Owen wrote this enjoyable book to help children understand the importance of community service, friendship, giving a helping hand, a hint at financial literacy, and character building. In this story, the character Lexington is named after his son. Piggy and the farm come from his family roots in Iowa and also the agricultural history in Robeson County, North Carolina. Lexington is currently in grade school and has a very close friendship with his mentor, Piggy. Piggy experiences loss and hardship with his corn harvest, and it becomes Lexington's goal to help his friend in need. Lexington raises money by working hard in the community. First, he works at the local cafe. Next, he picks up trash throughout the neighborhood. Finally, he walks dogs at the local doggy daycare. Lexington saves Piggy by raising all the money needed to pay his bills. Next, Piggy decides to work with other local farmers to sell produce from the surrounding area in his produce stand. This allows Piggy to make money until the next corn harvest. In the end, Piggy expresses his thanks and gratitude to Lexington.

Raymond Mackey is a struggling crime writer. His friends call him Mack. But friends are in short supply these days. Mack's thirty years as a homicide detective came to the kind of abrupt, ignominious end that tends to make friends dry up and blow away. It matters little that Mack was never actually a mole working for a shadowy, seemingly omnipresent mob boss. Somehow, the evidence was there anyway and the scandal ended everything for him overnight. Lucky to stay out of prison, Mack lives in a netherworld of forced retirement, spinning his memories of old homicide cases into pulp fiction and working part time as a shopping mall cop. His wife Marlo, the greatest criminal investigator Mack has ever known, has been dead of pancreatic cancer for nearly five years. That leaves his ancient Smith-Corona Corsair, a pack of Camels, a bottle of Old Forester, and Marlo's bourbon-loving cat, Phil, as Mack's only company.

Almost. Because Mack also keeps himself company. The psychiatrists call it Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. Mack calls it Triple-D. But crazy also works. It means he watches himself, usually from an overhead perspective, as though someone has tied a floating camera to a back beltloop on a long string. It makes him feel watched, and not by someone inclined to judge him kindly. So Raymond Mackey comes complete with his own Greek chorus. Watch yourself, Mack, people tell him. He has no choice.

When one of Mack's old informants goes missing and Mack's face turns up in a dead man's camera, his past comes roaring painfully back to life. Now the police want him for questioning, the mob want him dead and it's increasingly difficult to tell who, exactly, is working for whom. As a mercilessly hot Chicago summer finally breaks and it starts to rain bodies, Mack finds himself past his prime for this kind of action. Retirement has added weight and subtracted agility. He hasn't fired a weapon in years. His antiquated cell phone will not stop ringing with a mysteriously blocked number. In the end, as Mack watches himself from above, it is razor-sharp instinct, cheap consumer electronics and his dead wife that offer his only hope.

Raymond Mackey is a struggling crime writer. His friends call him Mack. But friends are in short supply these days. Mack's thirty years as a homicide detective came to the kind of abrupt, ignominious end that tends to make friends dry up and blow away. It matters little that Mack was never actually a mole working for a shadowy, seemingly omnipresent mob boss. Somehow, the evidence was there anyway and the scandal ended everything for him overnight. Lucky to stay out of prison, Mack lives in a netherworld of forced retirement, spinning his memories of old homicide cases into pulp fiction and working part time as a shopping mall cop. His wife Marlo, the greatest criminal investigator Mack has ever known, has been dead of pancreatic cancer for nearly five years. That leaves his ancient Smith-Corona Corsair, a pack of Camels, a bottle of Old Forester, and Marlo's bourbon-loving cat, Phil, as Mack's only company.

Almost. Because Mack also keeps himself company. The psychiatrists call it Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. Mack calls it Triple-D. But crazy also works. It means he watches himself, usually from an overhead perspective, as though someone has tied a floating camera to a back beltloop on a long string. It makes him feel watched, and not by someone inclined to judge him kindly. So Raymond Mackey comes complete with his own Greek chorus. Watch yourself, Mack, people tell him. He has no choice.

