Robert Garin Carlyle never expected his life to take such a dramatic turn. While visiting a friend in Europe, he experiences a violent encounter outside her university. Now, Robert is on the run, trying to prove his innocence and find the true killer. He becomes a modern day pirate as his life-changing journey forces him into the ports of Liverpool, Dublin, Lisbon, and more. He hides his true identity but runs into some bad business while learning the dark secrets of the shipping trade. The murder of Samantha Atwater is the reason for everything Robert has done. He must avenge her death and clear his name. However, when surrounded by evil, some of it rubs off. Robert hopes to eventually be the hero, but he might find new motivation to stay in the shadows and sink deeper into darkness.

Don’t tell me it’s terrifying. Terrify me. Filled with grief, Jules Belleno rarely leaves the house since her husband’s death while on duty as a police officer. Other than the reviews Jules writes on her blog, she has little contact with the outside world. But one day when she ventures out to the local grocery store, Jules bumps into a fellow customer . . . and recognizes him as her favorite author, Patrick Reagan. Jules gushes and thoroughly embarrasses herself before Regan graciously talks with her. And that’s the last thing she remembers—until she wakes up in a strange room with a splitting headache. She’s been kidnapped. And what she discovers will change everything she believed about her husband’s death . . . her career . . . and her faith.

This book offers solutions to anyone who has felt victimized, ostracized or left behind by life. Surprising as it may sound, many people take comfort in their own misery. Feeling too good for too long (or even feeling good at all) can be scary for people, explains Anne Katherine. "Achievement creates anxiety. Intimacy leads to fear. Happiness produces uneasiness. Pleasure causes pain. The solution to this dilemma: what feels good has to be stopped. I call this an addiction to misery." Katherine's fascination and perspective book provides immediate assistance to those people who think they might be making choices that keep them at a "carefully calibrated level of existence--beneath bliss and above despair."

In a kind of social tour of sympathy, Candace Clark reveals that the emotional experience we call sympathy has a history, logic, and life of its own. Although sympathy may seem to be a natural, reflexive reaction, people are not born knowing when, for whom, and in what circumstances sympathy is appropriate. Rather, they learn elaborate, highly specific rules—different rules for men than for women—that guide when to feel or display sympathy, when to claim it, and how to accept it. Using extensive interviews, cultural artifacts, and "intensive eavesdropping" in public places, such as hospitals and funeral parlors, as well as analyzing charity appeals, blues lyrics, greeting cards, novels, and media reports, Clark shows that we learn culturally prescribed rules that govern our expression of sympathy. "Clark's . . . research methods [are] inventive and her glimpses of U.S. life revealing. . . . And you have to love a social scientist so respectful of Miss Manners."—Clifford Orwin, Toronto Globe and Mail "Clark offers a thought-provoking and quite interesting etiquette of sympathy according to which we ought to act in order to preserve the sympathy credits we can call on in time of need."—Virginia Quarterly Review

The only daughter of a prominent Chicago minister, Ruth Wilcox, struggling to deal with her mounting marital problems, must finally face the truth when her husband has an affair with a young woman and decide whether to forgive and forget, or move on. Original.

This book takes a fun-filled look at the foibles, follies, pratfalls, and unpredictable world of the duck hunter, from the time his alarm rings at 3:00 a.m. until he stumbles into freezing marsh water two hours later, swamping his waders but not dampening his enthusiasm for the sport. Why do duck hunters do it? Sit in driving rain for hours awaiting ducks that may never come? Shiver in freezing boats and blinds in the most inaccessible, not to mention inhospitable, environs imaginable? Author-photographer Bill Buckley writes about these magic moments with humor and verve, but it is his brilliant color photographs that steal the show. The hapless hunter who watches helplessly as his partner's Suburban backs out of the driveway-and over the gun case that holds his favorite shotgun. Click! The faithful retriever that elegantly lifts its leg and makes a sop of the hunter's blind bag. Click! And the pained expressions on the faces of duck hunters caught in the act of enjoying their favorite sport. Click. Waterfowlers who sometimes question their own sanity can now take heart. It's all right, Buckley writes, if you like standing in swamp muck for hours on end. It's okay if your family thinks you're weird. Who cares if your girlfriend diagnoses you as obsessive-compulsive or sadomasochistic? The important thing is, you're not alone.

Adrienne L. Miller is a devout Christian who loves the Lord. Though her relationships, her environments, and her life experiences, often conflicts with her spiritual upbringing and her wanting to live her life for Christ, she still manages to maintain her Christian walk with God. After God delivered her from the many dangers, toils, and snares of the enemy, God put it on her heart to share with the world the reason for the hope that lies within her through her testimonial book, 'Misery Loves Company, but God Loves Us More." By sharing her testimony with others, Adrienne wants people to know that it doesn't matter what you've been, or are going through, God is able to keep those who are committed unto Him. This is Adrienne's debut book and prayerfully the beginning of many more to come. Adrienne's been working in the field of Education for over 25 years and has acquired many teaching styles and techniques from hands on educational work experiences. She has an AAS degree in Computer Science and is thirty credit hours away from her B.S. Degree in Business Administration. Under the tutorledge of her pastor and first lady, Adrienne gains knowledge from regularly studying and receiving spiritual training of the bible and applying its principles to her own existence. Adrienne L. M. A. Miller is a native Chicagoan who currently resides in Sauk Village, IL, with her daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, and occasionally her step grandson. She's the middle child of a family of fifteen. She's currently working as a Teacher's Assistant in a suburban public school district. If God is willing, she's looking forward to retiring from the work force in the near future and focusing more on working to help build God's kingdom.