Of endless weekdays, working weekends, making presentations, working with complicated Excel sheets, handling a boss with time-management issues and the general politics of the workplace. Sigh! After eight years of this life, her only personal insight is that she's terribly unambitious and constantly struggling to be an average performer in the competitive corporate world. When a colleague flashes the glint of a golden sabbatical she catapults into it headfirst. After all, one has to find one's calling at some point in one's life. So will the sabbatical miraculously change her life forever? Or will she go rushing back to her pocket money-generating job?

    To say the least. She calls Sweet Meadow, Georgia, home, where she works for her father doing auto repairs. She also drives the tow-truck, although Sweet Meadow's rather colorful denizens tend to treat Bertie more like the local, free taxi service. You know, someone has to get to a doctor's appointment or pick something up at the dry cleaners. Bertie's favorite day of the week is Friday, when she leaves the wrecker with her father for the whole weekend and joins her friends at the Dew Drop Inn for a night of dancing. Her best friend, Mary Lou, sometimes fixes her up with dubious dates, although Bertie has to remind her friend not to tease her hair too high for those occasions. Like the time when they went to Carrie Sue's open house, and a ceramic cow with angel wings hanging from a ceiling fan locked its hooves into Bertie's big hair and refused to let go. She had to wear it all night, dangling chain and all. Bertie's nearly perfect life is about to take a downhill turn, however. It starts when her landlord, Pete, currently a resident in a nearby nursing home, starts showing up at her house. In his birthday suit. A very badly wrinkled birthday suit. And then she goes to her mailbox, a rubber large mouth bass, and finds a notice from the zoning commission saying she can no longer park the wrecker in her driveway. The notice is signed by George Bigham. But when she goes to the courthouse to take care of her little problem, it is only to discover George Bigham is deceased. And Mary Lou's pregnancy test just came up positive. Can it get any worse? In a word... yes.

    From the foothills of North Carolina to the mountains of West Virginia, Birdie weaves her story with homespun simplicity, creating a tapestry that vibrates with the colors and textures of her life and times, spinning a tale from the years before the Great Depression on up through the end of World War II. Enthralled by her first taste of womanhood, she follows her heart with the man of her dreams, only to find that life is not fair. Or perfect. Or easy. Will she find the courage to risk everything in order to reclaim what she once had?

    Worse than that, his nightmare is just beginning… Detective Inspector Summers hates dealing with drug addicts, thieves, violent men and women, rapists, child molesters and murderers. She wants to be a doctor in a surgery, saving the lives of the sick. Instead, she deals with the sick and twisted. Finally, she gets handed the case she wants, the reason she joined the force… Her investigations lead Summers closer to Ben, and his involvement to the case slowly becomes clear… BLOOD OF A SERIAL KILLER It's only natural for Benny Jones to want to know more about the father he never met. He's turning eighteen and his doting mother, Eve, can no longer put off answering his questions with the excuse that he is too young to understand. Discovering whose genes he carries, Benny grasps why he has behaved the way he has in recent times and is intrigued to learn more about the darker side of his family. He has many questions, and his grandmother Lily Green, once known as the notorious killer The Phantom, lives on in a mental hospital not far from home and she could supply the answers. The corpses pile up as Benny discovers his purpose in life... FANATIC... Martin Day is at breaking point. The loner, ignored and ridiculed for as long as he can remember, looks to his hero for inspiration. Sadly, for those in the near vicinity, the person Martin looks up to most is notorious killer The Phantom.

    The three friends are members of a creative writing group and they decide to enter a national competition. But while they ponder their plots and agonise about their characters, their own lives are going far from smoothly.Evie's still pining for the husband who left her for a younger woman and is relying increasingly on clairvoyant Zelda. But who is Zelda really?Nic's battling a drink problem and is in despair about her workaholic husband who is addicted to his laptop. A shocking discovery shakes her to the core, but will she realise in time that she must stop protecting him?Becca's a City highflyer who seems to have everything - until a childhood friend turns up, threatening to expose the secret she's kept buried for nearly thirty years. How will her marriage, her children, her friendships survive it? And on top of that there's a deadline. The women have just eleven months to complete their manuscripts. Who will win the competition - and can there be any real-life happy endings?

    Abandoned by her teenaged birth mother and raised by callous grandparents, Johanna is determined to escape her bleak Midwest existence at any cost. But that blind ambition comes back to haunt her years later, after she’s reinvented herself as glamorous golden girl Jenna Coeur. Now her secret past has caught up with her, embodied in a calculating young woman who will stop at nothing to destroy her—a woman with a strangely familiar face...

    V has to live in a sham marriage as she seeks information on her husband, his financial affairs and proof of his sexual affairs.

    Along with Clover's stylish, powerful friend, Alice, they share holidays, sleepovers, school runs and childcare. They're like one big family. But all families have their secrets. When the children leave home, Clover and Laura's lives and marriages change forever, and the old rules on love and loyalty no longer apply. And when Alice decides she wants what they've got, Clover and Laura have to find out who they really are. Without the children, can their marriages - and friendship - survive?

