The bestselling author of Bee Season brilliantly explores the cruelty of children, the unreliability of memory, and the unpredictable forces that shape our adult selves. • "Haunting.... A compelling exploration of the fallibility of memory, explored through richly drawn characters.” —San Francisco Chronicle Twenty years after Celia’s best friend, Djuna, went missing, memories of that terrible day come rushing back—including the lie Celia remembers having told to conceal her role in Djuna’s disappearance. But when Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, her family and childhood friends recall that day very differently. As Celia learns more about what may or may not have happened, she becomes increasingly uncertain whom she should trust.

The second installment in the extraordinary Cooper Devereaux mystery thriller series, which combines the atmosphere of James Lee Burke and Craig Johnson with the noir brilliance of Robert Crais An arsonist is targeting schools in Birmingham, Alabama—with devastating effect. Detective Devereaux—a man you can’t quite trust and should never ignore—must put a stop to the elusive pyromaniac’s reign of terror before more damage is done. Or worse, before students’ lives are lost. But as Devereaux sifts through the ashes of the case, a grisly discovery at a burned-out school sends the investigation spiraling in a new, terrifying direction. The detective and his partner are dragged into a nightmare world by revelations of gruesome rituals, the disappearance of local citizens, and allegations against city officials of shocking crimes that stretch back decades. With innocent lives on the line, progress is hampered by friction between the police department and the FBI, and interference from factions of the local underworld complicate matters further. Devereaux doesn’t make excuses for his willingness to work outside the lines, but just as he needs to be at the top of his game, he’s rocked by echoes from his troubled past that threaten to engulf his daughter and girlfriend—and fracture the life he’s only recently begun to rebuild. Praise for False Friend “The second installment starring [Detective Cooper] Devereaux is a suspenseful action-packed drama that is sure to please fans of the series and mystery/thriller lovers alike. As a stand-alone, it will inspire newcomers to seek out the first book.”—Library Journal “An incendiary thriller . . . Cooper is solid—decent, flawed, and entertaining.”—Kirkus Reviews Praise for Andrew Grant’s RUN “An adrenaline-fueled thrill ride that will have your head spinning and your heart pounding.”—Joseph Finder “High stakes, high tension, and nonstop action . . . Hang on and enjoy this smart, original, and fast-paced adventure.”—Hank Phillippi Ryan “Relentless, twisty, and blistering fast, it’s a book you don’t dare start at bedtime.”—Sean Chercover “A whizbang of a novel with just the right dose of smart-ass.”—Chelsea Cain “Breathtakingly fast-paced.”—Harlan Coben “A perfect thriller—smart, fast, and blazing with nonstop surprises.”—Robert Crais

This book approaches the topic of false friends from a theoretical perspective, arguing that false friends carry out a positive role as a cognitive device, mainly in literature and jokes, and suggesting some pragmatic strategies in order to restore the original sense of a text/utterance when a given translator (or a foreign speaker) falls victim to false friends. This theoretical account is successively verified by appealing to texts from the fields of literature, science, philosophy, journalism, and everyday speech.

Daphne explores the ups and downs of false friendship in her latest fully illustrated diary of a fourth-grader. Daphne and Kaylee are fourth-graders and best friends, but Daphne also wants to become friends with Imogen, the cool girl in their class. The trouble is, to be friends with Imogen, she’s going to have to get past Imogen’s best friend, Darla. Which means becoming fake friends with Darla. But when it comes to Daphne, things never go according to plan. Can she survive the Fake Friend Disaster and make a real friend in the process? Daphne tells it like it is and expertly details the drama of being a kid in this fully illustrated journal from the creator of the bestselling Amelia series.

Various emerging technologies, from social robotics to social media, appeal to our desire for social interactions, while avoiding some of the risks and costs of face-to-face human interaction. But can they offer us real friendship? In this book, Alexis Elder outlines a theory of friendship drawing on Aristotle and contemporary work on social ontology, and then uses it to evaluate the real value of social robotics and emerging social technologies. In the first part of the book Elder develops a robust and rigorous ontology of friendship: what it is, how it functions, what harms it, and how it relates to familiar ethical and philosophical questions about character, value, and well-being. In Part II she applies this ontology to emerging trends in social robotics and human-robot interaction, including robotic companions for lonely seniors, therapeutic robots used to teach social skills to children on the autism spectrum, and companionate robots currently being developed for consumer markets. Elder articulates the moral hazards presented by these robots, while at the same time acknowledging their real and measurable benefits. In the final section she shifts her focus to connections between real people, especially those enabled by social media. Arguing against critics who have charged that these new communication technologies are weakening our social connections, Elder explores ways in which text messaging, video chats, Facebook, and Snapchat are enabling us to develop, sustain, and enrich our friendship in new and meaningful ways.

The King James Version has shaped the church, our worship, and our mother tongue for over 400 years. But what should we do with it today? The KJV beautifully rendered the Scriptures into the language of turn-of-the-seventeenth-century England. Even today the King James is the most widely read Bible in the United States. The rich cadence of its Elizabethan English is recognized even by non-Christians. But English has changed a great deal over the last 400 years—and in subtle ways that very few modern readers will recognize. In Authorized Mark L. Ward, Jr. shows what exclusive readers of the KJV are missing as they read God's word.#In their introduction to the King James Bible, the translators tell us that Christians must "heare CHRIST speaking unto them in their mother tongue." In Authorized Mark Ward builds a case for the KJV translators' view that English Bible translations should be readable by what they called "the very vulgar"—and what we would call "the man on the street."

"Detective [Devereaux] and his temporary partner, Jan Loflin, seek a missing [seven]-year-old foster child. [Devereaux], himself a survivor of the foster system, is haunted by his own brutal childhood and the death of his father. He labors under a cloud of suspicion, determined to find the missing boy before it's too late. But are his motives really pure? His record is a minefield of red flags and question marks: how is a Birmingham cop able to afford a Porsche, a penthouse, and a summer cabin?"--