Have you heard the saying 'If walls could talk' Well, Morgan Windfield can listen to them. Morgan is a single mother trying to keep her job as a museum tour guide and raising her teenage adopted daughter named Brit, which gives her trouble. Brit has to deal with a recurring vision that haunts her. Morgan receives a disconnected call from her estranged father and then gets a letter that his estate is foreclosing. She was young when her mother passed, and he has ignored her ever since. She had not talked to him in years; why should she care, but she does. When Morgan and Brit arrive at the estate, the groundskeeper Jon Bartlett, a tall, dark, handsome man. He tries to hinder progress in finding her father and discovering more about a large stone tablet and an archway by her father with mysterious carvings. Morgan uses her powers to unravel clues and to stop Brit from joining with a power-hungry evil sorceress that wants access to the archway to gain its power to control all.

A Listening Wind, a collection of translated original texts and commentary edited by Marcia Haag, highlights the large array of Indigenous linguistic and cultural groups of the U.S. Southeast. A whole range of genres and selected texts represent language groups of the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Cherokee, Koasati, Houma, Catawba, and Atakapa. The traditional and modern Native literature genres showcased in A Listening Wind include stories that speakers perceive to be in the past (or “fixed”), genres that have developed alongside these stories, and modern story types that have sometimes supplanted traditional tales and are now enjoying trajectories of their own. These texts have been selected to demonstrate particular literary themes and the cultural perspectives that inform them. Introductory essays illuminate how they fit into Native American religious and philosophical systems. Overall this collection discloses the sometimes hidden connections among genres as well as their importance to language groups of the Southeast.

“Start with Douglas Adams’s comic science fiction (A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and J.R.R. Tolkien’s alternative worlds, mix in James Ellroy’s gritty realism and Jonathan Swift’s unflinching satire and, if you’re lucky, you’ll get something like Terry Pratchett’s Thud!” —Wall Street Journal City Watch Commander Sam Vimes must solve the murder of a prominent dwarf or watch as Discworld is plunged into a bloody civil war in Terry Pratchett’s delightful Discworld satire, a brilliant tale of prejudice, ancient feuds, and tender fatherhood. Long, long ago, in a gods-forsaken hellhole called Koom Valley, trolls and dwarfs met in bloody combat. Centuries later, each side still views the other with simmering animosity that has been heightened of late because of one Grag Hamcrusher. The influential dwarf has been fomenting unrest among a section of Ankh-Morpork’s citizenry—a volatile situation made far worse when the petite provocateur is discovered bashed to death . . . with a troll club lying conveniently nearby. If he doesn’t solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see it fought again, right outside his office. But more than one corpse is waiting for Vimes in the eerie, summoning darkness of a labyrinthine mine network being secretly excavated beneath Ankh-Morpork’s streets. With war-drums beating ever louder, Vimes must unravel every clue, outwit every assassin, and brave any darkness to find the solution. And the darkness is following him, pulling him deep into the muck and mire of superstition, hatred, and fear—and perhaps all the way to Koom Valley itself. Until six o’clock every day, when without fail, the Commander goes home to read Where’s My Cow?, with accompanying farmyard noises, to his little boy. Because there are some things you must do. The Discworld novels can be read in any order but Thud! is the 7th book in the City Watch collection and the 34th Discworld book. The City Watch collection in order: Guards! Guards! Men at Arms Feet of Clay Jingo The Fifth Elephant Night Watch Thud! Snuff

Rudo lives in the slums of a floating town, where the poor scrape by under the shadow of the rich who live a sumptuous life, simply casting their garbage off the side, into the abyss. Then one day, he's falsely accused of murder, and his wrongful conviction leads to an unimaginable punishment-exile off the edge, with the rest of the trash. Down on the surface, the cast-off waste of humanity has bred vicious monsters, and if Rudo wants to have any hope of discovering the truth and seeking vengeance against those who cast him into Hell, he will have to master a new power and join a group known as the Cleaners who battle the hulking trash beasts of the Pit!

“Another day finished,gracias a Dios.” Seventeen-year-old Marisa’s mother has been saying this for as long as Marisa can remember. Her parents came to Houston from Mexico. They work hard, and they expect Marisa to help her familia. An ordinary life—marrying a neighborhood guy, working, having babies—ought to be good enough for her. Marisa hears something else from her calc teacher. She should study harder, ace the AP test, and get into engineering school in Austin. Some days, it all seems possible. On others, she’s not even sure what she wants. When her life at home becomes unbearable, Marisa seeks comfort elsewhere—and suddenly neither her best friend nor boyfriend can get through to her. Caught between the expectations of two different worlds, Marisa isn’t sure what she wants—other than a life where she doesn’t end each day thanking God it’s over. But some things just can’t wait...

In the aftermath of having survived an encounter with pedophile serial killer Uriah Beek almost three years earlier, two still healing couples reconnect at Christmas time in the small Oregon coast city of Cutter Point. Kevin Kearnes, the city's former police chief, now a special agent with Homeland Security, is returning to Cutter Point with Britt McGraw and his two young sons to marry Britt on the same beach where he first kissed her. Thud Compton, Kearnes' old sergeant, and now Cutter Point's new chief, has invited them to stay at the Compton home. However, the Kearnes' are not the only ones traveling to Cutter Point for the holidays. Some very bad men are coming to town and instead of bearing gifts, they are planning on taking one for themselves; an old military sword from WWII rusting away inside its display case in the local library which, after 9/11, is now worth a million dollars on the world black market for war artifacts. Russian mobsters "Little Nikki" Kravchenko and Vlasi Voronov will happily accept half that much in payment from Phillip Peeters, the man who has hired them to steal it. But to college student Darius Ono, who has already failed at one attempt to take it, the sword is priceless and reclaiming it will restore honor to the name of his dead great uncle "The Emperor's Sparrow." Although they don't yet know it, Kevin Kearnes and Thud Compton are about to face their greatest threat ever when they are forced to pursue the murderous men who have stolen The Sparrow's Blade.