Bücher veröffentlicht von Dagmar Miura

When Celeste runs into Angel, one of the city's growing homeless population, in front of Truman's building, she invites them to a street festival in Gladys Park. Angel proves to be a talented contralto at the event, and Truman meets Dyson, an outreach worker who hires him to track down some seemingly valueless stolen property. Truman's instincts and his 1930s-era detective handbook lead him to more questions, and he's confronted with the fact that the guy he's crushing on may be playing him. As they dig deeper, Celeste goes undercover in a developer's office, where she turns the head of Flint, the wealthy family's scion. Truman follows the clues in an old book about flying saucers, traveling around Los Angeles and subsequently uncovering local government corruption and a nest of old-time white supremacists.Join the bar-hopping, booze-swilling duo as Celeste has to decide whether Flint's social status is compatible with her worldview, Truman confronts the paranoia of conspiracy theorists, and the pair enlist their new Skid Row friend to join the battle against corruption.

Experience with me what life was like living with thirteen other family members in a two-bedroom, one-bath house in a typical 1950s middle-class, postwar American neighborhood. This story is an unusual combination of revealing autobiography, insightful self-help, and handy classroom teacher's guide.Survive rides with me and my mother and eight siblings on summer vacations to Southern California beaches and campgrounds in our 1950 two-door, two-tone green Plymouth station wagon. Join the fourteen of us for a typical family dinner in our moderate-size kitchen that was designed for six. Accompany my very pregnant mother on a bus in 1945 to Fresno to stay with the in-laws she had never met before while my dad awaited his Army discharge orders.Anyone born between 1946 and 1960 will find a delightful nostalgic journey down the baby boomers' memory lane. Others might use the story of my personal failures and subsequent triumphs to create value and positive changes in life. Teachers may find my suggested supplemental teaching techniques valuable to incorporate into the classroom.Enjoy this book. I wrote it as a clear and compelling testimony describing my childhood recollections that convey to you why I am Glad to Be a Ladd.

Sometimes all a woman needs is a decent man-even if she's not sleeping with him. For Celeste, her longtime friend Truman fills some of the gaps, leaving her the luxury of being choosier in her romantic pursuits. Truman has his own issues chasing guys, in his perpetual quest for the right man, and the pair of them manage not to get jealous when they target the same ones.In this first novel in the Truman and Celeste series, Truman stumbles into a detective gig while trying to imbibe a margarita, and soon finds himself hunting for a guy named Jaime in a rough neighborhood, getting embroiled with a series of increasingly troublesome lowlifes, none of whom ever seem to tell him the truth. Drawn into the mystery, Celeste works her contacts in the art world and meets a guy who's all sweet chocolate on the surface but has some toxic secrets underneath, all the while helping Truman avoid his more boneheaded instincts in his research and working up some job prospects for herself.Join Truman and Celeste as they troll the gritty underbelly of Los Angeles, never hesitating to slam that cocktail, hit on guys, or ask the next relevant question.

Lil Bee wants you to know her story. She’s a hardworking little bee who lives with her mom and thousands of sisters and a few brothers too. Life isn’t easy being Lil Bee. She doesn’t know what the future holds for her and her family. Her mom told her that they are going to go on a vacation, but she doesn’t know when or where. She has also heard some of the older bees buzzing on about a swarm. Join Lil Bee through the seasons as she prepares for the exciting family vacation.

Psychic investigator Mason is suspicious when Ortiz, a shady Navy operative from the desert, asks for his help, claiming he’s looking for his runaway teenage son, Owen. There’s more to it, he soon realizes, digging into Owen’s life, and Mason finds himself going to extreme lengths to stay off Ortiz’s radar. And who exactly is the hippie, visible in old photos but without a name, just beyond the reach of memory? With help from his talented roommate, Peggy, and his boyfriend, Ned, the scruffy flatfoot tangles with drag queens, religious extremists, a protest march, and maybe even aliens in this latest mystery in the Mason Braithwaite series.

Don't mess with the hothead-or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of Los Angeles, rooting out insurance fraud, not afraid to use whatever means necessary to get things done, and not about to hold back with his fists. A queer antihero for a new age, Slater walks the line between ordinary life and the frayed fringes of society, keeping his balance with the back-channel support he gets from his idiot cop ex-boyfriend, Conrad, and regular squeeze Andy.Two women who bear a remarkable resemblance to each other are brought together in a shelter for hillside residents fleeing the California wildfires. One of them, Gloria, asks Slater for help in tracking down the other, who's using her identity to run a shady export business. As he digs into the imbroglio, Slater turns up a series of stolen luxury cars, a garage hidden in an old church, and a whole lot of suspicious shipping containers. Not the kind of guy to keep it in his pants, Slater is soon sleeping with sweet sexy Lincoln-a penny-ante lowlife and someone he knows he can't trust. As Slater navigates a seedy slice of the underworld, the buff mechanic thoroughly clouds his judgment. Will Slater's libido finally get him trapped in a situation he can't punch his way out of?

