A delightfully wicked look at the badly behaved characters who shaped the history of New York through their deeds and misdeeds.

Camilla MacPhee is the black sheep of her perfect, blonde family, although she runs a law office specializing in Justice for Victims of violent crimes. However, her uneasy association with the world of crime takes a bizarre turn when a vicious, vindictive fashion columnist with underworld connections named Mitzi Brochu is crucified in a downtown hotel room. The problem is that Camilla’s best friend Robin was on her way to meet the victim, and has become the main suspect. Camilla sets out to vindicate her friend, but finding the real killer isn’t easy, as just about anyone among the politicians and supermodels skewered by Mitzi’s rapier wit could be said to have had ample motive. The investigation turns dangerous, as Camilla receives cryptic warnings while following a grisly killer’s trail marked by more murders of humans and felines. The cast of characters includes a sleazy rock promoter, a nosy, sherry-mad old lady, a suave but mysterious hotel manager, a grumpy Mountie, and several manipulative sisters in this seriously funny first mystery novel by Mary Jane Maffini.

In this remarkable true story, the haunting of a Long Island household forces a respected writer and editor to reevaluate the mysteries of life and death as he struggles with the frightening truths of his childhood home and his town's past. Growing up in Rockville Center, Long Island, Gary Jansen never believed in ghosts. His mother-a devoutly Catholic woman with a keen sense for the uncanny-claimed that their family house was haunted. But Jansen never found anything inexplicable in how their doorbell would sometimes ring of its own accord; or in the mysterious sounds of footsteps or breaking glass that occasionally would fill their home; or even in his mother's sometimes unsettlingly accurate visions of future events and tragedies. Though he once experienced a supernatural encounter in a Prague church as a young man, Jansen grew up into a rationalist, as well as a noted writer and editor. Decades later, in 2001, Jansen moved back into the very same house where he had once grown up to raise a family with his wife. One day in 2007, he encountered a strange physical sensation in his toddler son's bedroom: As I reached into his dresser drawer, I felt something very strange behind me. Startled, I quickly turned around, but there was nothing there. I shrugged it off, grabbed the socks and, as I was walking to the doorway, experienced an odd phenomenon-sort of like an electrical hand rubbing the length of my back. I stopped and stood transfixed. "What the hell is that?" I said to myself. The pressure then seemed to break apart and, for a brief moment, I felt like I had a million little bugs crawling all over my back. Within seconds, however, the sensation was gone. This became the first step in uncovering a frightening, fullblown haunting in his home-a phenomenon that lasted an entire year and eventually included unveiling the identities of the spirits who occupied his house; discovering the chilling story of a century-old murder in his hometown; encountering mind-boggling coincidences between local history and events in his own family; and finally engaging in a climactic exorcism with the help of Mary Ann Winkowski, the real-life inspiration for TV's The Ghost Whisperer. The events of that year-in which Jansen's family was terrified of and terrorized by ghosts in their own home-forever changed how he viewed the mysteries of life and death. Holy Ghosts is not only a gripping true-life ghost story but a funny and touching memoir, as well as a meditation on the relationship between religion and the paranormal, which are often considered at odds with each other but which the author shows are intimately linked.

The lives of notorious bad guys, perpetrators of mischief, visionary--if misunderstood--thinkers, and other colorful antiheroes, jerks, and evil doers from history all get their due in the short essays featured in these enlightening, informative, books. Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Georgia History features 15 short biographies of nefarious characters, from wicked pirate Edward Teach to John Gatewood, a ruthless Confederate guerilla fighter during the Civil War.

The lives of notorious bad guys, perpetrators of mischief, visionary--if misunderstood--thinkers, and other colorful antiheroes, jerks, and evil doers from history all get their due in the short essays featured in these enlightening, informative books. Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Connecticut History features fifteen short biographies of nefarious characters, from Benedict Arnold to P.T. Barnum.

The lives of notorious bad guys, perpetrators of mischief, visionary–if misunderstood–thinkers, and other colorful antiheroes, jerks, and evil doers from history all get their due in the short essays featured in these enlightening, informative, books. Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Boston History features eighteen short biographies of nefarious characters, from the pompous and self-righteous Cotton Mather to the swindler Charles Ponzi.

Enchanting ... while writing a series of richly comic recollections which had me laughing out loud every few pages, he has now written a book with much more underlying seriousness and much more to say about the human condition than any Booker prizewinner could achieve' A. N. Wilson, Country Life 'Intensely comical ... contains some of the funniest scenes I have seen in print this year' Jeremy Paxman, Observer 'Although on route to meet plenty of people more famous ... none of them can begin to match the charm of the book's bumbling narratior in his Dickensian progression from weedy daydreamer, to failed solicitor, country squire, genealogist, obituarist and lurker at stage doors. This man is an institution, one of the great English eccentrics of our time' James Delingpole, Literary Review