Captivating stories of how a young doctor's first year of medical practice in the Smoky Mountains shaped his practice of life and faithThe little mountain hamlet of Bryson City, North Carolina, offers more than dazzling vistas. For Walt Larimore, a young 'flatlander' physician setting up his first practice, the town presents its peculiar challenges as well.With the winsomeness of a James Herriott book, Bryson City Tales sweeps you into a world of colorful characters, the texture of Smoky Mountain life, and the warmth, humor, quirks, and struggles of a small country town. It's a world where the family doctor is also the emergency physician, the coroner, and the obstetrician, and where wilderness medicine is part of the job, search-and-rescue calls in the national forest are a way of life, and the next patient just may be somebody's livestock or pet. Bryson City Tales is the tender and insightful chronicle of a young man's rite of passage from medical student to family...

"May you live in interesting times" is the worst thing one can wish on a citizen of Discworld -- especially on the distinctly unmagical sorcerer Rincewind, who has had far too much perilous excitement in his life. But when a request for a "Great Wizzard" arrives in Ankh-Morpork via carrier albatross from the faraway Counterweight Continent, it's he who's sent as emissary. Chaos threatens to follow the impending demise of the Agatean Empire's current ruler. And, for some incomprehensible reason, someone believes Rincewind will have a mythic role in the war and wholesale bloodletting that will surely ensue. (Carnage is pretty much a given, since Cohen the Barbarian and his extremely elderly Silver Horde are busily formulating their own plan for looting, pillaging, and, er, looking wistfully at girls.) However, Rincewind firmly believes there are too many heroes already in the world, yet only one Rincewind. And he owes it to the world to keep that one alive for as long as possible.

Memo: For Ministry of Strange, Unusual, and Impossible Things Operatives OnlyRe: The Monster's Daughter by Paul GambleThere is more trouble in Belfast: odd things are happening at the aquarium, giant crabs are staging jail breaks, and formerly harmless bath bombs are destroying bathrooms left and right.Fortunately, our brave new recruits—Jack, a curious boy skilled at logical thinking, and Trudy, the most dangerous girl in school—are on the case. Armed with the best Ministry training (as long as you don't panic everything will be fine) and full access to Ministry supplies (those that weren't ruined in the recent flood), we are confident that they can discover and foil this villainous plot.Please give them all possible assistance. Oh, and be sure not to share their location, as Jack is still on the run from the Tooth Fairy.

Stacy Henry wants to earn money for the Cul-de-sac Kids Club. But she can't get permission from Abby, the club president, who is out of town.The rest of the kids vote to go ahead with a yard sale. The friends make signs, and everyone brings old treasures for the big day. But one night, some of their treasures disappear!Is there a bandit in the neighborhood? Who is stealing from the Cul-de-sac Kids?

What would happen if Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was set in the twenty-first century?When Mrs. Bennet inherits enough money to move to the kind of village she has always dreamed of, her daughters find themselves swept up in a glamourous life of partying and countryside pursuits.But Lizzie and her sisters soon discover that, beneath the very smart surface, lurks a web of intrigue and rivalries...

(Silhouette Intimate Moments  #608)HUSBAND WANTED...Nikki Beauvisage desperately needed her inheritance to keep her day-care centre open. But she had to be married to get the money. Enter Sam Walker - the most arrogant, tantalizing man she'd ever met. And as Nikki said 'I do', she had a sinking feeling she was in for a lot more than she'd bargained for... Sam Walker desperately needed money for his niece's surgery, and he would do anything to get it. Although their business deal was highly unusual, the prospect of spending a year with this sultry beauty was downright enticing. This could be a very convenient marriage indeed...A FAMILY CIRCLE: A bond so strong, nothing can tear them apart!

During the Second World War, Eastenders Miranda and Ted are sent to the country with another young evacuee, Roberta (Bobbie), to live with two unmarried sisters in their idyllic rectory. The time they spend with Aunt Sophie and Aunt Prudence turns their underprivileged lives into something very near to Heaven: gathering wool from hedgerows, initiating do and mend campaigns, and trotting about the countryside with Tom Kitten, Aunt Prudence's pony. But when the Committee for Evacuation object to the women's efforts to adopt all three of them, it is Bobbie who is sent away to live with the Dingwalls in very different circumstances. And when the aunts die, Miranda, Tom and Bobbie -- who have come to regard themselves as a family unit -- are eventually parted, seemingly forever. The three find each other after the war, and Miranda, now a beautiful young model, falls in love with grown-up Ted Mowbray, but unfortunately he can only think of her as a sister. In turn, he loves Bobbie,...

