Download or read book The Comfortable Coffin written by Richard S. Prather and published by Stonehenge Editorial. This book was released on 2021-03-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FIFTEEN CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES THAT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH UNTIL YOU DIE… Humor is often found in unlikely places, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Mystery Writers of America’s latest classic anthology, edited by master raconteur Richard S. Prather. Richard’s only criteria for this collection was that each crime or mystery story had to make the reader laugh, and the writers selected met his challenge and then some. Margaret Manners brings us the tale of a wife turned amateur journalist/sleuth who’s more than a match for a devious murder. From legendary hardboiled author Evan Hunter comes an over-the-top tale of a gumshoe in way over his head, caught up between a deadly damsel and a local mob. Ellery Queen recounts a tale of theft and assault at a university, where a slip of the tongue is enough to catch a thief. And no collection of humorous mystery stories would be complete without one from the master himself, Richard S. Prather, featuring his wisecracking P.I. Shell Scott matching wits with a local mobster who’s framed Scott for that most heinous of crimes…moral turpitude. Fifteen stories ranging from slapstick to parody to black humor, all guaranteed to tickle your funny bone…whether it’s attached to the rest of your body or not… Robert Arthur Stanley Ellin Michael Fessier Jack Finney Erle Stanley Gardner Michael Gilbert Dion Henderson Evan Hunter Veronica Parker Johns Dana Lyon Margaret Manners Berkely Mather William O’Farrell Richard S. Prather Ellery Queen

Download or read book Wear and Scare written by M. T. Coffin and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam and his friends plan a school Halloween event that includes wearing some very real looking costumes from a local store. But there's something very terrifying about the costumes, and the store owner isn't telling anyone the secret.

Download or read book Furnishing Eternity written by David Giffels and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A lifetime’s worth of workbench philosophy in a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son” (Kirkus Reviews)—the acclaimed author of The Hard Way on Purpose confronts mortality, survives loss, and finds resilience through an unusual woodworking project—constructing, with his father, his own coffin. David Giffels grew up fascinated by his father’s dusty, tool-strewn workshop and the countless creations it inspired. So when he enlisted his eighty-one-year-old dad to help him build his own casket, he thought of it mostly as an opportunity to sharpen his woodworking skills and to spend time together. But the unexpected deaths of his mother and, a year later, his best friend, coupled with the dawning realization that his father wouldn’t be around forever for such offbeat adventures—and neither would he—led to a harsh confrontation with mortality and loss. Over the course of several seasons, Giffels returned to his father’s barn in rural Ohio, a place cluttered with heirloom tools, exotic wood scraps, and long memory, to continue a pursuit that grew into a meditation on grief and optimism, a quest for enlightenment, and a way to cherish time with an aging parent. With wisdom and humor, Giffels grapples with some of the hardest questions we all face as he and his father saw, hammer, and sand their way through a year bowed by loss. Furnishing Eternity is “an entertaining memoir that moves through gentle absurdism to a poignant meditation on death and what comes before it” (Publishers Weekly). “Tender, witty and, like the woodworking it describes, painstakingly and subtly wrought. Furnishing Eternity continues Giffels’s unlikely literary career as the bard of Akron, Ohio…Only a very skilled engineer of a writer can transform the fits and starts, the fitted corners and sudden gouges of the assembly process into a kind of page-turning drama” (The New York Times Book Review).

Download or read book Roughhouse Friday written by Jaed Coffin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully crafted memoir about fathers and sons, masculinity, and the lengths we sometimes go to in order to confront our past "[A] lucidly written memoir . . . Coffin’s triumph lies in ridding the language of his father, a language that compelled him to dwell in a house he did not recognize." —Matthew Janney, The Los Angeles Review of Books While lifting weights in the Seldon Jackson College gymnasium on a rainy autumn night, Jaed Coffin heard the distinctive whacking sound of sparring boxers down the hall. A year out of college, he had been biding his time as a tutor at a local high school in Sitka, Alaska, without any particular life plan. That evening, Coffin joined a ragtag boxing club. For the first time, he felt like he fit in. Coffin washed up in Alaska after a forty-day solo kayaking journey. Born to an American father and a Thai mother who had met during the Vietnam War, Coffin never felt particularly comfortable growing up in his rural Vermont town. Following his parents’ prickly divorce and a childhood spent drifting between his father’s new white family and his mother’s Thai roots, Coffin didn’t know who he was, much less what path his life should follow. His father’s notions about what it meant to be a man—formed by King Arthur legends and calcified in the military—did nothing to help. After college, he took to the road, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before heading north. Despite feeling initially terrified, Coffin learns to fight. His coach, Victor “the Savage,” invites him to participate in the monthly Roughhouse Friday competition, where men contend for the title of best boxer in southeast Alaska. With every successive match, Coffin realizes that he isn’t just fighting for the championship belt; he is also learning to confront the anger he feels about a past he never knew how to make sense of. Deeply honest and vulnerable, Roughhouse Friday is a meditation on violence and abandonment, masculinity, and our inescapable longing for love. It suggests that sometimes the truth of what’s inside you comes only if you push yourself to the extreme.

