Showing results by narrator "Julie McKay" in All Categories

It’s an exciting time for yarn shop owner Izzy Chambers Perry. She and her new husband are expecting a baby, and all of Sea Harbor seems to be rejoicing with them. As a mother-to-be, Izzy is having a heady summer—full of bike rides, runs along the shore, and time spent with her aunt Nell and the other Seaside Knitters—until the day she spots an abandoned baby car seat and hand-knit blanket on the beach. Izzy immediately recognizes the blanket’s material—a soft yellow angora yarn she displayed in her shop window last fall.

As Izzy and the Seaside Knitters prepare her yarn studio for the tourist season, fellow knitter Birdie Favazza has her hands full with her granddaughter Gabby. The little girl soon becomes a fixture in the town and even strikes up a friendship with a reclusive local fisherman, Finnegan, who is the source of much local turbulence. Then lobsterwoman Cass Halloran stumbles over the old fisherman—his body covered with leaves and sea grass and wearing the yellow fleece vest she once made for him.

Charismatic, beautiful Sally Flynn was the center of her daughters' imaginations, particularly Laura's. Without warning, life as they knew it changed as paranoid schizophrenia overtook Sally. Whether it was accusing Laura’s father of trying to win her over to the side of Satan, or buying only certain products that were evil-free, glimmers of her mother’s future paranoia grew brighter as Laura’s early years passed. Once her husband left the family and filed for divorce, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest, and the three girls united in flights of fancy of the sort their mother had taught them in order to deflect danger.

With her shy manner and baggy jeans, Rose Malone becomes an unlikely superhero the night she stumbles into Izzy Chambers' shop and inadvertently saves a shipment of yarn from water damage. When the Seaside Knitters help the enigmatic handywoman settle into town and find work at a popular real-estate company, Rose proves she can fix just about anything - until a potential homebuyer is killed, and she becomes entangled in murder.

A young man is stopped by the police, a body is found in his backseat, and he is convicted of murder. While he awaits execution, he makes out a will leaving all his money to the police lieutenant who handled his case. The lieutenant learns of this when Hildegarde Withers, schoolteacher and hard-boiled private eye, stops by. She determines to clear the man in the few days left before his execution. The opening paragraphs bear comparison with the opening of Chandler's short story "Red Wind".

Hildegarde Withers, schoolteacher and amateur detective, stumbles onto the corpse of Jefferson Grammar School's attractive young music teacher. When Miss Withers goes for help, the body plays hooky, and when Homicide Inspector Oscar Piper starts to investigate, somebody tries to brain him with a shovel. The rest of the cops want to throw the book at the school janitor, who has flunked their pop quiz. But Miss Withers disagrees and decides to stay after school to ask her own questions.

Thick flakes of snow are falling on Fifth Avenue at twilight - and then the body of a young man suddenly falls among them, mysteriously out of the sky. Momentarily the wheels of traffic are halted, but other wheels spin relentlessly on - the wheels of death, the wheels on which bloody murder moves silently through Manhattan’s streets. Once again Miss Hildegarde Withers, the schoolteacher-detective, matches her wits against an unknown X, armed only with the precious gift of common sense and a cotton umbrella.

"You here for the Midnight Coven?" Icy words, whispered upon her lips in the night, used to scare Lorelei Huntington. But that was before. Before her mother tried to have her killed, before her world went back 50 years, before the magic of the swamp found its way into Lorelei's blood. Now she finds the whispers and the cold breath of the dead a comfort. That is until she's warned, by a small ghost haunting Whit's family's castle, about the secrets of the bloodthirsty family she resides with.

There are plenty of parenting books out there, but as a working parent there's never been a trusted guide that coaches you how to do well at work and be the loving and engaged mother or father you want to be. Enter Workparent. Whether you're planning a family, pushing for promotion during your kids' teenage years, or at any phase in between, Workparent provides all the advice and assurance you'll need to balance your family and career in your own authentic way.

Miss Hildegarde Winters, accompanied by her poodle, Talleyrand, is ready, willing, and able when nasty valentines upset a cartoon studio. With one murder down and three to go, Miss Withers and New York's Inspector Piper delve into poison ivy and a fantasy land when snooping around a school.

Hildegarde Withers is on the hunt again, as a vacation in California lands her a movie job and two dealers to clear up. Her own death brings Inspector Piper to the scene, and her resurrection cuts through Hollywood red tape as she becomes a target for the killer.

Hildegarde Withers heads down Mexico way where the death in the afternoon involves neither a matador nor a bull. Inspector Oscar Piper is off on a junket to Mexico in the summer of 1937 (surrounded by a bunch of Democrats, huffed Miss Withers) when a customs inspector on a train headed for Mexico City sniffs a very potent bottle of cheap perfume and promptly drops dead. Quite naturally, Oscar telegraphs Hildegarde in Manhattan about the perfume and quite naturally Miss Withers packs her bags and heads south of the border, figuring Oscar is out of his depth if he has to rely on deductive reasoning rather than a rubber hose.

When a company can get its best ideas to market faster, its leaders can be confident that their most important strategic decisions will be executed faithfully, and their visions for the company’s future will be realized. They are also able to be agile in response to market changes, pursue new opportunities, and achieve ambitious plans for growth.

When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband's 300-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a farm or raise a child, must endure the darkest days of the war on her own. By the time Major Hockaday returns two years later, Placidia is bound for jail, accused of having borne a child in his absence and murdering it. What really transpired in the two years he was away?

Top model Violet Feverel should be a pretty picture riding the big red thoroughbred Siwash - but the front page photo on the tabloids is ugly as death. The police dub the tragedy an unfortunate accident. But Miss Hildegarde Withers, who stumbled across the girl's body on the Central Park bridle path, knows they are, unfortunately, wrong. Just plain horse sense tells her it was murder....

Izzy Perry’s Sea Harbor Yarn Studio is heating up, thanks to an upcoming fashion benefit. The show will feature hand-knit garments, and enthusiastic knitters flock to the shop for supplies to create runway-worthy pieces. Yet Seaside Knitter Birdie is enjoying flocks of a different kind, thanks to a rekindled interest in birdwatching. Along with a group of passionate birders, she often spends weekend mornings looking for warblers or keeping watch for gannets and grebes. It’s a lovely, special time—until Birdie makes her way through a tangle of vines and stumbles upon a fellow birder’s body.

When pretty little Ina Kell arrived in Manhattan full of foolish dreams about making it big in show business, she had no idea how quickly she’d be in the headlines. But when TV personality Tony Fagan is murdered in the apartment building where she’s staying and she disappears shortly thereafter, the search is on, led by Inspector Oscar Piper and his long-time friend Hildegarde Withers.

After retrieving fresh lobster nets from a local laundromat, Cass Halloran rushes to attend a last-minute gathering with her knitting circle. But Cass can't stop worrying about the lonely boy she saw hanging around the dryers and the school uniform he left behind in a hurry. When she and her friends return the lost clothing the next day, they find the child and his younger sister alone, seemingly abandoned by their mother.

Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award-winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through 23 impassioned essays that explore her identity - from her childhood in a poor family in South Carolina to her adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York - and her sexuality.

Dolphins are magical creatures: They comfort the heartbroken, rescue the lost, even heal the sick. At the Hope Key Dolphin Assisted Therapy center in Florida dolphins use their healing powers to help autistic children communicate and to soothe other troubled people. But what if you don't want help? What if you've gone so far down the wrong path that you can't go back? Katy Grant can't see any way back from the path her life has taken. And she doesn't really care. Working at Hope Key keeps her out of jail. And it just might give her the chance at revenge she wants on the man who ruined her life.