Set against the stark but seductive landscape of the American Southwest, the stories in All My Relations explore the inner landscape of mind and heart, where charting the simplest course is subject to a complex constellation of relationships. In the title story of the collection, a Pima Indian hires on with a rancher in an attempt to quit drinking and to win back the wife and son who have left him. His efforts to master land and horses and to bake the perfect cake mirror his efforts to subdue his own demons and to embrace a peaceful domesticity.In "The Big Bang and the Good House", Tony, a former drug dealer, pits his urge toward chaos against the orderly pleasures of marriage, finally yielding to the solidity and spaciousness of domestic love: "I feel myself gathering weight, density. Cautiously, I allow myself to inhabit this Good House, which surprisingly fits like my own body". Julia, the aging protagonist of "Simplifying", risks her fragile health in a love affair; her generosity of spirit toward her lover is matched in inverse proportion by the frugality with which her lover doles out his affections. In "The March of the Toys", a young woman flees Delaware, her chronically ill father, and her grieving mother, only to find that she's traded the neediness of her family for the harrowing disturbances of her lovers. She muses, "I couldn't affect anyone's life. I could only attend it".In "Hualapai Dread", an investment broker's infatuation with an enigmatic Hualapai Indian woman, as elusive as she is beautiful, brings out his most predatory instincts and unmasks her own deceit. Acting on similar but more destructive impulses toward the object of his sexual obsession, a character in another story takes his soon-to-be ex-wife on a bizarre "honeymoon for divorce". The close-knit family of "Builders" breaks under the strain of constructing their dream house with their own hands, and eventually they are forced to leave behind the illusion of safety and permanence: "Once the three had imagined themselves as a house on a hill, dug into stone with the tenacity of a lion. Now they sat tensely in canvas-backed chairs stretched like slingshots. They talked cautiously, with encouragement, hoping for the return of pleasure".Embodying the transience and openness of the New West, the characters in All My Relations reinvent themselves, even as they struggle with the age-old, perilous necessity of loving.From Publishers WeeklySet against the landscape of the American Southwest, this collection of eight precisely observed stories offers a powerful and moving series of observations about love and relationships in the modern world. In the title tale, Milton, a Pima Indian, quits drinking and finds success as a ranch hand in the employ of a stubborn white cattle owner. But his sobriety alienates him from his friends, and his long-missed wife and son return only as Milton descends into a debilitating, dream-like illness. In "Simplifying," Julia, a volunteer at the local zoo, finds renewed life in an affair with Philip, a 66 poet with brittle feet. In a line that has resonance for many of the characters here, Philip says: "For my wife and me, making a baby would have implied too much optimism about our future." In "Builders," a close-knit family implodes under the pressure of building their dream house, only to be reborn in the thinner, less burdensome air of Denver. Describing their reunion, McIlroy writes, "Now they sat tensely in canvas-backed chairs stretched like slingshots. They talked cautiously, with encouragement, hoping for the return of pleasure." A winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, McIlroy writes with a spare elegance, consistently displaying the illuminating detail or the evocative description. His stories are grittily real, occasionally disturbing, filled with the breath of life. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalMany of the stories in this collection are set in Arizona, and McIlroy skillfully portrays both landscape and people. Distance between places in the desert is a recurring notion, and the emotional distance between people mirrors the geographically imposed isolation. In the title story, the brief friendship that grows between a lonely Anglo rancher and a Native American ranch hand is a singularly healing episode in increasingly barren lives. In "The March of the Toys," an encounter at a party leads two vulnerable women to friendship, tentative romance, ultimate alienation, and the question, "How can a person cease being who she's always been?" The final story, "Builders," ends on a hopeful note, when, estranged during the building of their dream house, a family begins to reconnect. In many of the stories, promising relationships begin by chance, end in deceit and disappointment, yet leave characters transformed. Recommended for larger fiction collections.Eleanor Mitchell, Arizona State Univ. West, PhoenixCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After a home dye job ruins her hair, Agatha Raisin, the prickly yet lovable amateur sleuth, turns to the wonderful new hairdresser in the neighboring town for help. And as Agatha soon learns, Mr. John is as skilled at repairing her coiffure as he is at romancing her heart. But the charming Mr. John isn't all he appears to be. According to gossip around the salon and the village, some of his former clients seem to be afraid of him. Could Mr. John really be a ruthless blackmailer? When a murderer strikes at the busy salon, Agatha must discover the truth and the killer's identity before it's too late.