Publisher: Next Chapter
Rattlesnakes interrupt the poker game at Wade's lodge, leaving several people dead. After one of the surviving players gets murdered at the hospital, Wade gets on the case. Suspects range from the hospital nurse to an old foe, Woody. Wade has his hands full in this race against time to catch the killer. But who was the intended victim, and who wanted them dead?
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia. His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’. At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remained and eked out a living by various means, including writing and selling short sketches to newspapers, to finish his schooling. That completed and with a scholarship to Moscow University obtained he rejoined his family. He was able to help support them by selling satirical sketches and vignettes of Russian lifestyles and gradually obtained further commissions. In 1884, he qualified as a physician and, although it earned him little, he often treated the poor for free, he was fond of saying ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ His own health was now an issue as he began to cough up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis. Despite this his writing success enabled him to move the family into more comfortable accommodation. Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’. His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26. He was also a major playwright beginning with the huge success of ‘Ivanov’ in 1887. In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate north of Moscow. Here his medical skills and money helped the peasants tackle outbreaks of cholera and bouts of famine. He also built three schools, a fire station and a clinic. It left him with less time for writing but the interactions with real people gained him detailed knowledge about the peasantry and their living conditions for his stories. His most famous work, ‘The Seagull’ was received disastrously at its premiere in St Petersburg. It was later restaged in Moscow to highlight its psychological aspects and was a huge success. It led to ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’. Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage in 1897 while visiting Moscow. A formal diagnosis confirmed tuberculosis and the doctors ordered changes to his lifestyle. Despite a dread of weddings the elusive literary bachelor quietly married the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had met at rehearsals for ‘The Seagull’, on 25th May 1901. By May 1904 with his tuberculosis worsening and death imminent he set off for the German town of Badenweiler writing cheerful, witty letters to his family and assuring them his health was improving. On 15th July 1904 Anton Chekhov died at Badenweiler. He was 44.Show book
"But Lance! We have to stop them! They are trying to pull down a statue of your granddad!" Said a magician a dimension away to Lance's teenage son Lance Junior. They were watching an angry mob of grey aliens and human sympathizers. Who were trying to rip down a statue of the local hero Blue Midnight, the Emperor of the local solar system in a park. Blue Midnight being of course Blake. "Let them, Gabriel, to fight them would cause them to be angrier and they will turn on us! It is only a statue It is only a symbol! It is not the man," said Lance Junior in the magician's head as he dragged the mad magician away from the place.Show book
Ken Barnard is a computer software designer who has had a series of unrewarding relationships with women his own age. He lives in the bottom half of an old Victorian semi-detached house in Hendon, London, and he is enthusiastic about just two things, computer programming and spanking. Recently he has discovered the pleasure in spanking older women who are often not only willing but desperate to be over Ken’s knee getting their bottoms warmed. In this audiobook, Ken spanks Rose and Holly together and then canes Amanda Prendergast for her Airs and Graces. There is also a spanking dinner party and Ken finally meets the love of his life. Philip Vincent Fantastic: Loved the book there was nothing bad in the book I really liked the ending you are a brilliant writer I am going to read some more of your stories Jason Roberts Another fun spanking series: Sweet older ladies can benefit from spankings just as much as naughty little girls. I’m really enjoying this author's genre-busting sexy spanking stories. NJSpank Enjoyable: With so many stories about thin young ladies and men being spanked this perspective was very enjoyable. Some nice erotic moments but spanking was the main theme. Well done and a very nice readShow book
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died. Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13. In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army. In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre. Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life. For them this was The Jazz Age. For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names. The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews. As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t. Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936. His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check. His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents. Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers. On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack.Show book
Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his detective stories, he also wrote other short stories which are masterpieces of mystery and suspense. In some of the stories, a suppressed uneasiness gradually builds up and evolves into sheer terror; in others, the story line unexpectedly changes and comes to an unexpected conclusion. In "The Beetle-Hunter," a beginning doctor is employed on a strange errand to a coleopterist.Show book
This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that—with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers—here approaches the Shakespearean. Tol Proudfoot is huge, outsized, in the tradition of the mythic. The three-hundred-pound farmer, personally imposing and unkempt, is also the most graceful of presences, reserved and gallant toward his tiny wife, the ninety-pound schoolteacher. Their contrasts are humorous, of course, and recall the tall tales of rural Americana. In the novella Watch with Me, we are given a story of such depth, breadth, and importance it earns being listed as one of the most important short stories written in the American language during the twentieth century.Show book