    Fleeing boredom, bad marriages, and dead-end jobs, these adventurers wander south to Playa Paraiso—a lush, unspoiled village on Mexico’s idyllic Caribbean coast. There they find the unpredictable, hedonistic, and sometimes frightening world of the tropics.At the center of this extraordinary group is Poppa, the irreverent and savvy owner of the local beach bar. As he tries to make sense of his own vagabond existence, he offers his fellow expats booze, advice, and the occasional helping hand. It is Poppa who tells the tales of these intriguing runaways, as together they encounter true loves, vicious drug dealers, charming rogues, clueless do-gooders, and a devastating hurricane. Against a backdrop of stunning blue water and endless white sand, they experience the heart’s tug of war between the need for a place to call home and the desire for the freedom to roam.Author Anthony Lee Head is very familiar with the dream of living in paradise portrayed in Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road. After leaving a long career as a San Francisco trial lawyer, he moved to Playa del Carmen, Mexico where for ten years he ran a small hotel and margarita bar near the beach.Travelers, wanderers, explorers and dreamers alike will see themselves in these unforgettable characters, all the while craving an icy boat drink on a sprawling beach. But be careful: if you stick your feet in the sand and come along on this journey, you may not want to go home again."... Joseph Conrad collides with Jimmy Buffett in a journey through the dark heart of Mexico's Riviera Maya."~ Bob Calhoun, bestselling author and journalist"Truly wonderful and moving tales; the author is a writer to watch."~ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Beneath the 'palm and balmy breezes' tone, a deep, empathetic humanity affords each character and event vivid authenticity."~ Peter Coyote, bestselling author and actor

    Now its anonymous author reveals both her identity and the true story of her giddyingly glamorous time in the style industry, with insider gossip on the people who populate it.Propelled by a painful end to a relationship and determined to prove her ex wrong for breaking up with her, our Fashionista lands a place on the Harrods Graduate Scheme. A complete outsider to the fashion world, she sets out on a wing and a pair of Guccis, and finds herself in a whirlwind of couture and craziness. Along the way she learns how to stay sane in a world where hairdressers have egos as big as their clients' bouffants, where dogs fly business class, and if you're eating carbs it can only be because you're pregnant.Confessions of a Fashionista is a book for anyone who's ever been an outsider, for anyone who's ever had a relationship end badly and thought they'd never find true love, and for anyone who thinks that cakes were made to be eaten, not sniffed. By turns hilarious, sad, thrilling, romantic and fun, it is the It book for fashionistas everywhere.

    Aren’t troubles with men a woman’s daily bread? Worse yet, I was sleeping with the trouble and he wasn’t my husband—a secret as undeserved as cruel. Adam’s marriage crimes were cold but not savage, and certainly not worthy of infidelity.”Isabelle needs one good reason to shave her legs with joy. Her husband broods over cholesterol, white flour, and his dental patients; her nervous eight-year-old son worries about everything, and her teen-aged daughter thinks Isabelle is an embarrassment.Isabelle begins her affair for many reasons—her husband treats her as an employee, her daughter turns more sour each day, and she feels she’s holding onto pretty by her teeth. But the lust isn’t worth the guilt, and when her daughter strikes up an unexpected friendship with the daughter of her lover, Isabelle’s two worlds approach a devastating collision."Randy Susan Meyers brings her razor-sharp humor, wit, insight, pathos and empathy to 19 MYTHS ABOUT CHEATING as she brings a marriage to life, and to the brink of death with deftness and sensitivity. Meyers writes with sass and smarts in this heart-wrenching and funny novella that every woman will read with a mixture of recognition, terror, and delight. I found myself saying, yes, yes, marriage is just like this, over and over.  No character is every black or white, no decision is ever right or wrongShe has us rooting for everyone even when we don't agree with them, and hoping that this time, love will triumph over adversity and that the book will last just a few pages longer." —NYT Bestseller, M.J. Rose

    

    It never happened to anyone I knew ... It happened over breakfast, or lunch. It happened to parents who were careless”Alice Winters is not a careless mother. Yet one awful day her two-year-old daughter is taken from her pushchair outside a village shop. Alice’s life becomes every parent’s worst nightmare as she begins questioning everything and everyone she knows, vowing to leave no stone unturned until Grace is found.Now, ten years later, Alice believes that the publication of her book recollecting the events surrounding Grace’s disappearance will be the final needle in the haystack needed to bring her home.Who had taken Grace and why? Will Alice ever be ready to accept the truth, no matter how difficult it is to hear? For fans of Diane Chamberlain, this is a must read.

    But she might just have met her match when she encounters Jess, a woman who is not used to losing at anything.Jess is very much like Lucy when it comes to a fondness for competition, only a more extreme version, and as the pair become friends, it's clear that a rivalry is developing between them in the fields of business, love and beyond.But as the lives of both women become more intertwined, that rivalry becomes more intense, and by the time it reaches the point of their friendship breaking down, it seems that there is nothing either woman won't do to come out on top.Two women. Only one winner.

    A sparkling short story from the bestselling author of The Oyster Catcher, available exclusively in ebook.