A beachside slaying threatens to put Mike Shayne behind bars No one at the hotel gives a damn about Walter Carson. There aren’t any letters for him at the front desk or calls at reception. Bellboys, waiters, and bartenders all ignore him. When he reaches out to strangers, they look away. He’s alone in the world—and worse, he’s gripped by an icy terror that follows him everywhere. One night, it catches up to him. Carson, unloved and unknown, is found dead with a bullet between his eyes. In the dead man’s pocket, the police find a newspaper clipping about Mike Shayne, Miami’s toughest private investigator. The local chief is convinced Shayne was connected to the murder, and he will do whatever is necessary to put the detective behind bars. Shayne can handle the cops—it’s Carson’s widow that he needs to worry about. Murder and the Wanton Bride is the 30th book in the Mike Shayne Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. Mita Choudhury’s examination of the trial sheds light on two important phenomena with broad historical implications: the questioning of traditional authority and the growing disquiet about the role of the sacred and divine in French society. Both contributed to the French people’s ever-increasing disenchantment with the church and the king. Choudhury builds her story through an extensive examination of archival material, including trial records, pamphlets, periodicals, and unpublished correspondence from witnesses. The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint offers new insights into how the eighteenth-century public interpreted the accusations and why the case consumed the public for years, developing from a local sex scandal to a referendum on religious authority and its place in French society and politics.

Dave is fourteen when his uncle teaches him how to pick up girls. Several women later, more than a few broken hearts in between, some drugs and alcohol added to the mixture, and a lack of sense of belonging to spice up the picture and Dave becomes a depressive romantic womanizer. Then he meets Izzy. She’s a skeptical clairvoyant, a woman lost in her world of secrets, unspeakable ghosts, and intuitive knowledge. The first time Dave and Izzy meet, they have a spread of tarot cards between them. If anyone said that everything changed in their lives from that moment on, they would be lying, because it took Dave and Izzy six months and the other side of the world for that to happen. So when chance brings them together after their odd first encounter, they form a bound that goes beyond normal friendship and stops at almost nothing. Izzy holds Dave’s deepest fears close to her heart and keeps his dirtiest secrets locked away in her soul. When they realize it, Dave’s wanton life has already permeated all bits of Izzy’s existence. He needs her sometimes more than the air he breathes, so love is not an option, is it? This is not merely about a man and a woman being just friends or more than that. This is about Dave’s wanton life, told by Izzy, who lived it through him.

Three friends reveal their most intimate secrets in an erotic romance from "an undoubted master."* They're inseparable friends who share their wildest secrets and dares. The latest bet is the boldest of all: each must sleep with whomever the others have chosen and return with every juicy detail. For divorcèe Abby it's a pair of sexy veterinarians who are fulfilling their own desire. For heartbreaker Blaire it's the one man she never had the courage to bed. For sensible Callie it's an irresistible stranger. For readers, it's an erotic fantasy come true.