the only girl. She lived in the elegant Oak Alley plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana, the sugarcane plantation that her father built. She loved watching Oak Alley thrive, as her brothers, nephews, and sons oversaw it. She was separated from her family in an orphanage, not reuniting with them until she was six years old. Billie had two marriages, five children with one dying at birth, and volunteered a lifetime of civic missions. She made friends with former slaves, went to college, worked at the Red Cross during both world wars, and watched as five generations of her family matured into upstanding members of society. Billie tells of her first car ride, struggling to make ends meet during the Depression, living through the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and finally succumbing to using a wheelchair at 102. Billie walked for women’s rights in her youth and gave an address opposing abortion at the age of 110. When the end came, she was ready for it. Her story is about a legendary family led by a woman.

Bite, seduce, fight, or love... In the war for a Shifter's heart, absolutely anything goes. Sexy alpha males, fierce heroines, and a whole lot of steamy romance -- you'll find all this and more in the Louisiana Shifters series! Two full-length novels plus four novellas featuring dashing Shifter males and the feisty females that love them. Tessa Andersen finds her soul mate the moment she realizes that she's a little more than human... too bad she needs to hand bad boy Jace Copeland over to the enemy in order to save her sister. Maddie Copeland has struck a bargain with sexy Alpha Jasper McDonough: she'll be his mate, but only on paper. When push comes to shove, Jasper has other ideas, and Maddie is caught between lust and fulfilling her lifelong dreams. Jeanne needs sexy neighbor Ian to stay alive, she just doesn't know it yet... Emma might have visions of the future, but nothing could prepare her for smoking hot Shifter Connall and the mission they'll need to complete... Shy, repressed Dr. Rose will have to fight to save her Shifter patient, known to her only as Mason. With his execution looming, will she have the courage to leave everything behind in order to save him? Maddie and Jasper return, appearing in Edinburgh to track down an elusive Alpha. As they explore ancient Scottish ruins, they'll also get to explore one another...

SISTERS FROM THE START: story of seven women, all with names of gems, and each bearing terrible scars from childhood and previous marriages, which meet and instantaneoulsy see something of themselves in each other. Rapidly developing a firm friendship, they are astounded to discover that they are in fact all sisters.\MY PEN LAY STILL NOT: is an upheaval thirty years journey about Cheyenne Phoenix Coyote, the 'Red-haired Gal' of a family with three sets of dark-straight-hair triplets. She suffers many hardships from illness to lost loves.

The Dictionary of Louisiana French (DLF) provides the richest inventory of French vocabulary in Louisiana and reflects precisely the speech of the period from 1930 to the present. This dictionary describes the current usage of French-speaking peoples in the five broad regions of South Louisiana: the coastal marshes, the banks of the Mississippi River, the central area, the north, and the western prairie. Data were collected during interviews from at least five persons in each of twenty-four areas in these regions. In addition to the data collected from fieldwork, the dictionary contains material compiled from existing lexical inventories, from texts published after 1930, and from archival recordings. The new authoritative resource, the DLF not only contains the largest number of words and expressions but also provides the most complete information available for each entry. Entries include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent, and the word's use in common phrases. The DLF features a wealth of illustrative examples derived from fieldwork and textual sources and identification of the parish where the entry was collected or the source from which it was compiled. An English-to-Louisiana French index enables readers to find out how particular notions would be expressed in la Louisiane .

Book Delisted

There was never a stronger desire that flows through the veins of a Louisiana man to be a cowboy than in Tom Menzer. At nineteen, he had made a good start to do that, but Pontchartrain, Louisiana, did not seem to be the right place, so he turned his horse west and headed for Texas where the real cowboys came from. The life he lived is nothing more than a harrowing experience. If he made friends with the native Indians, then the white man would hate him, would call him a squaw man, and would tell him that his life was worth nothing more than the average Indian. If he took the side of the white man, then the Indians would look to lift his scalp. Tom was not a killer, and he hated killing. But he found himself wearing a necktie that was just seconds away from taking his life by some soldiers that were paid by a very rich rancher to dispose of him. It was after that he vowed never to be caught by the law. He traveled north to Oklahoma where he made friends with a village of natives. There he hunted and contributed his share of food for the village. The chief rewarded him with his daughter. When she was a little baby still on her mother's breast, her family was massacred by the natives. She was found crying under some small bushes, and a warrior took her and gave her to the chief whose wife was nursing a young son and nursed her to become a very lovely maiden. The chief later told Tom that his wife was not native, and he had waited a long time to find the right man for his daughter. When the horse thieves tried to kill him and harm his wife and family, it was only then that he used his gun to kill the thieves. Suffering from the buckshot in his back, he had a man at a fort near Calgary dig the pellets out with his hunting knife. You can read on and find out how Tom and Raven Feather learned to love each other in a deep and enduring way.

For Louisiana Richardson, desperate times call for crazy-like-a-fox measures. As the new librarian at Alligator Bayou Parish's struggling library, she’s returning to her Southern roots and facing trouble hotter than fresh cornbread out of the oven. Somehow, she's got to draw readers back in and prove the library is still vital—even as domineering parish board head Mrs. Gunderson plans to shut it down for good. If that means Louise has to resort to some unconventional methods—like outrageous inter-library Zumba classes, and forming a book club that’s anything but Oprah-approved—well, it wouldn’t be the first time she went out on a limb... Soon Louise is doing everything she can to rally the whole community. Before she knows it, she's sparking welcome changes—and uncovering surprising secrets—throughout her new town. And between glasses of sweet tea, bowls of mouth-watering gumbo and the warmth of a tantalizing new love, the newly single Southern mom might find a life she never imagined—and a place to finally call home. Emily Beck Cogburn crafts a novel full of charm, delight and acres of heart about the enduring joys of storytelling and the ways hope can write life's most extraordinary moments.

Sailing in the Caribbean, Captain Alan Lewrie, RN, is once again pursuing a chimera. A rich French prize ship he'd left at anchor at Dominica has gone missing, along with six of his sailors. What starts as a straightforward search for it, and them, from Hispaniola to Barbados, far down the Antilles, leads Lewrie to a gruesome discovery on the Dry Tortugas and to a vile cabal of the most pitiless and depraved pirates ever to sail under the "Jolly Roger" . . . and the suspicion that one of his trusted hands just may be the worst of them all! Against his will--again--the usually irrepressible Lewrie is made his superiors' "cat's-paw" once more, and his covert mission this time is to go up the Mississippi in enemy-held Spanish Louisiana to the romantic but sordid port of New Orleans in search of pirates and prize, where one false step could betray Lewrie and his small party as spies. Beguilements, betrayal, and death lurk 'round every corner of the Vieux Carré, and it's up to Lewrie's quick but cynical to win the day wits for their survival and wreak a very personal vengeance on his foes!