When the movie star renting Maggie's house is accused of murder, she's the only one who believes he's innocent. Now all she has to do is prove it. Maggie McJasper is starting over in a little California beach town. She has a bead shop, a nice circle of friends, and a handsome movie star who keeps flirting with her. Life would be pretty great if she could just stop stumbling over dead bodies…. Do you like dogs, crafts, quirky friends, a slow-building romance between grownups who genuinely like each other, and a twisty little mystery with red herrings galore? Then this is for you. The Maggie & Jasper Capers are fun and flirty cozies, with no swearing or love scenes, and no gruesome violence to keep you up at night.

This study of what Brian Norman terms a neo-segregation narrative tradition examines literary depictions of life under Jim Crow that were written well after the civil rights movement. From Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, to bestselling black fiction of the 1980s to a string of recent work by black and nonblack authors and artists, Jim Crow haunts the post-civil rights imagination. Norman traces a neo-segregation narrative tradition--one that developed in tandem with neo-slave narratives--by which writers return to a moment of stark de jure segregation to address contemporary concerns about national identity and the persistence of racial divides. These writers upset dominant national narratives of achieved equality, portraying what are often more elusive racial divisions in what some would call a postracial present. Norman examines works by black writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, David Bradley, Wesley Brown, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Colson Whitehead, films by Spike Lee, and other cultural works that engage in debates about gender, Black Power, blackface minstrelsy, literary history, and whiteness and ethnicity. Norman also shows that multiethnic writers such as Sherman Alexie and Tom Spanbauer use Jim Crow as a reference point, extending the tradition of William Faulkner's representations of the segregated South and John Howard Griffin's notorious account of crossing the color line from white to black in his 1961 work Black Like Me.

As World War II drew to a close and radio news was popularized through overseas broadcasting, journalists and dramatists began to build upon the unprecedented success of war reporting on the radio by creating audio documentaries. Focusing particularly on the work of radio luminaries such as Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, Norman Corwin, and Erik Barnouw, Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest traces this crucial phase in American radio history, significant not only for its timing immediately before television, but also because it bridges the gap between the end of the World Wars and the beginning of the Cold War. Matthew C. Ehrlich closely examines the production of audio documentaries disseminated by major American commercial broadcast networks CBS, NBC, and ABC from 1945 to 1951. Audio documentary programs educated Americans about juvenile delinquency, slums, race relations, venereal disease, atomic energy, arms control, and other issues of public interest, but they typically stopped short of calling for radical change. Drawing on rare recordings and scripts, Ehrlich traces a crucial phase in the evolution of news documentary, as docudramas featuring actors were supplanted by reality-based programs that took advantage of new recording technology. Paralleling that shift from drama to realism was a shift in liberal thought from dreams of world peace to uneasy adjustments to a cold war mentality. Influenced by corporate competition and government regulations, radio programming reflected shifts in a range of political thought that included pacifism, liberalism, and McCarthyism. In showing how programming highlighted contradictions within journalism and documentary, Radio Utopia reveals radio's response to the political, economic, and cultural upheaval of the post-war era.

The King's First Minister Lord Robert Cecil, Earl of Salusbury, had set May 3rd as the date for the execution of the Jesuit leaders convicted of complicity in the Gunpowder Treason. He had delayed it twice before in hopes his army of Pursuivants would capture the remaining fugitive, flamboyant John Gerard in time for him to witness the grisly execution of the elderly Jesuit Superior, Henry Garnet, knowing he was to be the next to suffer. However, Gerard had eluded gallows justice more than once. His most notable effort had occurred while Elizabeth lived when the Jesuit escaped his Tower prison in an aerial fete involving linens and ropes. Other forces, not all of them English, had a rescue in the making involving the Scottish adventurer Will Hepburn's ship, La Belle Ecossaise. It was far short of an ironclad scheme. Sir William Hepburn had an unbridled distrust of the English and scant affection for the newly anointed King James I, ostentatious son of the Queen of Scots who for a few months almost forty years ago had been his infant stepbrother.Moreover, Hepburn had inherited his dead father Bothwell's abiding distrust of all things Catholic. When James was wee, Bothwell stood outside of the door during the Christening. He had made Queen Marie cry by refusing to marry her in a Catholic ceremony. Even if the powers seeking Will's cooperation found a way to manipulate him into participating in a most unlikely a rescue, Gerard's supporters would have to find him first and deliver him to a coastal port and row. Will knew more enough about the Earl of Salisbury and the Gunpowder Treason to feel safer in open waters than at the Stuart Court. Also, Hepburn had promised his guidwife Daisy Kirkcaldie never again to set foot on English soil. While Hepburn was an adventurer famous for his derring-do, Daisy was no one to be crossed. Moreover, even if the rescue party had the means to enlist Hepburn's sense of honor and engage Daisy's determination to ride into the breach, what if the charismatic English Jesuit John Gerard were to have conflicting passions of is own?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The third book of the suspense-filled, enduringly popular Gentleman Bastard Sequence about a roguish group of conmen, which George R. R. Martin has called “fresh, original, and engrossing . . . gorgeously realized.” “Fast paced, fun, and impossible to put down . . . Locke and company remain among the most engaging protagonists in fantasy.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) ONE OF PASTE’S BEST FANTASY BOOKS OF THE DECADE With the greatest heist of their career gone spectacularly sour, con artist extraordinaire Locke Lamora and his trusted partner, Jean, have barely escaped with their lives. Or at least Jean has. Locke is slowly succumbing to a lethal poison that no alchemist can cure. With the end nearing, Locke’s only hope is to accept a mysterious Bondsmage’s offer: act as a political pawn in the Magi elections, and in exchange be healed. But the lifesaving sorcery promises to rival even the most excruciating death, and Locke refuses. Until the Bondsmage invokes the name of Sabetha, the love of Locke’s life, his equal in skill and wit . . . and now his greatest rival. From his first glimpse of Sabetha as a fellow orphan and thief-in-training, Locke was smitten. But after a tumultuous courtship, she broke away. Now they will reunite in another clash of wills. Faced with his only equal in both love and trickery, Locke must choose whether to fight Sabetha—or woo her. It is a decision on which both of their lives may depend. Don’t miss any of Scott Lynch’s epic fantasy Gentleman Bastard Sequence: THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA • RED SEAS UNDER RED SKIES • THE REPUBLIC OF THIEVES

When a magical creature kills, is it murder? On the day Abyowith is promoted to Assistant Stalker, a City Councillor is found is garroted in a locked room. All signs point to a miscreation—a magically created beast—but why would a miscreation break into a man’s house, kill him, and lock the door after? And why, that night, does a voice in the darkness tell Abyowith, “Leave him alone!" With no motive to be found and more victims coming to light, Abyowith begins a search for answers that takes her from the halls of power to the city’s underbelly. And as she closes in on the killer, Abyowith discovers that learning why the Councillor died may be even more dangerous than tracking the creature who killed him.