Don't mess with the hothead-or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of Los Angeles, rooting out insurance fraud, not afraid to use whatever means necessary to get things done, and not about to hold back with his fists. A queer antihero for a new age, Slater walks the line between ordinary life and the frayed fringes of society, keeping his balance with the back-channel support he gets from his idiot cop ex-boyfriend, Conrad, and regular squeeze Andy.Interrupted late one night by Marisol, a desperate woman seeking help from his business partner, Slater agrees to go after her husband, Abner, a nebbishy accountant who's making their divorce negotiations a nightmare. But why is Marisol traveling with a bodyguard, and why is she more interested in uncovering Abner's secret assets than just warning him off? With Andy's help, Slater infiltrates Abner's office and befriends staffer Nolan on a quest to figure out where all the money is coming from. Unable to keep his libido in check, Slater winds up in bed with one of the principals, and struggles to keep the entanglement from clouding his judgment. After using his illicit Russian tech to surveille Abner and a degenerate religious nut, some covert deception with his elderly neighbor, and an excursion to a seedy bar in Albuquerque, Slater begins to unravel Marisol's end game. Debilitated by his addictions dragging him closer to rock bottom, and wading through a sea of compulsive hookups with an array of guys, Slater is ultimately confronted with a moral dilemma that puts other people's lives in the balance.

Washington DCand terror in an isolated government-sanctioned medical laboratory as the potential of medicine goes horrifyingly wrong.When Susan, a young researcher, loses her fiancee in a terrible accident, she is seduced by Michael, a friend and the head doctor on a top-secret neurometric project backed by the White House and the famed Borg-Harrison Foundation. Joining Michael's team, Susan is unaware of the terrible danger she faces in the high-security facility and from Katherine, the team psychologist, who will go to any lengths to protect the lab's vital secrecyand her own carnal desires. When Susan stumbles onto the true nature of the project, it's to find herself in it too deep to walk away and, trapped in the worst kind of nightmare, threatened every second to becoming a ghastly medical experiment herself.In The Head Hunters, David Osborn explores the murky boundaries between ethics and medical research, between volunteer and victim, ambition and ruthlessness, and between life and death when a team of responsible doctors plays a deadly game in which any of the players can be condemned to a purgatory more ghastly than hell.

Kelly Anders, financially successful writer of best-selling romantic fiction, lives a privileged but sterile existence in a Manhattan penthouse. Pushed into a book tour of Britain by her publisher, Kelly dreads a politically orchestrated meeting with Rachel Sommerset, the acclaimed Nobel Prizewinning novelist, her generation's Tolstoy. The encounter, while leading to a surprising friendship between the two women, dredges up the ghosts of Kelly's pasther unacknowledged youth with a different name in the impoverished inner city and her ambivalent feelings toward her husband, Gerald, now hidden away in her penthouse in a permanent coma, the fallout of an ugly kidnapping in Argentina of himself, the mining corporation head he worked for, along with the man's consort, Teresa, and Jake, a renowned photographer. Their lives changed forever by their brutal captors, Jake and Teresa, in their struggle to right themselves, find their way together in the world, while unified with them through their shared experience and strengthened by the bond she'd built with Rachel, Kelly begins to reassess her career and her life in an ultimate quest for redemption.

Meet three remarkable women who excelled in times when men dominated everything.Alicia, a young American girl in England, visits an old churchyard and evokes Elvira, a sprightly, mischievous young ghost who in turn introduces her to three women from three critical moments in history, when each triumphed in a male-dominated society.Considered the greatest English queen, Matilda of Flanders came from Normandy with William the Conqueror as the key strategist for the Conquest as well as his guiding light in the politics and culture of her era. Sofonisba Anguissola was an accomplished Renaissance artist who studied with Michelangelo and became his protege and collaborator, and Lucie Dillon, once a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette at Versailles, barely escaped the Terror and the dreaded guillotine to farm in the new United States for a time before returning to France to advise and aid Napoleon. In their own words, these ghostly women describe their widely different lives and loves, and the three periods in which they livedthe Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution.

Don't mess with the hotheador he might just mess with you. Slater Ibez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of Los Angeles, rooting out insurance fraud, not afraid to use whatever means necessary to get things done, and not about to hold back with his fists. A queer antihero for a new age, Slater walks the line between ordinary life and the frayed fringes of society, keeping his balance with the jobs that his employer, Della, throws his way, and the back-channel support he gets from his idiot cop ex-boyfriend, Conrad.In this introductory novel in the series, Slater runs surveillance on an injured tech worker, soon finding that there are secrets lurking beneath the surface at his company. How do they generate so much revenue without employing anyone? Why does the founder spend so much time at the border? And why does a tech company need such heavy security? Tangling with blackmailers, party girls, late-night hookups with a gamut of guys, and a lot of bourbon, Slater uses his wits and a strong right hook to sort out bad from worse.