When one of Mack's old informants goes missing and Mack's face turns up in a dead man's camera, his past comes roaring painfully back to life. Now the police want him for questioning, the mob want him dead and it's increasingly difficult to tell who, exactly, is working for who. As a mercilessly hot Chicago summer finally breaks and it starts to rain bodies, Mack finds himself past his prime for this kind of action. Retirement has added weight and subtracted agility. He hasn't fired a weapon in years. His antiquated cell phone will not stop ringing with a mysteriously blocked number. In the end, as Mack watches himself from above, it is razor-sharp instinct, cheap consumer electronics and his dead wife that offer his only hope.

What convinces us that we have been wrong about the world? When do we know that the usual ways are no longer working; that it is time to set down one life and pick up another? Winner of the Pacific Book Award for short fiction, Signs of Passing presents ten stories told from the nearside of epiphany, less a time or place than a state of mind in which one can hear the voice calling from beyond the veil of conscious understanding and singing of how life can be better: -A young boy, abandoned by divorce, discovers something inexplicable happening in the two-dimensional world of Winchester County, his favorite TV western;-A waitress at a bar called The Office, so alienated from the tedium of her own existence she no longer feels any fear walking home at night in the dark when perhaps she should;-A crime detective novelist so beset by writer's block that he attends the funerals of strangers in hopes of gleaning some advice from the dead, unaware that he is being followed;-A young and secretly talented widow struck by the revelation that her late husband was not the man she thought she had married;-A homeless, rural bus driver forced to confront the possibility that the dreams keeping him alive have been too small for him and that it is better to embrace peril in risking everything for a better life than to live safely in a prison of the familiar;-A squared-away child psychiatrist forced to confront the reality that one of his immature patients and an erotic dancer know more than he does about the fraud of his own existence and the excruciating secret to happiness;-An assistant veterinarian for a small-town zoo who, unbeknownst to her undeniably perfect husband, has taken to following random strangers around the city as a way of escaping both her guilt and her contentment;-A young photojournalist surrendering herself to the control of a brutish and degenerate winemaker, all to exorcise a past that will not let her go and that holds all love at bay;-A shopping mall employee whose enmity for a local television meteorologist is rewarded with an unlikely opportunity for revenge; and-An entertainment media mogul, stricken with sudden news of cancer as he battles in court to retain the rights to remake an old television western about a better life in Winchester County.A collection of separate stories about interconnected characters, Signs of Passing is devoted to the experience of waking up-of recognizing the better life in all of its unlikely disguises-and then summoning the courage to leave everything else behind, and to give chase before it's too late.

This is the Dream, ten stories less about dreaming than not dreaming. Ten stories about pulling free the gossamer mask of illusion and seeing the face of what has been true - about ourselves, about the people we choose to love, and about our path through the woods - from the very beginning.

JOHN. The bus driver whose lunchtime encounter with Andromeda reunites him with the one person he has spent a lifetime choosing to avoid. (Everything Stops).

WYATT. The Appalachian who wakes from a dream that his wife has been abducted by aliens to find that she has gone missing and wishing the explanation could be so benign. (Little Green Men).

RUTH. The chocolate-quality inspector whose compartmentalized solitude threatens complete suffocation until a renowned romance novelist reveals the paper-thin wall that separates despair and hope. (Paper Walls).

KATHY. The identical twin, so desperate to be original that she sacrifices her authenticity to a stranger on a plane, lying herself a new identity without any thought to the consequences. (Failure to Thrive - Act One: Flying and Lying).

KATJA and JUNE. The novelist and the reporter, bound by history, separated by an ocean, and united in a struggle to reconcile their own hearts one letter at a time. (Failure to Thrive - Act Two: Katja and June).

K.P. SORENSON. The convention speaker with a renewed hope of becoming a literary demiurge, looking for validation from an audience of would-be fans, but finding instead the very last man she expects and the only woman who can separate fact from fiction. (Failure to Thrive - Act Three: The Birds).

DANNY. The laid-off, newly separated factory worker whose life is in such dramatic contrast to that of his next-door neighbor, and George Clooney, that robbing a convenience store seems like his best option. (Hating George Clooney).

