A New York reporter, Toni Miracle, attends a rose festival in Pennsylvania's Amish country and stumbles on a series of murders, each of which is accompanied by a rose. As she investigates, the town's age old secrets emerge.

Like other fictional characters, female sleuths may live in the past or the future. They may represent current times with some level of reality or shape their settings to suit an agenda. There are audiences for both realism and escapism in the mystery novel. It is interesting, however, to compare the fictional world of the mystery sleuth with the world in which readers live. Of course, mystery readers do not share one simplistic world. They live in urban, suburban, and rural areas, as do the female heroines in the books they read. They may choose a book because it has a familiar background or because it takes them to places they long to visit. Readers may be rich or poor; young or old; conservative or liberal. So are the heroines. What incredible choices there are today in mystery series! This three-volume encyclopedia of women characters in the mystery novel is like a gigantic menu. Like a menu, the descriptions of the items that are provided are subjective. Volume 3 of Mystery Women as currently updated adds an additional 42 sleuths to the 500 plus who were covered in the initial Volume 3. These are more recently discovered sleuths who were introduced during the period from January 1, 1990 to December 31, 1999. This more than doubles the number of sleuths introduced in the 1980s (298 of whom were covered in Volume 2) and easily exceeded the 347 series (and some outstanding individuals) described in Volume 1, which covered a 130-year period from 1860-1979. It also includes updates on those individuals covered in the first edition; changes in status, short reviews of books published since the first edition through December 31, 2008.

Murder in the holiday spirit It was Christmas in Lickin Creek, and all through the town something was stirring..The borough council was quarreling about the color of the Christmas lights. A social worker wouldn't let a living baby be part of the town's living crèche. And some ladies were stretching the limits of their leotards in a pageant called the Nutcracker. All in all, former New Yorker Tori Miracle was basking in the quaint glow of her adopted Pennsylvania town, when suddenly the season went sour. A boy was missing. A thirty-year-old mystery resurfaced. And now two people have been murdered. With her boyfriend--the town police chief--out of town, Tori must help his befuddled replacement. And what she finds out, or should be finding out, is making Tori the next target--of someone only in the mood for murder....

This volume is a comprehensive collection of critical essays on The Taming of the Shrew, and includes extensive discussions of the play's various printed versions and its theatrical productions. Aspinall has included only those essays that offer the most influential and controversial arguments surrounding the play. The issues discussed include gender, authority, female autonomy and unruliness, courtship and marriage, language and speech, and performance and theatricality.

When a quaint Pennsylvania town hosts a Civil War reenactment, only the blood will be real.... How does a once-hip New Yorker get used to living in a quaint Pennsylvania town famous for its gooey, oversized sticky buns? For Tori Miracle, it means kissing her diet good-bye, always showing up in the wrong clothes, and struggling with a love life. And now that she's filling in for the editor of the Lickin Creek Chronicle and has the town newspaper to look after as well as her own dear fastidious felines, sometimes it means cosponsoring public events like a Civil War reenactment for the local women's college. But when this charmingly authentic reenactment is done, and each man and woman has played his or her part to the hilt, it's clear that Tori has miscalculated again. Someone used one live bullet in an antique gun. And with a man dead, it's going to be up to the only city slicker in Lickin Creek to unravel a mystery of murder in a town where calories don't count, but murder does....

From the author of books about women police officers and a retired editor who’s now a volunteer cop in small town America, Food, Drink, and the Female Sleuth gathers together the best food scenes in mainstream detective fiction. Over 140 flavorful contributors, over 250 slurpy excerpts, 23 rich chapters with titles like “Undercover Grub and Stakeout Takeout,” “Junk Food on the Run,” “A Dozen Ways to Feed Your Lover,” “Bribing with Food,” and “The Last Bite.” Like us, PIs, cops, and amateur sleuths ARE what they eat. Also they are known by how they eat, where they eat, why they eat, and by who does the cooking. What better way to flesh out a sleuth’s work partner than “Let’s Have A Drink,” or spell out social class with humor in “Upper and Lower Crusts”? What better way to get a plot underway than breakfast? Or stir in suspense and foreshadow events in “Let’s Do Lunch”? This book is for anyone whose shelves are stacked with really good detective novels and really good food. Face it, if you like to eat, put Food, Drink on your table.

Keith B. Darrell traverses multiple genres and dimensions, guiding the reader to a wondrous universe of speculative fiction in which he has loosed the gremlins of his imagination. Leading the reader through realms of fantasy, horror, science fiction, satire, nostalgia, urban fiction, and other genres, he has tapped into the zeitgeist, chronicling the exploits of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations. His tales hold a funhouse mirror up to society and force us to recognize ourselves in the reflection. Filled with pathos, they cross all genres and are alternately poignant, nostalgic, humorous, cautionary, and even terrifying. Keith B. Darrell’s stories flow effortlessly. Do not be deceived. They are raw. They are politically incorrect. And they will take you from your comfort zone into a modern day Twilight Zone.