Chaperoning Temple Barr's visit to Chicago to meet fiancé Matt Devine's family, hard-boiled feline sleuth Midnight Louie is unexpectedly catnapped by an abductor with ties to an unsolved string of murders in Vegas and Temple's ex, the amnesiac magician Max Kinsella.

"When the cat's away, the mice will play - but who will oversee the cat? When Dolores Tremayne, a successful business executive, travels overseas, part of her remains mysteriously behind in X, the family's indoor cat. Through feline eyes, Dolores witnesses the shocking behavior of her errant husband, the stalled novelist Gerald Tremayne. Far away in Germany, the human Dolores is conducting high-powered negotiations with a prestigious auto-maker, but back at home, her husband's liaisons force him into ever more drastic exploits. Meanwhile, Dolores begins to wonder about the strange words and images that have begun to pop into her head, as if from nowhere"--Jacket flap

As she prepares to launch a high-risk Las Vegas mob museum and casino, publicist Temple Barr uncovers a buried safe and a recently murdered body and turns to Midnight Louie's cat posse to stave off mafia threats on her life.

Twelve-year-old Courtney dreads the day when she will become a woman, for it is then, that she must leave Elysia, the world of light, goodness, and beautynever to return again. Recently elected queen, Courtney knows the rules of Elysia are unyielding. Only children are allowed. Courtneys world was once normal. But after her father disappears, Courtney, desperate to escape her depression, begins entering a fantasy world every night as she sleeps. As young as she is, even Courtney knows this place cannot possibly exist; still, in this colorful world filled with delightful creatures, everyone wants to make her happyincluding her new best friend and the boy of her dreams. But unfortunately, an evil civilization also exists nearby, and its king has stolen the magic crystal that provides power to the beautiful world she has come to love. Now Courtney and her friends must journey into the dangerous darkness to try to get the crystal backbefore they become adults. In this fantasy tale, as Courtney and her new friends come of age, they must somehow find the strength and character inside each of them in order to save their world from destruction.

Be inspired by award-winning animator Barry Purves' honest insight into the creative process of making stop motion animations, using his own classic films to illustrate every step along the way. With Barry's enthusiasm for puppets in all their many guises and in-depth interviews from some of the world's other leading practitioners, there is advice, inspiration and entertainment galore in Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance. And there's more! Many of the artists and craftsmen interviewed have contributed their own specially drawn illustrations - showing their inspirations, heroes and passion for their craft. These beautiful images help make the book a truly personal journey into the heart of the animation industry with broad appeal for anyone with a love of animation.

Temple Barr and Matt Devine make a cozy engaged couple, and the feisty redhead is all for her handsome fiance starring in a Las Vegas charity event, "Dancing with the Celebs." But while Matt struggles to master the sexy moves of the tango, a killer stalks the dance floor.

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project. Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.