Flowers Fiction

Pinion, Minnesota: a metropolis of all of 700 souls. Nothing ever happened there - until the mayor of sorts (campaign slogan: "I'll Do What I Can") and a buddy come up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map. They'd heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary had turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of pilgrims. And all those pilgrims needed food, shelter, all kinds of crazy things, right? They'd all get rich! What could go wrong? When the dead body shows up, they find out, and that's only the beginning of their troubles - and Virgil Flowers'....

Quirky and fun-loving American heiress Daisy Bowman is the last unmarried Wallflower. Her exasperated father has informed her that if she can’t find a husband by the end of her third London season, she will be forced to marry a man she hates - the ruthless entrepreneur Matthew Swift. Daisy is horrified. A Bowman never admits defeat, so she decides to do whatever it takes to marry someone...anyone...other than Matthew.

China, 1957: Chairman Mao has declared a new openness in society. “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Many intellectuals fear it is only a trick, and Kai Ying’s husband, Sheng, a teacher, has promised not to jeopardize their safety or that of their young son, Tao. But one July morning, just before his sixth birthday, Tao watches helplessly as Sheng is dragged away for writing a letter criticizing the Communist Party and sent to a labor camp for “reeducation”. Once again, Tsukiyama brings us a powerfully moving story of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with grace and courage.

Still new to her duties as Lady Vorkosigan, Ekaterin is working together with expatriate scientist Enrique Borgos on a radical scheme to recover the lands of the Vashnoi exclusion zone, lingering radioactive legacy of the Cetagandan invasion of the planet Barrayar. When Enrique's experimental bioengineered creatures go missing, the pair discover that the zone still conceals deadly old secrets.

In Israel, a man clutching a backpack searches desperately for a boat. In Minnesota, Virgil Flowers gets a message from Lucas Davenport: You're about to get a visitor. It's an Israeli cop, and she's tailing a man who's smuggled out an extraordinary relic - a copper scroll revealing startling details about the man known as King Solomon. Wait a minute, laughs Virgil. Is this one of those Da Vinci Code deals? The secret scroll, the blockbuster revelation, the teams of murderous bad guys? Should I be boning up on my Bible verses? He looks at the cop. She's not laughing.

Noah may have a solidified playboy reputation, but he also has a new puppy at home and a single mom for a sister who relies on him to babysit when she's busy saving lives as a doctor. The problem? Football season is quickly approaching, and Noah's worried who will fill his shoes when he's out of town winning games. The solution? Asking Gemma Briggs to move in with him. But what happens when the temporary arrangement becomes something they both want to make permanent?

Valley U’s hottest QB has heard in detail how I want to climb him like a tree. One viral video, and my life as a wallflower is over. Felix Walters knows exactly how I feel about him—so does everyone else on campus.

When I was young, I was told that my true love would be a faerie king. I didn’t heed the warning. I tumbled into love as soon as our eyes first met, unaware that he wasn’t what he seemed. My king wanted marriage, power, devotion, and a family. He had all but one, and as our kingdom stood upon the precipice of ruin, the weight of failure tore us apart. Though it was not the war but his betrayal that sent me running to a foreign land. And straight into the arms of a one-eyed warrior. The wolf was a weapon of heartless destruction, a rogue without a real name, and nothing I was allowed to want.

As Kazuma spends his downtime bemoaning his party's lack of a little-sister archetype, he's invited to a royal banquet, where he meets the young Princess Iris. She's enthralled by his tales of adventure, and once she takes a liking to him, Kazuma ends up getting transported to the royal castle! Though he's initially unsure of what to expect, life with Iris turns out to be a dream come true, and Kazuma doesn't ever want to wake up. . .so when he hears rumors of a "righteous thief" stalking the capital, Kazuma declares he'll be the one to capture the dastardly do-gooder!

The thrilling new Virgil Flowers novel from the #1 New York Times best-selling author. The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it: local merchants, fearing for their businesses, and environmentalists, predicting ecological disaster. The protests don't seem to be slowing the project, though, until someone decides to take matters into his own hands.

