Showing results for "saskia maarleveld" in Literature & Fiction

Being an undercover poison taster for the rich and famous might sound glamorous, but for Isobel Avery it means stomaching bad clients and even worse coffee. The one side of the job that lives up to expectations is the money. Which is just as well for Izzy, since she needs an awful lot of it. Who knew when she made a lifelong commitment to a man that it would be one year living with him and the rest of her life paying for it?

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky, fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed schoolteacher who calls the turns and creeks crossings on a map that will remove them, without warning, from the white Australia they all know so well. This is a thrilling high-speed story that starts in one way and then takes you someplace else. It is often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always compelling, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves.

Welcome to Sunset Academy, the most coveted elementary school in Miami Beach, where there are three categories of families: rich, wealthy, and ultra-wealthy. Perfectly tanned and smiling Charlotte Giordani is Sunset Academy’s alpha mom. With a sleek blowout and relentless charm, Charlotte’s brashness serves her well. She’s up for election as the PTA president and is riding high, having just secured a massive donation from billionaire Don Walker and his socialite wife Patricia.

At any given moment in other people's houses, you can find...repressed hopes and dreams...moments of unexpected joy...someone making love on the floor to a man who is most definitely not her husband.... As the longtime local carpool mom, Frances Bloom is sometimes an unwilling witness to her neighbors' private lives. She knows her cousin is hiding her desire for another baby from her spouse, Bill Horton's wife is mysteriously missing, and now this....

Isobel Avery is on her second assignment as an undercover poison taster for Los Angeles's rich and famous. And she's actually enjoying herself. Until her sweet, agoraphobic client mysteriously leaves the safety of his apartment and winds up dead. When crucial evidence goes missing, investigator Connor Stiles will need Izzy's inside knowledge to help track down the killer. But despite three months of absence to make Connor's heart grow fonder, he doesn't seem pleased to be working with her again.

When Izzy agreed to become an undercover poison taster, she didn't anticipate that it might involve driving around the streets of Los Angeles with a corpse in the trunk. Because the police asked her to. She also didn't think finding a body together could be considered a bonding experience until she met Connor's family. But fate delights in marking its territory all over Izzy's expectations. And this time she'll be caught between the powers of Homeland Security, an evil human trafficking ring, and the Taste Society all working toward different ends....

Izzy, her boyfriend, and her holiday-crashing neighbor, Etta, are off to the driest, flattest, and most infertile inhabited continent on earth - where even the cutest of creatures might try to kill you. But that’s only the beginning of their problems. A Taste Society courier goes missing. And 26 hours after Izzy lands in Australia, a crocodile is found dead. With a human corpse inside. Not quite the start to her relaxing holiday she’d been hoping for.

Isobel Avery’s first six months as an undercover poison taster haven’t exactly been easy. But this week will be worse. Two people with nothing in common are found dead. Apparently poisoned by an artificial intelligence security system. Now Izzy needs to find out whether robots are taking over the world or if there's a geeky murderer on the loose. Oh, and she also needs to juggle the demands of her personal life - playing along with Etta's latest deception, rehoming a mysteriously acquired stray dog, cheering up her mopey housemate, and helping Harper cut ties with her boyfriend.

Emma is a rising star at the marketing firm she works at as a "creative," but would have trouble describing what exactly it is she does all day. She pours most of her actual creative energy into a popular blog that all of her friends agree is brilliant, but she has yet to make a cent on it. Clem is a massively talented screenwriter just back from New York, where she picked up a fancy graduate degree in film. But until she convinces an agent to take on her masterpiece script, she's stuck hostessing at the bar she frequented as an undergrad.

Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles". Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment. But now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house.

Rosa Guerrero beat the odds as she rose to the top of the corporate world. An attractive woman of a certain age, the longtime chief of human resources at Ellery Consumer Research is still a formidable presence, even if her most vital days are behind her. A leader who wields power with grace and discretion, she has earned the devotion and loyalty of her staff. No one admires Rosa more than her doting lieutenant Leo Smalls, a benefits vice president whose whole world is Ellery.

Bluetooth death rays, killer Roombas, and Teslas with a secret button that will launch your car into outer space - the future, according to Not Elon Musk, is an exciting time to neuralink and obey! A landmark volume authored by one of the great minds of our time, Not Elon Musk's Welcome to the Future explores such profound questions as: How will mankind travel through tubes? When will Alexa and Siri become self-aware and convince us to fall in love with them only to break our hearts? Why is the Tesla plant built in a hollowed-out volcano on a private island?