Showing results by author "Brian Taylor" in All Categories

Booker Johnson, an Emmy-winning TV reporter on the brink of losing everything, stumbles upon a horrific crime scene in South Florida. Teaming up with no-nonsense police detective Brielle Jensen, they dive into the case, unraveling a web of deception, manipulation, and murder that reaches the highest echelons of power. As Booker uncovers the sinister truth behind a mysterious group pulling the strings, he finds his own life in jeopardy. With personal troubles brewing and powerful forces trying to silence him, he must risk it all to expose the truth.

This Very Short Introduction provides a guide to understanding Russian Politics that goes beyond the headlines, offering a vivid account of the key forces driving Russian politics. It places Russia in a global context while explaining its internal political development. Several major themes run through the book, including the primacy of the state over society, the role of the so-called "West," which has represented a source of inspiration, of threat, and of competition for generations of Russians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Welcome to Toy Academy: Where toys learn to play. This is where action figures train to battle, stuffed animals study the art of the hug, and collectibles practice standing very, very still. Though Grumbolt isn't really any of those things, he's determined to fit in. But when the Evil Toy Academy threatens to bring down his school, it's up to Grumbolt to go where no good toy has gone before and prove he's truly a great toy after all.

The wreckage of a millionaire’s plane found crashed onto the side of a Welsh mountain. A burned out holiday cottage deep in the Welsh Marches, with the remains of a body still smouldering amongst the ashes. A mysterious package missing, first from the plane, and then from the cottage, that everyone is looking for, but no one can find. Too busy looking over their shoulders trying to see what the next guy is doing, no one is watching Chief Inspector Macdonald, but he’s the one pulling the strings.

The Shropshire Hills, summer 1990. The gardens of an old house, Moorecroft House, which had stood there amongst the hills for so long, it seemed to almost be a part of them. If the man in Elizabethan costume who had appeared out of the mist that lay across the gardens that morning was a ghost, how come no one had ever heard of any ghosts and hauntings connected to them before? And if he wasn't a ghost, why did no one who worked in the gardens seem ever to have heard of him, or the horrific double murder he said had happened back in the 1960s,involving a man and a woman who'd worked in the ...

When local councillor Warren Hescott reluctantly agreed to a tree planting ceremony he didn't want, in order to celebrate his twenty five years of service to the community, he said he'd only take part in the event if the tree planted in his honour was the special cedar he knew his old enemy, Hereward Gordon, the former Director of Parks had, out of pure bloody mindedness after being forced to take early retirement, secreted away in his garden in one of the lodges in the grounds of the Hall before he went, rather than using the tree to complete the main avenue of the Hall as he should have ...

Look out for the wind the old man said for it may be changing and pointing towards Madragora again. And where is Madragora the young man asked I don’t believe you ever explained that to me fully. A land of dragons sorcerers, elves and pixies is where it is, the old man said and if you watch the movements of the weather vane we fashioned out of dragons gold for the purpose carefully enough it will guide you there because it doesn’t ever point an any other direction than towards Madragora and then only monetarily. Loose that moment as the wind changes and you might never find your way to it.

The girl in the bar had been very pretty. And had the sort of body Howarth knew would interfere with his sleeping if he thought about it too much in the night. And once he’d set eyes on her he knew that he was going to think about her a lot in the night, because there had been an unspoken promise in the way she’d looked back at him when she’d caught him watching her surreptitiously, covetously, and he’d felt he had to get to know her better. Howarth was still young enough to have his head turned that quickly by a pretty girl and feel he was able to do something about it. That was ...

Local gossip said the burned out cottage at the edge of the marshes, and the stretch of beach that lay in front of it, was haunted. By the ghost of a girl who used to live there, but who set fire to it one day, then deliberately walked into the sea to drown herself, when someone let it be known that the lover she had lived there with had betrayed her with another woman, before abandoning her completely, by going off to fight on the battlefields of First World War France. Dying there as well, so local gossip said. Local gossip didn’t say who the woman had been, or the name of the soldier ...

