New releases from Dagmar Miura
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Night on the Water
by Christopher Church
A chance encounter on an airplane with the woolly academic Rovski leads psychic investigator Mason onto a college campus, where he works to figure out why math professor Emily is hassling the guy. As he digs into the mystery, his psychic mentor Hanh instructs him to connect with his client in the dream world. Mason works to get lucid in his dreams and struggles to understand the symbolism and the meaning of his experiences in that realm, and how it intersects waking life. It soon becomes clear that he’s seeing things that other people don’t, and the plucky redhead has to grapple with the classic psychic’s dilemma: how to relate paranormal experiences back to mundane reality. His boyfriend, Ned, and their roommate, Peggy, help Mason keep his feet on the ground, and old friend Gilbert shows up in ways that transcend helpful and dive into annoying. As Rovski gets more rattled by Emily’s behavior, Mason gets closer to the truth, sailing across a mountain lake in the dead of night, chasing his quarry on his trusty bicycle, and ultimately unfolding a hidden part of reality.
“Church vividly constructs a world peopled with characters I did not want to leave behind when I finished the book.”
The Convenient Patsy
by George Bixley
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.
When the narrator of his favorite podcast lands in the City of Angels and asks for help to find a missing colleague, Slater takes the case, and soon finds himself working undercover—as security on a trashy reality TV show, then as a paparazzo wielding a camera to snap images of a vapid pop star. As he circles closer to finding out what happened to the disappeared geologist, Slater trolls oil industry thugs, tangles with well-armed and tight-lipped witnesses, and digs into the city’s wealthy beachside enclaves. Things heat up when one of his targets attempts a frame job. Slater hustles to keep clear of it, all the while drinking way too much, dealing with lowlifes who tend to punch back, and struggling to keep his sex life out of his work.
“With Slater I waffle between concern for his bad habits and getting turned on by his raunchiness. Rarely do we meet a character … so in touch with his id.”
Eventide
by David Osborn
Abandoning a life she herself terms “thrown away,” Ana Masaryk, a Purple Heart Army vet of the Iraq war, begins anew in a small northern New England town, where she finds refuge with the gay illustrator of children’s books in an abandoned church he has transformed. A necessary job covering local social functions and writing obits for The Chronicle, the town’s newspaper, leads Ana into an impassioned whole new life of consuming work as the paper’s publisher and editor, and to her defiant defense of it, at the risk of losing everything, when the paper’s independence is threatened by a big-city news chain owned by a politically ambitious billionaire, who always gets whatever he wants through lies, distortions, and sowing dissension.
“Breathless introduction to the inner workings of big business …”
Bee-n-Bee Vacation
by C. M. Potter
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.
“Such a charming and educational story about our friends, the bees. Bee-n-Bee Vacation will delight children while teaching them about the important role bees play in our lives. Whether young or old, we all need to support the preservation of this amazing creature!”
Parent Child Excursions: ADHD, Anxiety, and Autism
by Dan Shapiro, MD
Written for parents, clinicians, and educators, Parent Child Excursions is a practical book about helping children with ADHD, anxiety, and autism. In this unique approach, Dr. Dan presents ADHD as a problem with stopping, anxiety as a problem with going, and autism as difficulty balancing these competing tendencies. From the introduction: “This book is quite simply a story of red light and green light, braking and accelerating, holding back and forging ahead.” Based on this simple formulation, management of problems with self-control depends on finding the right balance between excitation and inhibition.
These five Excursions present entirely new ways to think about caring for “different drummer” children. Readers will discover an unprecedented level of detail. Based on scientific research and years of clinical experience, Dr. Dan takes you for a deep dive into: (1) effective medication for ADHD, (2) exposure therapy for anxiety, (3) combined therapies for coexisting ADHD, anxiety, and autism, and (4) social engineering for autism. The book concludes with an in-depth discussion of (5) autism, sexuality, and gender variation, cowritten by Dr. Dan and his son Dr. Aaron Shapiro.
As with his first book, Parent Child Journey: An Individualized Approach to Raising Your Challenging Child, Dr. Dan teams up again with illustrator John Watkins-Chow. Throughout the five Excursions, they weave a fun metaphorical tale. Readers are led along by an under-inhibited dog, an over-inhibited turtle, and a well-balanced bird of a different feather.
