Bestselling author Michele Bardsley cooks up stories about hearth and home, love and loss, truth and hope in her anthology: A Mother Scorned and Other Stories. The collection includes the dark suspense story, A Mother Scorned, which won the Grand Prize in the 72nd Annual Writer's Digest Writing Competition as well as the EPPIE-winning novella, Midnight Intentions. Go on ... take a bite of gourmet fiction!

Rich, beautiful, deadly... Billionairess Susan Cummings was very rich, even by the exalted standards of Virginia horse country. Shy and single, she used just two rooms of her huge mansion and slept with a .357 Magnum under her pillow. Some people called her haughty. Others said she was strangely obsessive, eccentric, and emotionless, with a strong distrust of people. Her lover, Roberto, an Argentinian polo player with an eye for wealthy women, was undoubtedly handsome and possessive...and he was also cheating on her. But police, answering a mysterious 911 call, saw him only as a bullet-riddled corpse. Telling of escalating abuse, Susan displayed the blood running freely from knife wounds on her arm, and said she shot him in self-defense. Yet police had their doubts: claiming that Roberto had been dead so long, the pool of his blood looked like sticky red Jell-O... Now, in a harrowing true tale of secrets, obsession and betrayal, top crime writer Lisa Pulitzer reveals the uncensored truth about a privileged world where ordinary rules don't apply...where a shocking crime rattled the sprawling playground of the wealthy elite...and where money can buy almost everything...

From its opening scene to its breath-catching climax, Liz Carlyle's charming Regency romance is a vividly etched portrait of passion and intrigue. When a woman consumed by sinister secrets opens the door to a strikingly handsome stranger, a powerful desire rushes in—and a love she could not have imagined. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Jonet Rowland is surely that. But she is also lovely, rich, and—it is rumored—an unrepentant adulteress. When her philandering husband, the marquis of Mercer, is murdered in his own bed, it's whispered that Jonet is a femme fatale in more ways than one. Shunned by society, the daring widow steels herself to fight for what truly matters—her children. When his scheming uncle begs him to investigate the death of his brother, Lord Mercer, Captain Cole Amherst refuses. But it is soon apparent that treachery stalks two innocent boys, and Cole plunges into the viper's pit that is Jonet Rowland's life. Nothing could have prepared Cole for the lust Jonet inspires. But as danger swirls about them, he is tortured by doubt. Can an honorable soldier open his shuttered heart and let a wicked widow teach him how to truly love?

The Straw Hat consists of 21 well crafted stories. Set in Irish provincial towns, they explore the themes of love, loyalty and neighbourliness, family unity, aloneness, prejudice and petty jealousy. Good characterization, each story has a satisfying twist in the tail.

Investigative reporter Wensley Clarkson has spent years researching the most extreme and intriguing cases of women who commit murder, and this gripping collection brings together 20 of his most thrilling true stories. These are the tales of women who challenge our idea of what many still, mistakenly, often think of as the weaker sex. Their characters and backgrounds are as diverse as they are deadly, and their crimes are every bit as shocking as those of of their male counterparts. From the case of the beautiful Diana Perry, who suffered years of abuse at the hands of her husband before taking the matter into her own hands; to Bobby, a woman whose gruesome interest in blood led to one of the most horrific seduction killings ever seen.

The fourteen short stories collected in this volume were written between 1913 and 1921, most of them against the background of the 1914-18 War. All but one were published in slightly different versions by magazines and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten were selected and revised by Lawrence for his collection England, My England published in 1922 in the United States and 1924 in Britain. Some of the stories included in this volume are "Tickets Please", "The Blind Man", "Monkey Nuts", "Wintry Peacock", "Hadrian", "Samson and Delilah", "The Primrose Path", "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter", and "The Last Straw". The texts aim to recover Lawrence's own intentions, which editors and publishers all too frequently ignored or altered. Where possible, manuscripts and corrected typescripts are used as base-texts. The introduction traces the composition and revision of the stories, setting them in the context of Lawrence's life and work. The textual apparatus gives variant readings, and explanatory notes identify sources, references and quotations. The 1915 version of "England, My England" is given in an appendix.