Download or read book The Coffin Confessor written by Bill Edgar and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2021-07-02 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine you are dying with a secret. Something you’ve never had the courage to tell your friends and family. Or a last wish – a task you need carried out before you can rest in peace. Now imagine there’s a man who can take care of all that, who has no respect for the living, who will do anything for the dead. Bill Edgar is the Coffin Confessor – a one-of-a-kind professional, a man on a mission to make good on these last requests on behalf of his soon-to-be-deceased clients. And this is the extraordinary story of how he became that man. Bill has been many things in this life: son of one of Australia’s most notorious gangsters, homeless street-kid, maximum-security prisoner, hard man, family man, car thief, professional punching bag, philosopher, inventor, private investigator, victim of horrific childhood sexual abuse and an activist fighting to bring down the institutions that let it happen. A survivor. As a little boy, he learned the hard way that society is full of people who fall through the cracks – who die without their stories being told. Now his life’s work is to make sure his clients’ voices are heard, and their last wishes delivered: the small-town grandfather who needs his tastefully decorated sex dungeon destroyed before the kids find it. The woman who endured an abusive marriage for decades before finding freedom. The outlaw biker who is afraid of nothing . . . except telling the world he is in love with another man. The dad who desperately needs to track down his estranged daughter so he can find a way to say he's sorry, with one final gift. Confronting and confounding, heartwarming and heartbreaking, The Coffin Confessor is a compelling story of survival and redemption, of a life lived on the fringes of society, on both sides of the law – and what that can teach you about living your best life . . . and death.

Download or read book Letters to a Young Doubter written by William Sloane Coffin and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Blue Lady of Coffin Hall written by Carolyn Keene and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ned and Nancy track down a ghostly saboteur in the twenty-third book in the Nancy Drew Diaries series, a fresh approach to a classic series. Nancy and Ned are visiting Coffin Hall, an estate turned rare books library, doing research on the library’s rumored ghost for an episode of the NedTalks podcast when a fire breaks out in the records room. One of the library’s security guards accuses Ned of arson—after all, he was the only one in the room when the fire started—but Ned swears it wasn’t him. He was trying to stop the fire. He tells Nancy he saw a lady in blue right before the incident, and thinks it was Henrietta Coffin, the ghost of Coffin Hall! Nancy is confident her boyfriend is innocent, and she’s determined to identify the real culprit, though she’s pretty sure it wasn’t of the paranormal sort. When she investigates further, she learns that the fire was just the latest in a string of recent strange and inexplicable incidents plaguing Coffin Hall. It’s increasingly apparent that someone has more than a passing interest in shutting down the library. But who—or what—is responsible? And why?

Download or read book The Boy the Bird and the Coffin Maker written by Matilda Woods and published by Scholastic UK. This book was released on 2017-05-04 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alberto lives alone in the town of Allora where fish fly out of the sea and everyone knows everybody's business. There he makes coffins for the great and small, but being the only coffin maker in town can be lonely. That is until a little boy and a magical bird enter his life and change it forever.

Download or read book The Amber Effect written by Richard S. Prather and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just when surefire shamus Shell Scott was thinking that unannounced naked women don't show up on his doorstep frequently enough, a Ms. Naked USA contestant and next-door neighbor comes knocking with nothing on. But the real knockout is her story: someone tried to kill her and is now dead on her floor! This private eye can't believe what he's seeing! Before Scott can even ask where she kept the weapon, she's disappeared and our private dick is stuck with the stiff…and a tall tale to tell the cops. Scott's used to people trying to take shots at him, and for good reason, but who would want to hurt this heavenly heartbreaker? The trail leads Shell Scott to even more barbarous beauties and he gets thrown some dangerous curves along the way. The search for the truth is a bumpy ride and people keep getting bumped off but our legendary lady-killer knows how to hang on. The plot is thick, the suspects are drop-dead gorgeous and its time once again for our hard-charging, gun-toting gumshoe to rise to the occasion. The Amber Effect is the 40th book in the Shell Scott Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Download or read book Christmas Coffin written by Michelle Lundy and published by Michelle Lundy. This book was released on 2009-01-07 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Christmas Eve, the Noel family receives the strangest gift. A coffin decorated with a big red bow, containing an unconscious man, bound in chains, is left in the snow at the end of their drive. When the man awakes he has no recollection of who he is, where he came from or how he got there. For name's sake, the Noels decide to call him Michael until his memory returns. The only glimpse Michael has of his former life comes in dark vivid dreams, where the taste of blood arouses his senses, making him yearn for more from the mere pleasure of it. Caught between the growing love in his heart for this kind family and the cold yet longing desires taking over his nightmares that are hard to ignore... Will the Noel family, in fact, have a Merry Christmas? Or will their world be shattered, at the fate of their own doing, from taking in a stranger under the strangest of circumstances?