By the end of this comprehensive and original guidebook, parents and professionals will have learned how to prepare the child for the trail and the trail for the child.
“For the first time, state-of-the-art and highly original methods are presented to address the issues that commonly co-occur in complicated children and teens.… Dr. Shapiro offers a remarkable combination of up-to-date scientific knowledge and extremely practical advice that will be of great benefit to pediatricians and mental health professionals, as well as to parents.”
Ophelia and Her Forest Friends
by David Osborn
Ophelia is a little girl who lives deep in a far-off great forest where her widowed father is a woodcutter and her home a tiny cottage with a thatched roof and flower-filled window boxes. Blessed at birth by fairies, she is friends with all the little forest animals who live around her, and with no school or other children to fill her playtimes, she is never lonely, sharing adventures with many, like Sammy Skunk, Rory Raccoon, Oscar Owl, Betsy Bunny, Patrick Porcupine, Benjamin Beaver, and others—all joining with her in keeping their forest home peaceful and safe.
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The Psychic Vegan Cookbook
by Henrietta Flores
It has never been easier to cook vegan, and you don’t even need to be psychic to do it. This all-plant-based cookbook is a tie-in with the Mason Braithwaite paranormal mystery series and contains some of the plucky LA psychic’s favorite dishes.
The sixty recipes are straightforward and focus on everyday Southwestern cooking. Simple and whole foods are the rule, and few nonstandard ingredients are involved—and when they do appear, they’re explained in detail. You won’t need to make a special trip to esoteric grocery suppliers, however, as this book is ideal for cooks just diving into plant-based home cooking.
Whether your motivation is eating healthier or the welfare of other sentient creatures, Henrietta Flores guides you through some plant-based versions of familiar dishes as well as some that might be new. Many are sure to become household favorites.
“Thank you, Henrietta, for pulling together an amazing collection of vegan grub from Mason’s world. Bon appétit!”
Camera Ready
by Adele Royce
On sale Tuesday, August 25
Camera Ready offers a compelling version of a love triangle at its center, as L.A. executive Jane Mercer follows a tortuous path toward her version of the American dream.
Jane finally has her life together. She is vice president of accounts at the advertising agency Warren Mitchell & Partners. She has a stable long-term relationship with classical violinist Derek Lowell and a bright future full of family, close friends, and success. But a surprise encounter with Craig Keller—managing partner of Keller Whitman Group and a powerful advertising magnate—stirs up emotions from her disastrous liaison with him two years earlier. This meeting and an unexpected photo of the two in a popular tabloid topples her secure world, threatening to destroy everything she’s worked to gain.
As Jane anxiously watches, Keller Whitman Group buys out her employer, resulting in the savagely handsome Craig becoming Jane’s new boss. In addition to his alluring yet reprehensible behavior, he now has authority and control over her. Jane feels her autonomy stripped away as Craig ties her promotion to a consensual relationship with him. Worse still, Jane’s visceral attraction to him still burns, despite her wishes to keep him in her past. Forced to face up to her emotional bondage to Craig, Jane must find inner strength to live with integrity—or risk sinking into the morass of decadence and greed that is Keller Whitman Group.
“Riveting, vulnerable, wicked—the Truth, Lies and Love in Advertising series is fun, Fendi, and all the other f-words in between.”
Stalking the Scratch Man
by Chester Henry
Hired to figure out whether his client’s husband, Ray, has been sleepwalking or just faking it, Truman pulls his best friend, Celeste, into the mystery. The duo digs deep—rifling medical files, running late-night stakeouts, stalking witnesses in bars—to find there’s more to it than Ray’s secretive trips to Chinatown and his habit of macking on women. Truman tries to stay objective with his new crush, Larry, not sure how much he knows about the boss’s lowlife activities, while Celeste contends with her own man troubles in the stalwart but suspicious Alejo. Celeste uses her stealthy instincts to interview the players without showing her hand as Truman, relying on his 1930s-era detective handbook, delves into the dark side of the import business.
Join the bar-hopping, booze-swilling duo as their digging pushes things right to the edge, where Truman and Celeste have to figure out whether to do what’s easy or do what’s right.
“Truman is like that twinkie who slipped through your fingers that time—sweet and a little naive but whip-smart. And every man should have a reliable friend like Celeste. With these two booze hounds running around, the city promises to be a little wilder, and a whole lot more exciting.”