Investigative journalist Laura Chambers is back in her tiny hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina, the one place she swore never to return. Fired from the Boston Globe, her career in shambles, she reluctantly takes a job with the local paper. The work is simple, unimportant, and worst of all, boring--at least until a missing girl turns up dead, the body impeccably clean, dressed to be the picture of innocence. Years earlier, ten-year-old Patty...

People have accumulated a frightening and environmentally devastating amount of garbage even in outer space! This book rips from the headlines the powerful stories of some of the world s worst dumps, including Mumbai in India, Dandora in Kenya, and more. Fact boxes chronicle the legal changes made and not made in each place with regard to waste management. Statistics presented in sidebars on each spread illuminate the problem for readers using frighteningly...

Imagine the typical American farmer. Many people visualize sun-roughened skin, faded overalls, and calloused hands -- hands that are usually white. While there's no doubt the growing trend of organic farming and homesteading is changing how the farmer is portrayed in mainstream media, farmers of color are still largely left out of the picture. The Color of Food seeks to rectify this. By recognizing the critical issues that lie at the intersection...

"Discover secret museums, go on an urban safari for wild parrots, locate a landmarked tree, enter the oldest building in New York City, watch a performance of robots in a church, stand tall next to hobbit doors on an otherwise normal residential street, learn how to breathe fire, swallow swords, hammer a nail into your skull and charm a snake, touch the oldest subway tunnel in the world and the world's smallest Torah, forage for food in Prospect Park,...

"She was fine arranging other people's weddings... But life had other plans. When it comes to creating the perfect happily-ever-after, Yardley Belanger is a bona fide miracle worker. From bridal bouquets to matching cowboy boots, the quirky wedding planner's country-chic affairs have caused quite a stir in the small town of Cemetery. But when it comes to her own love life? She's clueless. Completely clueless. Perhaps it's for the best. The thirty-one-year-old...

"Genderqueer fourteen-year-old Z Chilworth has to adjust quickly to their new status as a zombie after waking from death from a car crash that killed their parents and sisters. Always a talented witch, Z now can barely perform magic and is rapidly decaying. Faced with rejection from their remaining family members and old friends, Z moves in with Mrs. Dunnigan, an elderly witch and befriends Aysel, a loud would-be-goth classmate who is, like Z, a loner....

"Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Pincus exposes the darkest secret in American nuclear history- sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands that decimated a people and their land. The most important place in American nuclear history are the Marshall Islands- an idyllic Pacific paradise that served as the staging ground for over sixty US nuclear tests. It was here, from 1946 to 1958, that America perfected the weapon that preserved the...

"With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable,...

"When a ransom exchange turns violent in the latest mystery from New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry, Commander William Monk faces an unthinkable possibility: betrayal by his own men. Local businessman Harry Exeter doesn't want the aid of the Thames River Police in tracking down the men who kidnapped his wife, Kate. He only asks them to help him navigate Jacob's Island, a creepy mass of decrepit buildings where he will hand off a large sum...

It's Maya and Jamie's anniversary, and she waits with excitement for him to return home for a celebratory dinner. There's a knock at the door. It's the police. Jamie has been found hanging in a local wood. His death is ruled a suicide, but Maya doesn't believe Jamie would take his own life. Something isn't right. Someone has broken into her house. Someone is watching her. And someone has gone to great lengths to cover up what Jamie was doing before...