One late fall Sunday in southern Minnesota, a farmer brings a load of soybeans to a local grain elevator - and a young man hits him on the head with a steel bar, drops him into the grain bin, waits until he's sure he's dead, and then calls the sheriff to report the "accident." Suspicious, the sheriff calls in Virgil Flowers, who quickly breaks the kid down...and the next day the boy's found hanging in his cell. Remorse? Virgil isn't so sure....

One February afternoon, Detective Ray Flowers' life is blown apart by a petrol bomb attack. No one can tell him who did it. Or why. Anchorless and alone, he moves to his aunt's country cottage. What he needs is perspective. Instead, he is tormented by visions of Kitty Hallam, a troubled young woman accused of witchcraft. Back in 1643. Is she a figment of Flowers' imagination or something more? Whatever the truth, Flowers can't help but be drawn into Kitty's world, sensing their stories are intertwined somehow.

Like everyone else in Palm Springs, Gish idolizes her smart, beautiful, kind older sister. Even their parents compare Gish unfavorably to Gloria—threatening to send her to boarding school once the more perfect sister leaves for college.

Forbidden love comes into full bloom. For three years they were kept hidden in the eaves of Foxworth Hall, their existence all but denied by a mother who schemed to inherit a fortune. For three years their fate was in the hands of their righteous, merciless grandmother. They had to stay strong…but in their hopeless world, Cathy and her brother, Christopher, discovered blossoming desires that tumbled into a powerful obsession. Now, with their frail sister, Carrie, they have broken free and scraped together enough for three bus tickets and a chance at a new life.

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat. In 10 captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

Virgil knows the town of Trippton, Minnesota, a little too well. A few years back, he investigated the corrupt - and, as it turned out, homicidal - local school board, and now the town's back in view with more alarming news: A woman's been found dead, frozen in a block of ice. There's a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of 20 years ago that has a midwinter reunion coming up, and so, wrapping his coat a little tighter, Virgil begins to dig into 20 years' worth of traumas, feuds, and bad blood.

Peony Bellefleur runs Betwitching Blooms, the charming flower shop in a picture-perfect Cotswold village in England. Her flowers seem to make the sick improve, wedding days happier, and birthdays more special because she infuses her bouquets with a little magic. Peony’s a witch in a village that seems too perfect to be true. Probably because it is. She’s got her hands full between running her flower shop, managing her mother—who’s a medium with a habit of conversing with the dead wherever she happens to be—and helping her protégé to embrace her newfound powers.

In these stories, inspired by long-lost photographs, the lives of the people in the frame are imagined and then explored, layer by layer. What must have it like to be them? We share the lives of three sisters, brought up in Penang. We hear of what happened to them, and to their Chinese neighbours caught in the tides of war. We see a group of small boys in a Glasgow slum, their young lives stunted by poverty, and hear how life worked out in contrasting ways for them. We follow a young woman's search for love in the unlikely realm of Egyptian antiquities.

Edgar does not cheat in flower shows. He might use a magically enhanced serum, but anyone could do that. It's not his fault the other competitors don’t know magic exists! But when the Ivy House crew goes to the pre-show to support him, it becomes clear that someone should've been watching Edgar much more carefully. What he's done is way worse than overgrown flora. While Jessie is dealing with that, she gets a shock as she discovers photos of her ex with his girlfriend…turned fiancée. And while the flood of emotions can be ignored, the desire to show off Austin on social media is not.

Miss Maryann FitzWilliam is too witty and bookish for her own good. No gentleman of the ton will marry her, so her parents arrange for her to wed a man old enough to be her father. But Maryann is ready to use those wits to turn herself into a sinful wallflower. When the scandal sheet reports a sighting of Nicolas Ives climbing out the chamber windows of a house party, Maryann does the unthinkable. She anonymously claims that the bedchamber belonged to none other than Miss FitzWilliam, tarnishing her own reputation - and chances of the dastardly union her family secured for her.