A metallurgist's desire for Mason to locate the earth energy points running under Los Angeles seems straightforward enough, but what is he planning to do with them once he knows where they are? A shady real estate transaction and a bizarre machine hidden in the backyard might reveal some answers. Mason's research leads him to Julia, a waitress and part-time banker who draws him into a quest of her own, plumbing the depths of the radio era when she uncovers a cache of forgotten artifacts. And what does Meg, descendant of a long forgotten radio star, know about it, hiding from the world in her townhouse?From digging up the yard to tracking down clues on the other side of the country, and with the begrudging support of his boyfriend, Ned, and help from their roommate, Peggy, the intrepid bicycle-riding psychic investigator uses his paranormal skills and real-world insights to get to the bottom of the twisted mystery.

Kasie Sanders, a young rising-star New Orleans police detective, is busted after a bodega shootout and is working as a wedding and children's party photographer when she is picked for a dangerous special assignment by the FBI, investigating American ties to a sex-slave ring in Malaysia and Thailand. Going undercover as a photojournalist for Great American Families magazine, Kasie joins Louisiana's famed Warriner family, one of whom, a prominent congressman, is suspected of pedophilia, and soon encounters, in the idyllic setting of the Warriner's historic antebellum Lonsdale House, vicious racism as well as crimes even worse than pedophilia, and herself in far more danger than she ever experienced as a police officer.

Don't mess with the hotheador he might just mess with you. Slater Ibez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of Los Angeles, rooting out insurance fraud, not afraid to use whatever means necessary to get things done, and not about to hold back with his fists. A queer antihero for a new age, Slater walks the line between ordinary life and the frayed fringes of society, keeping his balance with the jobs that his employer, Della, throws his way, and the back-channel support he gets from his idiot cop ex-boyfriend, Conrad.Hired to look into the theft of an expensive piece of jewelry, Slater soon finds himself entangled with a delusional high-end clothing manufacturer who sees the good in everyone, his snooty socialite wife, described as ';damaged,' and her book-smart smoking-hot stepson. Which one of them is lying to Slaterand who, exactly, is the slippery con artist in the red miniskirt? From his new digs in the Fashion District, and with the help of a new business partner, Slater stalks wealthy lowlifes and their minions in boutiques and clubs, breaking into places he's not supposed to be, winding up the middle of the desert in the middle of the nightand never hesitating to serve up a beatdown.

Helping out Gilbert, a friend who's suffering from late-night visitations, psychic investigator Mason is confronted with aliens on the roof, and soon finds himself caught in a whirlwind of paranormal events. Liminal beings contract him to stop a very real land development project in Los Angeles, pitting him against ruthless and powerful forces. With help from his boyfriend, Ned, and their roommate, Peggy, Mason manages to con his way into obtaining documents that might upend the whole project, but is it worth his own safety? A threatening visit from a shadowy figure and an alien abduction therapist from Texas have Mason questioning his career, his motivations, and the very nature of reality.

Chase Morse and his brother, Haydn, heirs to an auction-house empire, split their time between Manhattan and The Moorings, the idyllic family estate on Nantucket, but when a body turns up at The Moorings and a priceless painting goes missing from inside the tight-security vault at the auction house, family secrets get harder to keep. As Gabrielle, a French journalist sent to write features on the glittering New York art world, becomes entangled with the family, the police start digging, and the stakes are higheighty million dollars, pilfered and then lost in risky Russian investments. Can an entitled one-percenter with expansive resources, and enlisting the help of a wily art forger, outsmart the art cops and the old guard within the company?The glittering, exalted world of art auctioning hides love, hate, and murder in a wealthy and socially prominent family when the forgery of an anonymous Cape Cod painting threatens to destroy them all.

A fender-bender on the freeway gets psychic investigator Mason entangled with Catherine, an enigmatic visitor from DCbut who, exactly, does she work for? Trying to track her down, he runs across Billy Blood, a Los Angeles company that markets a stomach-churning ';lifestyle drink' made with animal blood, and goes to work for its shady CEO to find out who has been vandalizing the product. Recruited by Hanh, an old friend from the psychic world, to rescue a lost colleague, Mason meets an ally with serious dirt on the company, and manages to dredge up some of his own. And why is Catherine so interested in his research work for Billy Blood? Hounded by the media and mortified to see his face on the news, Mason battles a billion-dollar corporation, sharpening his psychic skills and wrestling with a dilemma most of us face at one time or anotherdoing what's convenient versus doing what's right.Backed by his boyfriend, Ned, and their roommate, Peggy, who are almost always willing to help him out, this fourth book in the Mason Braithwaite Paranormal Mystery Series sees the bicycle-commuting detective using his psychic insight, along with a newfound experimental hypnosis technique, on the seedy side of the West Coast entertainment industry.

When an old client sends psychic investigator Mason on a ghost hunt, he stumbles onto a research lab populated by strangely passive scientists with some remarkably advanced tech. Ingratiating himself with Annette, the director, by participating in the local town's folk festival as the Hunter, Mason scores a gigto find Qualtrough, a scientist gone missing under mysterious circumstances. Equipped by the researchers with a new suit and a fat wad of cash, and using his burgeoning psychic powers, Mason sets out on his own to hunt for Qualtrough in the shadowy underworld of Los Angeles nightlife, tangling with drag queens, cops, and con artists and finding his voice in an unfamiliar world.