Showing results by narrator "Rosemary Benson" in All Categories

How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a "kitchen physic", as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business? In Hope in a Jar, historian Kathy Peiss gives us the first full-scale social history of America's beauty culture.

When Declan and his uncle Seamus find a dead woman in the master closet of a house for sale, Seamus hopes that means he'll get a deal...but private detective Charlotte Morgan is more interested in why the body has a note pinned to its chest.

Charlotte hunts a killer with a curious cookie-cutter calling card who seems to be out to impress the local true-crime podcaster. The work keeps her from concentrating on the fact her boyfriend has been acting strange...it seems Declan is ready to make a few major life decisions. Meanwhile, Mariska and Darla take over a local restaurant while the owner's out of town, and can't help but add a few things to the menu… bad idea, since the owner belongs to a true crime club that roots for the killers...

"The whole world is watching!" cried protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention as Chicago police beat them in the streets. When some of that violence was then aired on network television, another kind of hell broke loose. Some viewers were stunned and outraged; others thought the protestors deserved what they got. No one—least of all Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley—was happy with how the networks handled it. In When the News Broke, Heather Hendershot revisits television coverage of those four chaotic days in 1968—not only the violence in the streets but also the tumultuous convention itself.

Newly minted private detective Charlotte Morgan, resident orphan of the Pineapple Port 55+ community, discovers she might not be an orphan after all. Stunned by the news, she distracts herself with a cat burglar who left a smear of make-upped whiskers on a sliding glass door and a path straight to "Clown Town," a community for retired circus performers. When a fortune-teller doesn't see her own death in the cards, Charlotte's burglary becomes a murder investigation!

Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson's Clarissa, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov's Lolita, and Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

Patti Eddington always knew she was adopted, and her beloved parents seemed amenable enough to questions—but she never wanted to hurt them by expressing curiosity, so she didn't. The story of her mother cutting off and dying her hair when she was a toddler? She thought it was eccentric and funny, nothing more. When she discovered at fifteen that her birthday wasn't actually her birthday? She believed it when her mother said she'd changed it to protect her from the "nosy old biddies" who might try to discover her identity.

The romance novel has the strange distinction of being the most popular but least respected of literary genres. While it remains consistently dominant in bookstores and on best-seller lists, it is also widely dismissed by the critical community. Scholars have alleged that romance novels help create subservient readers, who are largely women, by confining heroines to stories that ignore issues other than love and marriage.

Someone is killing cozy mystery detectives! Charlottes friend Tilly dies and leaves her a cryptic message about the Cozy Mystery Killeran assassin who has a grudge against amateur detectives. She's left more clues hidden inside tea cosies stashed all over Pineapple Port, which is good, because someone has robbed her home, leaving Charlotte with few leads. While Charlotte and Declan follow the clues to find the killer, Mariska and Darla work to surprise them with upgrades to the couples new detective agency office.

President Gerald Ford suffered two attempts on his life during his term in office: one by a young woman in Charles Manson's Family, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, and the other by a far more unlikely candidate—an average middle-aged mother of five—Sara Jane Moore. After thirty years in contact with Moore in prison, journalist Geri Spieler deconstructs her life in Housewife Assassin, tracing the path from Moore's small-town upbringing in West Virginia to that fateful moment when she tried to assassinate the president.

When a Pineapple Port resident is found dead during an approaching hurricane, Charlotte fears someone’s trying to disguise murders as storm-related accidents. The first two victims have more than the storm in common—both were hoarding valuable storm supplies like toilet paper and water.

Newly minted detective Charlotte Morgan discovers a mysterious box in her attic, the contents of which lead her to a hotel packed with strange characters and a link to her family's past. Trusting the crafty Yorkie-toting manager will be as difficult as tracking down a missing child...and the woman who might be her aunt. Back in Pineapple Port, Charlotte's boyfriend gets tangled in a local tomato war as the locals band together to stop a corporation from destroying their fallen friend's field.

Someone has left puppies on the doorsteps of Pineapple Port's residents, but the adorable balls of fur seem to be connected to the murder of a nearby millionaire with too many heirs of his own. Meanwhile, Mariska's been framed for baking a killer cake, and Charlotte must clear her name.

Flora Miller Biddle was born a blue-blood. The granddaughter of the Whitney museum founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her childhood played out in a sort of Wharton landscape as she was shielded from the woes of the world. But money itself is not the source of happiness. In this wonderfully evocative memoir, Flora Miller Biddle examines, critiques, and pays homage to the people and places of her childhood that shaped her life.

In Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi, Ellen B. Meacham tells the story of Kennedy's visit to the Mississippi Delta, while also examining the forces of history, economics, and politics that shaped the lives of the children he met in Mississippi in 1967 and the decades that followed.

Before Key West was the party capital of the Florida Keys, it was built by wrecking skippers who, in feats of derring-do, raced to shipping disasters to save valuable cargo from the ocean depths. But when a friend is killed, Seychelle begins to suspect a chilling scenario: that modern-day wreckers are causing yachts to crash onto the reefs - and killing off whoever gets in the way. Seychelle's dear friend, Nestor Frias, was piloting a billionaire’s luxury power yacht on its maiden voyage when it ran up on a reef. A few days later, Frias was dead.

As Japanese forces attack the Philippines in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, US army nurse Louise Harrison waits to be evacuated from Manila. But with the enemy closing in, Louise is forced to flee with a handful of wounded soldiers to a field hospital deep in the mountains. Isolated in an unfamiliar country amid desperate conditions, Louise strikes up a friendship with Sammy Mori, an injured Japanese soldier with a secret.

Book three of Christine Kling's Seychelle Sullivan series is loosely based on the real South Florida murder of Greek immigrant tycoon Gus Boolis, once the owner of South Florida's Sun Cruz Casino gambling boats. In Seychelle's new caper, she may just be in over her head when murder and corruption come bobbing to the surface.

This step-by-step DIY guide shows entrepreneurs how to create and launch new products, package and market to consumers, and build a thriving business.

When the birds first called, Susan Fox Rogers was in a slack season of her life. The woods and rivers that enthralled her younger self had lost some of their luster. It was the song of a thrush that reawakened Rogers, sparking a long-held desire to know the birds that accompanied her as she rock climbed and paddled, to know the world around her with greater depth. Energized by her curiosity, she followed the birds as they drew her deeper into her authentic self, and ultimately into love.