John Taylor has another one of those days, beginning with a showdown at the defunct Nightside carnival between the Voodoo Apostate, the gods he tried to dominate, and Taylor. Next, a call from the editor of the Unnatural Enquirer asking Taylor to find a man who disappeared en route to deliver an afterlife recording he had just sold the rights to. Teamed with a half-succubus demon-girl reporter, Taylor visits the Nightside’s key players and politics as people jockey to replace the recently destroyed authorities. Meanwhile, some heavy-duty characters also seek the recording. More fast, fun, adventurous detection in a setting in which nearly anything’s possible.
The only constants in nature are change and death. Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer from northern Utah, has seen her share of both. The pages of Refuge resound with the deaths of her mother and grandmother and other women from cancer, the result of the American government's ongoing nuclear-weapons tests in the nearby Nevada desert.
Unnatural History of Cypress Parish by Elise Blackwell
Louis Proby is an old man now, sitting in his study in New Orleans awaiting what they say is a huge storm, Hurricane Katrina. As he watches the skies darken, he remembers his earlier life, as a watchful, curious young man filled with hunger and desire in Cypress Parish, the life that was washed away when the Mississippi River flooded in 1927. He remembers exactly how the Parish was sacrificed to those waters--because the city fathers said it was expendable.
Oz Blackstone is enjoying the success of his latest smash hit movie. But when blackmailers threaten Oz's father with a sleazy scam, the dream begins to turn to nightmare. And as Oz prepares to fight back, he knows he's being sucked into a vortex of evil.
Acts Of God - The Unnatural History Of Natural Disaster In America
The ten most costly catastrophes in U.S. history have all been
natural disasters--seven of them hurricanes--and all have occurred
since 1989, a period, ironically, that Congress has dubbed the Decade
for Natural Disaster Reduction. Ted Steinberg, professor of history
and law at Case Western Reserve University, looks at how much of
the death and destruction has been well within the realm of human
control. Surveying more than a century of losses from weather and
seismic extremes, he exposes the fallacy of seeing such calamities
as simply random events. Acts of God explores the unnatural history
of natural calamity, the decisions of business leaders and government
officials that have paved the way for the greater losses of life
and property, especially among those least able to withstand such
blows--America's poor, elderly and minorities. Seeing nature or
God as the primary culprit, Steinberg argues, has helped to obscure
the fact that, in truth, some Americans are better protected from
violence of nature than their counterparts lower down the socioeconomic
ladder. Donald Worster, the author of
Dust Bowl: The Southern
Plains in the 1930s, says, "This compelling book blows away
many obscuring clouds of misunderstanding and denial in our national
environmental memory."