PETER. The teenager who, forced to spend Christmas in Hawaii with his younger sister, his parents, and the friends of his father not seen since college, discovers that reality is only a state of mind. (Island Santa).

ZOE. The Hollywood intern, working on a movie about a superhero with random powers, managing a telephone relationship with an anonymous criminal, and excavating the secret structure of creation. (Random Man).

CALI. The high school loner whose dreams of a dead classmate lead her to the razor's edge between living and not living. (This is the Dream).

What if your childhood harbored a dire warning about your future? What if your life and the lives of dozens of others, including your future child, depended on you deciphering that warning before it is too late?

Mother Blues is about the maternal relationships we never knew existed, the evil we never expect, and the redemption we never think possible. Subversively feminist and environmental, this is a novel about mothers: those we have loved and lost, those we have never known, and those who have always been there for us whether we have realized it or not. And while this is not a novel about blues music, the blues is everywhere in this story, both grounding it in history and pushing it forward in a slow, rhythmic ache.

As Hurricane Harvey submerges Houston, Davis Payne escapes to the small desert town of Corbin, Texas. He is escaping much more than a 100-year flood. He is escaping a life of guilt and a childhood haunted by death. When Davis was ten, his mother drowned saving him from a boating accident. Years later, his first love burned to death before he could reach her. Davis has no idea of any supernatural connection between these tragedies. He knows only that if he does not leave Houston and stop drinking, he will not live to see his late thirties.

But, of course, there is no starting over; there is only another step deeper into reckoning. Davis soon finds his life inextricably tangled with the lives of others fighting to keep their own heads above water. For Corbin, Texas is not the quiet refuge Davis expects. Beneath its dry, dusty surface Davis finds a town rife with terrible secrets, restless legacies of love and heartbreak, and life-and-death dramas that rival his own.

Olivia DeLuna, for instance, is a beautifully bi-racial loner with a tragic past that she keeps rigorously to herself. Working a collection of low-paying jobs, Olivia lives in a brothel masquerading as a pecan farm called Libby's Nuts. Its proprietor, Libby Holder, is a colorful, hysterically irreverent madam known after dark as Liberty Cherish, a woman rumored throughout Corbin to have long ago murdered her husband and fed his privates to the coyotes. Parentless from childhood, Olivia's only goal in life is to own a blues club known in its heyday as Mother Blues.

There are others in Corbin whose stories Davis must make his own: a haunted, childless schoolteacher risking incarceration for murder in order to save a troubled student she is determined to adopt; a former Louisiana prostitute who, having heroically raised and died for her adopted Asian daughter, is ultimately avenged when the girl marries her mother's killer and exploits the opportunity; and a world-renowned blues diva who unwittingly trades her only daughter for commercial success and who, until her final days, spends the rest of her life desperate for a chance to atone.

Filling the background of these various dramas, is the rapidly unfolding drama of Corbin: a tiny town teetering on the precipice of momentous change. A plan is afoot to transform Corbin with a commercial river walk fed from an engineered diversion of the Pecos River. Except for environmentalists fighting to preserve the habitat of a tiny minnow species, most of Texas is rabidly in favor of the project. Unfortunately, no one realizes that the Corbin River Walk is but a well-conceived, brilliantly executed and violently defended fraud perpetrated by the Russian mob.

If there is one maternal presence that binds together the characters of this novel, living and dead, it is the blues itself. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, Mahalia Jackson, and all the timeless mothers to that quintessentially American genre are here, a soulful Greek chorus singing from the shadows, warning and imploring, offering hope, and bearing witness to lives adrift and in danger of capsizing.

