Read Online: Nonfiction
The Wicked Wand
Magic slipped free from my grip and danced, spark and glimmer, eluding my frantic clutches. A lesson were learned then there. Unless I were held in Briny Brook’s hand, I were unable to grasp my magic. I vowed to change that bothersome fact. I vowed. Ye see how I were successful. Oh, it took a lon...
The Sixth Wife: The Story of Katherine Parr (2009)
There had come to her that day a proposal of marriage. It was her first proposal of this nature, because it was an appeal to her direct. There had, in the course of her thirteen years, been other suggested marriages, but she had never been called to give her opinion on these. When she had been a ...
Simple Intent
Even from his vantage point on the hill, Berger heard the throaty rumble of the big engine, the shouts above it. Tony pointed to a stack of red-striped containers at the far end of the terminal yard. Berger peered through his binoculars and scanned the area around the pick-up point. Clean. Nothin...
Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01
Vi was bathing, Magda had dozed. The bodyguards, McColgin on the boulevard side, his pal Nels on the seawalk, blamed each other. She’d disappeared about 11 p.m. By midnight McColgin and Leo were searching on the boulevard and bayside, while Nels took the beach south toward the jetty and Hic...
The Last Notebook of Leonardo (2010)
I didn’t like him. 3 We walked down the street in the snow. It was dark out already and the snow looked very beautiful falling through the cones of light underneath the street lamps. Sometimes people stared at us, and some of them laughed as if they thought it was a joke, but a lot of people didn...
Blood Kin
It was written in dried blood on the floor of the millhouse with a scatter of yellow, white, and gold corn. The handwriting was thin, almost delicate. Sadie figured the preacher had cut open his own finger and used it to make the letters. “He got his Bible back,” Mickey-Gene said faintly. “I’m ...
Nightside [Diana Tregarde series]
A few of them jittered into the pool of weak yellow light cast by an aging streetlamp—a converted gaslight that was a relic of the previous century. It was old and tired, its pea-green paint flaking away; as weary as this neighborhood, which was older still. Across the street loomed an ancient ch...
Anne Ashley
‘I’ve taken such great care over the arrangements for this wretched dinner party, but I must confess I cannot be easy in my mind. Holding the event so soon after the funeral is bad enough, without decking myself out in a load of gauds.’ The housekeeper shot her mistress an...
Poe
Shew, and the false start with Mrs. Locke, had not materially affected Poe's passionate desire for female companionship. In the summer of 1848 he visited Mrs. Locke and her husband at Lowell, in Massachusetts, where he was about to deliver a lecture on “The Poets and Poetry of America.” Mrs. Lock...
After Dark
The park is a small one on a narrow strip of land in the middle of the city. Set near an old public housing project, it has a playground in one corner with swings, seesaws, and a water fountain. Mercury lamps illuminate the area. Trees stretch their dark branches overhead, and below there are den...
God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State
Each desk has a small round panel of buttons for casting votes. The accompanying brown leather, high-back recliners also have the seal emblazoned on them. When you sit, there is an exhalation as the cushion adjusts; one lawmaker told me that a colleague taped over the vents on the back of the cha...
Mary Reed McCall
Duncan forced himself to take shallow breaths as Colin shoved him the rest of the way down the narrow corridor, into the bowels of the dungeon, trying to concentrate on anything but the dark reality of where this little journey was going to end. They’d not seen another living soul along the way, ...
Charlie Bumpers vs. the Squeaking Skull (2014)
the Squeaking Skull 6Don’t Say That! I made it all the way through dinner that evening without saying anything about Halloween. Finally, after we’d finished washing the dishes, I heard my mom talking on the phone in the hall. I went out to listen, but she motioned for me to go away so I went back...
The Eighth Veil
He’ll be in his rooms this time of day.”“Not just yet, Barak. I need some time to reread these letters and I want to have someone look at this box and seal.”“I see. Will you be needing me anymore?”“No, not until later this afternoon. Come to me after the noon meal in the room we use to interview....
New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club
They had huge blowers that they used to create a white fog of dust particles in the air, and they set them up on the hills all around the valley. They also had two light airplanes operating out of the county airport that they'd send up to seed the rain clouds whenever any appeared. Dinky ...