Daily Archives: December 19, 2020

Black Leaf Fall (The Black Seasons Book 1)by Lenai Despins

Sometimes it’s not places that are haunted… it’s people.

Alexia Brooks’ life is uprooted when she moves to the sleepy forest town of Pine Ridge, Pennsylvania, for her final year of high school. The transition is unsettling, but Alexia finds comfort in her greatest passion: ballet.

Dancing in the woods one day, she meets Xander, an attractive stranger with a mysterious past. Weeks go by and Alexia only learns two things about him. The first is that he lives all alone in a huge gothic mansion, and the second is that she’s hopelessly in love with him.

Xander’s life is shrouded in mystery, but the more Alexia tries to make sense of it, the more distant he becomes. What is he hiding? The question continues to torment her until the fateful day when she finally solves his secret. Alexia realizes too late that some stones are better left unturned. Now, her sanity and survival are on the line.

Dive into Black Leaf Fall to discover Xander’s secret in Lenai Despins’ debut page-turner.

Fault Linesby Nancy Huston

A brilliantly written family epic that won France’s Prix Femina and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. “An immaculate novel” (The Guardian).

In a profound and poetic story, internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Nancy Huston traces four generations of a single family from present-day California to WWII-era Germany.

Fault Lines begins with Sol, a gifted, terrifying child whose mother believes he is destined for greatness partly because he has a birthmark like his dad, his grandmother, and his great-grandmother. When Sol’s family makes an unexpected trip to Germany, secrets begin to emerge about their history during World War II. It seems birthmarks are not all that’s been passed down through the bloodlines.

Closely observed, lyrically told, and epic in scope, Fault Lines is a touching, fearless, and unusual novel about four generations of children and their parents. The story moves from the West Coast of the United States to the East, from Haifa to Toronto to Munich, as secrets unwind back through time until a devastating truth about the family’s origins is reached. Huston tells a riveting, vigorous tale in which love, music, and faith rage against the shape of evil.

“Huston’s powerful novel combines the pacing of a thriller with the emotional intricacies that are the hallmark of the best family stories.” —Booklist, starred review

On To Virginia Cityby Gordon Landsborough

All that glitters is not gold…

Virginia City, Nevada, is a town where men come from far and wide to make their fortune in its gold and silver mines.

But although many are struck by the glittering promise of riches, in reality competition is fierce and in this cut-throat world, not everyone is so lucky.

For while a few men become millionaires, many more are forced into a brutal life of poverty.

When Drew Halliday arrives in Virginia City to try his own luck, he is soon recruited by rich businessman Jack Shannon to help suppress an uprising by the Piute, a group of Native Americans.

For Drew, this is finally the opportunity he needs to help him get settled in Virginia City, and all for a few days’ work – or so it seems…

Soon Drew is drawn into a deadly cycle of war and treachery that will push him further than he could ever have imagined.

Can he bring peace to the land?

Or will he become the latest victim of the ruthless quest for gold?

Filled with twists and turns, On to Virginia City is a Western classic written by one of Britain’s most prolific writers.

Solstice Shadows: A VanOps Thrillerby Avanti Centrae

DA VINCI CODE meets TOMB RAIDER in this multi-award-winning and #1 bestselling thriller that combines intrigue, history, science, and mystery into pulse-pounding action.
 
A computer-app designer. An encrypted relic. Can she and the VanOps team decipher the dangerous code before extremists trigger a high-tech apocalypse?
 
Broad-shouldered marine turned covert agent named Bear Thorenson wants his girlfriend, Maddy Marshall, to join VanOps, but the software expert and aikido black belt isn’t sure she’s ready for a hazardous dark-operations role that might risk the life of AJ, the nine-year-old boy she wants to adopt. Things change when an armed Russian thief escapes over a wrought-iron fire escape carrying her ancient star chart. She chooses to join Bear in the pursuit, because if her royal family legends are true, the mysterious chart leads to a superconductive meteor capable of powering the ultimate quantum computer. Upon learning the lightning-fast machine would be used by fringe members of the Russian government to spark a global war, and those same extremists kidnapped AJ once before, Maddy’s heart drops and Bear’s arctic-blue eyes turn to ice.
 
Setting off on a mad dash to uncover the chart’s celestial secrets at a Mexican archeoastronomy site, the VanOps team unearths a clue dating back to biblical times. As they race across the globe through the dangerous bazaars of Morocco, fallen Turkish temples, and Egypt’s perilous Valley of the Kings, they must fight to stay even a half-step ahead of sinister assassins. Worse, the place Maddy sent AJ for refuge becomes the enemy’s testing ground, where hungry gangs roam darkened streets.
 
With millions of lives on the line, can Maddy and Bear rescue the boy and crack the chart’s secret code?
 
SOLSTICE SHADOWS is the second novel in the fast-paced, multi-award-winning VanOps thriller series. A standalone, it follows THE LOST POWER (“A masterwork of international intrigue.” – #1 NYT bestselling author James Rollins). If you enjoy smart edge-of-your-seat suspense by James Rollins, Dan Brown, Steve Berry, or Clive Cussler, you’ll stay up late turning the pages of Avanti Centrae’s “rousing sequel.” Kirkus Reviews.

The Upstream Model: Hidden Secrets to Building a Massive Referral Business While Crushing Big Tech Competitorsby Justin Stoddart

Your future as a well-paid professional within a service-based industry is in serious jeopardy. Whether it be real estate, mortgage, insurance, wealth
management, or similar, it is time to pay attention to what is happening. Little by little, your customers are warming up to the easy, safe, convenient and non-committal benefits of your complete or partial replacement by ever-advancing technology offerings.

An unwillingness or inability to grow and adapt accordingly will lead to one of the following undesirable outcomes:
1. You own an unprofitable business that pays you subsistence wages to work around the clock while you wear out your health and your relationships.
2. You become a lower-paid functionary/sales and service representative of one of these disruptive technology companies.
3. You are forced out of your industry altogether.

While traditional cold-market and warm-market methods are failing us, I introduce to you a new, or alternative method, The Upstream Model, which allows you to leverage the pros of cold-market (scalability) with the pros of warm-market (relationships).

The Upstream Model allows you to create endless streams of warm referrals. Rather than focusing on large databases of the wrong people to eek out a few sales or referrals a year, this model allows you to get more business from fewer relationships by focusing your value proposition on professionals in different industries that know that a transaction is coming in your industry before these future customers talk to anyone in your industry.

A Little White Casket: Accepting the Grief and Loss of the Present, Confronting the Truth of the Past, and Reframing Towards the Futureby Gary Howell

Everyone experiences grief, pains and loss on this journey of life. For some it serves as a catalyst for growth and for others it becomes an impassable obstacle. This book not only shares my personal experience with grief and loss but also contains case studies of several types of pain and loss. When we acknowledge that we have been affected in many ways by the painful experiences, we then must become intentional Amit seeking hope and healing. This book will share some possibilities on implementing your own hope and healing strategies, as well as supply some tools to take control of how you thing and respond to future grief, pain and loss.