Download or read book Don t Get Too Comfortable written by David Rakoff and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2010-06-04 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems David Rakoff’s collection of autobiographical essays, Fraud, established him as one of our funniest, most insightful writers. In Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff journeys into the land of plenty that is contemporary North America. Rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly and wittily portrayed. Whether contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good times and chicken wings of Hooters Air, portraying the rarified universe of Paris fashion shows where an evening dress can cost as much as four years of college, or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core Playboy TV shoot, where he is provided with his very own personal manservant, David Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess, delving into the manic getting and spending that defines the North American way of life. Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism, and Rakoff is there to map that frontier. He sits through the grotesqueries of “avant garde” vaudeville in Times Square immediately following 9/11. Twenty days without food allows him to experience firsthand the wonders of “detoxification,” and the frozen world of cryonics, whose promise of eternal life is the ultimate status symbol, leaves him very cold indeed (much to our good fortune). At once a Wildean satire of our ridiculous culture of overconsumption and a plea for a little human decency, Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a bitingly funny grand tour of our special circle of gilded-age hell.

Download or read book Reminiscences of Levi Coffin the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad written by Levi Coffin and published by . This book was released on 1880 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Real Life MBA The no nonsense guide to winning the game building a team and growing your career written by Jack Welch and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Business authors Jack and Suzy Welch return, nearly a decade after publishing their international bestseller, Winning, to tackle the most pressing business challenges in the modern world. From creating winning strategies to leading and managing others The Real Life MBA acts as an essential guide for every person in business today – and tomorrow.

Download or read book If the Coffin Fits written by Lillian Bell and published by Crooked Lane Books. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for fans of Carolyn Haines and Donna Andrews, Lillian Bell makes the return with her second Funeral Parlor mystery featuring funeral director Desiree Turner. When an unnatural cause of death finds one of her clients, Desiree must get to the bottom of the murder before she’s fitted for a coffin, herself. Funeral director Desiree Turner deals with death by natural causes all the time. Death by unnatural causes? Not so much. Yet, she and her boyfriend Nate have heard some not-so-dear things about the recently departed. A suspicious remark by the late Frank Fiore’s daughters sparks some concern. And when Violet Daugherty faints behind the wheel of her car, Desiree suspects she’s got a front seat to murder. Desiree can’t help but look into Violet’s untimely end, but soon after, rumors begin to spread that she’s accusing her clients of murder, which quickly spurs a mass cancellation and Desiree is on the verge of going out of business. What began as an effort to do due diligence for her client turns into a wild goose chase for Violet’s murderer. Desiree must find her proof before everything she works for is lost. But that’s easier said than done, because while everyone else in town is looking to take their business elsewhere, the killer sets sights directly upon Desiree. Now it’s up to Desiree to find the murderer before she becomes the next body her funeral parlor serves in If the Coffin Fits, Lillian Bell’s second charming Funeral Parlor mystery.

Download or read book The Sound of Building Coffins written by Louis Maistros and published by Toby Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1891 in New Orleans, and young Typhus Morningstar cycles under the light of the half-moon to fulfil his calling, re-birthing aborted foetuses in the fecund waters of the Mississippi River. He cannot know that nearby, events are unfolding that will change his life forever-events that were set in motion by a Voodoo curse gone wrong, forty years before he was born. In the humble home of Sicilian immigrants, a one-year-old boy has been possessed by a demon. His father dead, lynched by a mob, his distraught mother at her wit's end, this baby who yesterday could only crawl and gurgle is now walking, dancing, and talking - in a voice impossibly deep. The doctor has fled, and several men of the cloth have come and gone, including Typhu's father, warned off directly by the clear voice of his Savoir. A newspaper man, shamed by the part he played in inciting the lynch mob that cost this boy his father, appalled by what he sees, goes in search of help. Seven will be persuaded, will try to help...and all seven will be profoundly affected by what takes place in that one-room house that dark night. Not all will leave alive, and all will be irrevocably changed by this demonic struggle, and by the sound of the first notes blown of a new musical form: jazz..

Download or read book Water for Drowning written by Ray Cluley and published by . This book was released on 2014-08-22 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Josh, falling in love does not fit in with his rock and roll lifestyle. And falling for someone who believes in mermaids? Who wants to be one? Well, he wasn't expecting that, either. But the sea is deep with mysteries. Sometimes they wash ashore, whispered in the hush of a quiet tide, and all you have to do is listen. Other times you have to explore the dark beneath the surface yourself, unsure of what you might find... Bonus content Special introduction about the genesis of Water For Drowning by Ray Cluley Bonus story: the British Fantasy Award winning story 'Shark! Shark!'

Download or read book Do it Yourself Caskets and Coffins written by Steven J. Frey and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A casket is typically the single most expensive item in a traditional modern funeral, but they need not be. Do it Yourself Caskets and Coffins shows you how to create and personalize a variety of casket and coffin styles, including a modern traditional casket, as well as biodegradable 'green' coffins, Kosher Jewish coffins, and even simple classic (old west) coffins. With thirty years of product design and technical writing experience, author Steven J. Frey walks the reader through every step of construction, with easy to follow instructions and nearly 200 illustrations. The material is presented in such a way that makers of all skill levels can easily follow along. Complete tool and material lists with estimated costs are included along with information on where to purchase supplies and the all so important Federal law regarding the use of customer supplied caskets.