Mira Rinaldi lives life at a rolling boil. Co-owner of Grappa, a chic New York City trattoria, she has an enviable apartment, a brand-new baby, and a frenzied schedule befitting her success. Everything changes the night she catches her husband, Jake, "wielding his whisk" with Grappa's new Mâitress d'. Mira's fiery response earns her a court-ordered stint in anger management and the beginning of legal and personal predicaments as she battles to save her restaurant and pick up the pieces of her life. Mira falls back on family and friends in Pittsburgh as she struggles to find a recipe for happiness. But the heat is really on when some surprising developments in New York present her with a high stakes opportunity to win back what she thought she had lost forever. For Mira, cooking isn't just about delicious flavors and textures, but about the pleasure found in filling others' needs. And the time has come to decide where her own fulfillment lies—even if the answers are unexpected. Keenly observed and deeply satisfying, Aftertaste is a novel about rebuilding and rediscovery, about food passionately prepared and unapologetically savored, and about the singular contentment that comes with living—and loving—with gusto. "A delicious debut." --Jamie Cat Callan, author of French Women Don't Sleep Alone Meredith Mileti lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their three, mostly grown children. She is a graduate of Hamilton College and the University of Pittsburgh where she earned a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, and subsequently served on the faculty. Since taking her first home economics course in junior high, Meredith has loved to cook. An adventurous and eclectic diner, she appreciates any well-cooked meal, whether from a lobster shack in Bar Harbor, Maine, a friggitorie in Naples, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris or a Deluxe Double Egg & Cheese at Primanti's in Pittsburgh. Aftertaste is her first novel.

An undead monster hunter must track down a killer, trailer-park-havoc-wreaking were-frog in this outrageous mash-up of Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy and George Romero’s zombie horror. Before he died, Saelig Zilch was a chef. Now, posthumously recruited by a shadowy agency for reasons still unknown, tasked with keeping the public safe from things that go bump in the night, he hunts monsters. Zilch scrabbles out of a North Carolina grave in someone else’s body. Someone recently dead. He only has a few days to find his bearings and carry out his latest mission, before the precious few nanobugs in his corpse shell are exhausted and he’s forced to start all over at the beginning. As he trudges down the main thoroughfare, he runs into Galavance. More accurately, she runs into him with her pink Chevy Cavalier. A case of unfortunate timing? Maybe not. Turns out the critter Zilch has been dispatched to dispatch of—a murderous were-frog—squelches uncomfortably close to the trailer Galavance calls home. And come to think of it, Galavance's boyfriend Jolby has been spending a lot of nights out lately . . . Stuffing gross-out humor, greasy fast food, and psychedelic amphibians into a blender on high, Aftertaste is a wild ride through life, afterlife, and the American South.

In an alternate Ireland, the politicians are young and the Government is seemingly left-leaning. The Health and Wellness Act, hurriedly signed into law just one year ago, has made it illegal to possess or consume unhealthy food or 'junk'. Recent polls suggest support for 'Junk Advocates', a term coined for people who openly acquire and consume illegal foods in protest, is rapidly rising. So when popular 'Junk Advocate' Lila Birch goes missing under suspicious circumstances, the public are outraged and her sister Eadie's world is upended. When Eadie sees an opportunity to get close to high ranking Government officials, she takes it. Can she find out what happened to her sister or will the same fate befall her? Aftertaste is a new play by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth that offers a theatrical exploration into a world full of violence, greed and food.

An anthology of twenty-one funny-scary stories from members of the Horror Writers Association.

Coffee spelled backwards is eeffoc – and I don't give effoc until I've had my coffee… Nick Sullivan knows the value of hard work, and after a windfall from a family member comes his way, he finally realizes his dream of opening a coffee shop and bakery. Becoming the hot spot for the newly built apartment building in the heart of the city, he finds himself extremely successful and with offers left and right to expand and franchise that he routinely ignores. But when he meets a girl who moves into one of the apartments above his shop, Nick starts to realize something might be missing from his life. When she enlists him to help with her friend's wedding, the two-start developing a relationship that could rock his carefully constructed life in more ways than one! Alexis—known as Alex to her friends—comes from a wealthy family, but isn't interested in the kind of life they lead. Rather than being a trophy wife, she wants to have a career, and despite their constant pressure, she strikes out on her own to get it. When she moves into the new apartment building and runs into Nick, she finds herself both hopelessly attracted to him and also needing his help for her best friend's wedding disaster in progress. But when she starts to mix her business mind with her love life, things get muddy quick. Can she keep the two aspects of her life baking away, or will she burn one, or both, to a crisp? The Coffee Shop Romance Series A Rich Aftertaste A Bitter Flavor Baked to Perfection Search Terms: contemporary romance, new adult, romance, contemporary romance and sex, romance billionaire series, true love, overcoming, women's fiction, fake girlfriend, billionaire, Alpha male romance, Alpha Bad Boy, bad boy, hot romance, hot and steamy, happily ever after, love, enemies to lovers, romantic suspense, New Adult ROmance, music romance, high school romance, virgin romance, dark romance, scholarship athletes, romantic suspence, steamy romance, Contemporary Steamy Romance, fantasy new adult, new adult and college, new adult romance, College sports series, music, coming of age, lost love, inspirational romance

Nosike remembers the final years of his childhood and his adolescent years, and the conflicts and delights that marked his life at the time. The scope of his narration, through memory, takes us through the complexities of family, friendship, religious upbringing, dreams and conflicts, in the life of an adolescent, on such a pedestal that the topic becomes a consideration for people of all ages. It also shows the polaroid of the human experience and how our opinions on them are not final, and is transient when viewed through the lens of memory.

Eating Fish with a Bitter Aftertaste is a fantastic account of Phoebe Frisbee, a troubled suburban housewife and her three ennui ridden, social climbing friends. They live on the same street in an affluent Long Island village during the late 1990s and they are convinced they have discovered the formula for everlasting youth and beauty. When Phoebe wakes up one day locked in a mental health facility, mute and disheveled, with no idea how she arrived there, her hilarious and frightening adventure begins. We are taken back in time, though Phoebes hypnotherapy sessions, to piece together the mystery surrounding her incarceration and the bizarre events that led up to it. The seachange that Phoebe and her cronies experience takes them on a wild ride through the trends of the nineties. Eating Fish with a Bitter Aftertaste is a chowder of pop psychology, substance abuse, fundamentalist cults, the weight loss industry, and the animal rights movement. Although this is a work of fiction, the author wishes to remain anonymous. This book includes a small collection of recipes.