Bestselling author Michele Bardsley cooks up stories about hearth and home, love and loss, truth and hope in her anthology: A Mother Scorned and Other Stories. The collection includes the dark suspense story, A Mother Scorned, which won the Grand Prize in the 72nd Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition as well as the EPPIE-winning novella, Midnight Intentions. Go on ... take a bite of gourmet fiction!

Rich, beautiful, deadly... Billionairess Susan Cummings was very rich, even by the exalted standards of Virginia horse country. Shy and single, she used just two rooms of her huge mansion and slept with a .357 Magnum under her pillow. Some people called her haughty. Others said she was strangely obsessive, eccentric, and emotionless, with a strong distrust of people. Her lover, Roberto, an Argentinian polo player with an eye for wealthy women, was undoubtedly handsome and possessive...and he was also cheating on her. But police, answering a mysterious 911 call, saw him only as a bullet-riddled corpse. Telling of escalating abuse, Susan displayed the blood running freely from knife wounds on her arm, and said she shot him in self-defense. Yet police had their doubts: claiming that Roberto had been dead so long, the pool of his blood looked like sticky red Jell-O... Now, in a harrowing true tale of secrets, obsession and betrayal, top crime writer Lisa Pulitzer reveals the uncensored truth about a privileged world where ordinary rules don't apply...where a shocking crime rattled the sprawling playground of the wealthy elite...and where money can buy almost everything...

The Straw Hat consists of 21 well crafted stories. Set in Irish provincial towns, they explore the themes of love, loyalty and neighbourliness, family unity, aloneness, prejudice and petty jealousy. Good characterization, each story has a satisfying twist in the tail.

Gaze into the lives of the twentieth century’s wealthy and declining WASP establishment in these twelve stories by the author of The Education of Oscar Fairfax. No one else writes about the moral life of America’s moneyed class with anything approaching Louis Auchincloss’s understanding, sympathy, irony, and humor. In this, his first book of short fiction since the acclaimed Collected Stories, he again brings us news that no other writer can deliver, news about how America’s great families and fortunes are run and the axes and crises on which they turn. Here is how the privileged view their privilege—some with smugness, some with style, some with a crushing sense of civic and personal responsibility. Here is how the rich marry, how they divorce, and, more important, why. Here, definitively and indelibly, is the eastern seaboard’s Wasp establishment—sometimes in its glory, more often in its decline, and always with its values, assumptions, and increasingly fragile sense of self held up for our scrutiny by a master, the most subtle critic of American manners since Edith Wharton. Praise for The Atonement and Other Stories “The 12 stories collected in “The Atonement” reveal a writer at, or very near, the top of his form.” —Los Angeles Times “In this PC world, Auchincloss’ crisp, confident tales of the WASP elite almost qualify as guilty pleasures. These 12 stories . . . will satisfy longtime fans and initiates alike with their portraits of investment bankers, lawyers, and socialites testing the limits of silver-plated social niches . . . . As usual, Auchincloss etches out the moral dilemmas of the blue-chip social stratum with reassuring clarity. A” —Entertainment Weekly “Fragile, often smug, and sometimes silly characters populate this noteworthy collection . . . . these glimpses of the Eastern elite’s manners and moral quandaries will provide an accessible first taste for the Auchincloss novice and an enjoyable read for longtime fans.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

The fourteen short stories collected in this volume were written between 1913 and 1921, most of them against the background of the 1914-18 War. All but one were published in slightly different versions by magazines and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten were selected and revised by Lawrence for his collection England, My England published in 1922 in the United States and 1924 in Britain. Some of the stories included in this volume are "Tickets Please", "The Blind Man", "Monkey Nuts", "Wintry Peacock", "Hadrian", "Samson and Delilah", "The Primrose Path", "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter", and "The Last Straw". The texts aim to recover Lawrence's own intentions, which editors and publishers all too frequently ignored or altered. Where possible, manuscripts and corrected typescripts are used as base-texts. The introduction traces the composition and revision of the stories, setting them in the context of Lawrence's life and work. The textual apparatus gives variant readings, and explanatory notes identify sources, references and quotations. The 1915 version of "England, My England" is given in an appendix.

Those who have read Mr. Harold Frederic's novels and short stories will need no commendation of this book. The tale of the progress of Marsena Pulford, a young man with an artistic temperament in embryo (and absolutely, as his office boy would have said, " without no show"), is told with acuteness through the times when Marsena was a village photographer, having failed as a painter, and through the period of his service in the war, straight on to the hopeless tragedy at the last. It scarcely seems possible that any young woman could be both a hospital nurse and such a wicked fool as Miss Julia Parmalee is represented to be; but as the red-nosed man once said to Mr. Peter Magnus : " Rum creeters is women." There are three other stories in the book — all "of the wartime," and all well told.