Nodiad LlyfrMae'r llyfr hwn yn gofnod o fywyd a gwaith y Parchedig John Jones o Dalsarn, un o bregethwyr mwyaf adnabyddus Cymru yn y bedwaredd ganrif ar bymtheg. Ysgrifennwyd y cofiant gan y diweddar Barchedig Owen Thomas, sy'n cynnwys hanes ei fywyd, ei alwad i'r weinidogaeth, ei ymdrechion i sefydlu eglwys newydd yng Nghaernarfon, a'i weithiau fel cyflwynydd ar y cyfryngau. Mae'r llyfr hefyd yn cynnwys sylwadau ar bregethau'r Parchedig Jones, ei ddulliau pregethu, a'i berthynas ag ysgolheigion eraill o'r cyfnod.Mae'r llyfr yn bwysig oherwydd ei fod yn cynnwys hanes duwinyddiaeth a phregethu Cymru yn y bedwaredd ganrif ar bymtheg. Mae'n cynnig golwg ar fywyd a gwaith y Parchedig Jones, ac yn cyflwyno'r cyfnod hwn o hanes Cymru o safbwynt crefyddol. Mae'r llyfr hefyd yn cynnwys gwybodaeth am y cyfnod hwn o hanes Cymru, gan gynnwys ymdrechion y Parchedig Jones i ddylanwadu ar fywydau pobl eraill.Mae'r llyfr yn addas ar gyfer darllenwyr sydd ����� diddordeb mewn hanes crefyddol Cymru, yn ogystal ����� phobl sy'n ystyried gweinidogaeth fel gyrfa. Mae'n gyfrol werthfawr i'w chael yn llyfrgellau ac archifau crefyddol.This Book Is In Welsh.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Nod y llyfr hwn yw cyflwyno cofiant y Parchedig John Jones o Dalsarn, sy'n cynnwys ei fywyd, ei waith, ac effaith ei bregethau ar y gymuned. Mae'r llyfr hwn yn rhan o gyfres o lyfrau hanes crefyddol a chymdeithasol, ac mae'n canolbwyntio ar hanes Duwinyddiaeth a phregethu yng Nghymru. Ysgrifennwyd y llyfr gan Owen Thomas, ac fe'i cyhoeddwyd yn wreiddiol yn 1874. Mae'r llyfr yn cynnwys cyfieithiad i'r Gymraeg o'r cofiant Saesneg gwreiddiol. Mae'n gyfrol bwysig i'r rheiny sydd ����� diddordeb mewn hanes crefyddol a hanes Cymru.This Book Is In Welsh.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

An easy case turns deadly, spiraling down into the kind of bloody chaos that the streets of Chicago know only too well as the heart-pounding twists in this must-read mystery thriller keep coming and coming.

Still grieving the death of his wife, Marlo, and wasting away in a retirement forced upon him under a cloud of suspicion, Raymond Mack Mackey finds a new job with the Chandler Illinois Police Department. It might be reason for hope. Or not. Mack can't seem his to shake his reputation for corruption. Undeserved, sure, but most of his colleagues want to see him locked up or dead anyway.

A welcome diversion shows up in the form of Nadia King, an alluring single mother who asks Mack to recover a missing heirloom: an antique Russian nesting doll that belongs to Nadia's immigrant mother.

It might just be the easiest assignment he's ever had.

Until it isn't.

Just like the woman on his doorstep and the doll she wants him to retrieve, appearances are not what they seem. Success, and even Mack's own redemption, requires separating truth from deception as he travels a path fraught with danger, littered with bodies, and confounded by cold homicide cases suddenly coming back to life.

Like, for example, the popular Chicago restauranteur, gunned down in his bedroom. Or, the casino manager, bludgeoned by his own employees. Or, the police officer, shot to death in the home of his widowed mother as she listens, bound and gagged, from the kitchen.

Not to mention the bald giant with a broken poker chip in his pocket and Mack on his mind. Maybe he works for Big Man. It seems like almost every criminal and most of the cops in the city work for Big Man.

It's also starting to seem like Big Man has developed a strange obsession with Ray Mackey.

If Mack can keep himself alive, he has a chance to clear his name and salvage his career. But Big Man is always watching, with a thousand eyes and from every corner of the city. Marlo is still dead. The Russian doll knows everything, but she isn't talking. The only one who can truly look out for Mack... is Mack.

This astounding sequel to Message in a Bullet (shortlisted as the Best Mystery Novel of the Year by FORWARD Indies Best of the Year Awards), is the latest thrilling noir detective novel in multi-award-winning author Owen Thomas' Raymond Mackey Mystery series. The Russian Doll is a unique and exhilarating read that's packed with high-octane action and page-turning suspense.