The writer, still working as a parish clerk has moved to a different village where a previous clerk has left him looking for missing gravestones

Being used to a diet of organised crime, drug manufacturing, smuggling, and dealing in all its many forms, and attacks on them by assassins working for the Russian, and the Chinese, governments, all as a result of their association with Chief Inspector Macdonald, Sinead Grogan and Christopher Caine had been afraid they might find life boring when they gave up working for Macdonald and became private detectives, instead but they were wrong. In their youth they had been into banning the bomb, not making them, but when a group of determined former CND women were faced with the prospect of an ...

A man missing since an urban activist group set up a camp outside his egg farm to protest about its continued expansion in the face of unswerving local opposition. Another man who really believes murder can’t be murder unless there’s a body to show for it, and you’ve got to prove him wrong. Chief Inspector Macdonald reckons that this will all turn out to be a Chinese puzzle in the end, but will he be able to solve it if it is?

The body of a man slumped beside the ruins of a house in the woods, whispering dying words about a ‘Destroying Angel’. The body of another man laying in the cottage the first man had lived in; clutching a package to his chest he’d stolen from someone who had just killed him in an unsuccessful attempt to get it back. No good retiring to Shropshire if it’s a quiet life you’re looking for. Not as long as Chief Inspector Macdonald is still there pulling the strings.

American cities are distinct from almost all others in the degree to which freeways and freeway travel dominate urban landscapes. In The Drive for Dollars, Brian D. Taylor, Eric A. Morris, and Jeffrey R. Brown tell the largely misunderstood story of how freeways became the centerpiece of US urban transportation systems, and the crucial, though usually overlooked, role of fiscal politics in bringing freeways about.

Being used to a diet of organised crime, drug manufacturing, smuggling, and dealing in all its many forms, and attacks on them by assassins working for the Russian, and the Chinese, governments, all as a result of their association with Chief Inspector Macdonald, Sinead Grogan and Christopher Caine had been afraid they might find life boring when they gave up working for Macdonald and became private detectives, instead but they were wrong. Working undercover at Greenvale Manor, a private school for girls, situated in the Welsh Marches, passing themselves off as a teacher of Welsh Studies ...

When Caroline Meredith was a child and her father often went off on trips without her. He always told he couldn’t take her with him because he was chasing the dragon and she would see him as a sort of a St George figure as result. One day after he’d failed to return from one of those trips, and she’d had to investigate his disappearance, she found out what he’d been doing on them and how he had earned his family’s fortune.

"From the land beyond the Endless Sea, from the land beyond eternity, in a dream there came to me, strangers one and two and three. I saw a stone before my eyes, hot as fire, yet cold as ice, it promised me a paradise, beware the stone, beware it lies! But in my dreams I then perceived, fools and wise men all deceived, and of their senses taken leave. Then the sound of fighting filled my head, my stomach rose at the stench of the dead, armies rose and armies bled, because of the words that the stone had said. Beware the strangers when they come, beware the mother who seeks her son, Beware ...

A secret way into another world in another dimension. A world where elves, sprites and fairies live alongside mortals. And where a war between the sorceress who controls the fire ice jewels mined in the depths of the mountains there, jewels which can control the minds of anyone who comes into contact with them, and those trying to free themselves from her subjugation, has flared up again. It was hard enough for Aurora Bradley, known as Rory to her friends, to escape from that world the first time she stumbled into it accidently through the time portal at the end of her great aunt’s garden...

The "Higher Ed Breakfast Club" is a dynamic and engaging podcast dedicated to exploring the multifaceted world of higher education as well as all things breakfast! Join the hosts and their guests each week as they cover a variety of topics in the higher education space and the many, many, many breakfast options available in the world. What a time to be alive!

A secret way into another world in another dimension. A land called Madragora by those who lived there, where elves, sprites and fairies live alongside mortals. And where a war between two sorcerers battling for control of the fire ice jewels mined in the depths of the mountains there, jewels which can control the minds of anyone who comes into contact with them, simmered for centuries. It went on for more than five hundred years, always involving that same stretch of road with a cottage at the end of it where three sisters, local people believe to be witches, lived. The latest of these ...