But interlaced with his success is a tale of mendacity, deceit, coercion, and theft.A Book for Today: The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald
Finally, Allison offered to submit to an interview under a proffer agreement, in hopes of leniency.A Book for Today: The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald
His motivation was just garden-variety venality and greed.A Book for Today: The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald
The courtroom was packed, half filled with the venire.
The way it works is that the judge has a computer-generated list from which he calls the first twelve citizens from the venire, and they take seats in the jury box.A Book for Today: Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly
You know, once a vato always a vato. So they took me off gangs.A Book for Today: Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly
Raddled: A raddle might be a thin stick woven between vertical fence posts. A raddle might also be a series of posts to keep the warp properly spread on a loom. Raddle might also be a reddish dye derived from iron oxide. I imagine this final definition lends the best meaning in the context shown.Eddie really wanted to see him raddled and spotted like the evil twin painting he was sure to have stashed in the attic.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
Combine that with a few totally unconnected comments she made in public fora about the state of her local waste management service, and I pin her down to one of three cities.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
We'll be back in an hour, even if we leave the transport here and yomp it.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
He dropped his bergen on the lobby's dusty inlaid floor and looked around the entrance to the hotel.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
She stepped close up behind Esganikan to chivvy her along.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
Nacre: Mother of pearl.At this time of the morning Ceret had risen high enough to cast a peach light over the unbroken layer of nacre that covered the whole city, and gave it the name the colonists sometimes used: City of Pearl.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
They can't do that with a franger on, can they?A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
It made him feel like a total pillock.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
And I bet Esganikan told Marchant bint that Shan was coming with us.A Book for Today: Judge by Karen Traviss
He had a vague sore throat accompanied by mild coryza.A Book for Today: Contagion by Robin Cook
When he saw it close-up, Jack found true poverty enervating.A Book for Today: Contagion by Robin Cook
During the past year Blomkvist had often regretted that they hired Dahlman, who had the enervating habit of looking at everything in as negative a light as possible.
All four patients were people who'd been hospitalized frequently and hence were economically undesirable in a capitated system.A Book for Today: Contagion by Robin Cook
Also, all three were fulminant cases. The people all died within twelve hours or so of their first symptoms.A Book for Today: Contagion by Robin Cook
The lambent reflections of the streetlights played over their faces as they regarded each other in the half-light of the taxi.A Book for Today: Contagion by Robin Cook
She faced the window, and the morning sun fell lambent over her profile.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
Owen Glenn has found that sucking up to politicians is a tricky business, with your lovely money treated as if it pongs when the wind changes. (Rosemary McLeod - Sunday Star Time)
If you think you can stomach the sick side of Science, then read on to find out about all kinds of illnesses from the common cold to cruel cholera, why ancient doctors thought nasty pongs caused disease and what happens to your body when it comes under attack. (Deadly Diseases (Horrible Science series))
Kerewin is scrapping the dottle from the bowl, attentive, but not urging him to continue. Joe goes on.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Maybe that is why all the ruction.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Limpet: A variety of salt water and fresh water snails.O spendid idea ... though did you notice those things whirling part the window a moment ago?A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Yeah, the leaves?
No, they were limpets...
Where the gold harvest was ready the peasants in their hats like limpets winnowed the rice against little curved shelters of plaited bamboo.
Shag: A shag is a sea bird similar to the cormorant. The only difference being a crest on the shag and none on the cormorant. Originally, the two names were used interchangeably.Stewart Island shags, and I don't know the Maori for that ... kawau rakiura, perhaps?A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Bach: A bach is a New Zealand beach house. As bach is pronounced batch, it is widely presumed to share its etymology with bachelor pad.We own five baches, all of us owning them, not anyone separately.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
She's standing on the orangegold shingle, arms akimbo, drinking the beach in, absorbing sea and spindrift, breathing it into her dusty memory.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Most Pundits could not get enough of my questions and would speak with me in Sanskrit for as long as I could stay awake.A Book for Today: Slipping into Paradise by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
What shall we do with a drunken sailor, ear-lie in the morning?A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Put him the scuppers with a hosepipe on him ...
The first thing he saw, right by his eyes when he wakened, was the sea biscuit shard.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
He fossicks, picking up tide debris, bring it back to her.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
She thought of the tools she had gathered together, and painstakingly learned to use. Futureprobes, Tarot, and I Ching and the wide wispfingers of the stars ... all these to scry and ferret and vex the smokethick future.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
It's been a long time since I did any scrying. An accidental glimpse; a spark, like static from a stranger's hand.Quotation from:
She cultivates them, doping the ground with things dandelions like, and helpfully spreading seed by blowing the clocks.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Kaibab Moccasins: The Kaibab Plateau in an area of Arizona southeast of the Grand Canyon. The Kaibab Moccasin Company, no longer in business, made high-top moccasins and their name is still associated with shoes of this style.She slips on thin leather kaibabs over woolen socks.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
And worst of all, he knows in an inchoate way that the greatest terror is yet to come.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Marae: The Maori word for a sacred place.New marae from the old marae, a beginning from the end.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Which is why I was going to embalm the whole thing [The Bone People] in perspex (sic) when the first three publishers turned it down on the grounds, among others, that it was too large, too unwieldy, too different when compared with the normal shape of a novel.A Book for Today: The Bone People by Keri Hulme
Katherine and Langdon were alone now, dashing through the cathedral's annex, following signs for "The Garth." ... The cathedral garth was a cloistered, pentagonal garden with a bronze postmodern fountain.A Word for Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Tonight, when I felt the tiny circumpunct at the bottom of the stone box, I realized that the ring is, in fact, part of the symbolon.A Word for Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Langdon looked at his finger, but the only transformation he could see was that he now had an indentation on his skin my by the circular nubbin - a tiny circle with a dot in the middle.A Word for Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
This sacred space was dark, illuminated only by indirect reflections in the foliated vaults overhead.A Word for Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Rood Screen: Rood shares its etymology with rod and can mean a staff, or in a religious context - a cross or crucifix. Rood is the Anglo-Saxon word for crucifix.When they reached the Great Crossing, the dean guided them through the rood screen - the symbolic divider between the public area and the sanctuary beyond.A Word for Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Abruptly, Mal'akh drew his gaze downward, past the double-headed phoenix on his chest, past the collage of ancient sigils adorning his face, and directly to the top of his head.A Word for Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
The Araf? Hamistagan? The place to which Dante devoted the canticle immediately following his legendary Inferno?A Word for Today: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
is Dan Brown's third installment in the Robert Langdon sagas of mysticism, fanaticism, and brutality. Though somewhat less brutal than the previous volumes, it still suffers from the author's unfortunate tendency towards exposition where the action stops for some lecture or another. Readers of the first two volumes will not be surprised by the mystery quest plot, shallow characters, or violence. The puzzles are fewer and less satisfying, but if you skim the lectures, as I did, the pace is quite nice, though the resolution is reminiscent of Narnia.At the end of the meal, when the plates had been stacked and cleared, they filed out of the dining room as demurely as they could.A Book for Today: Midnight for Charlie Bone by Jenny Nimmo
Here the streets were cobbled and narrow.
Charlie began to talk to himself as he struggled over the cobblestones and several people glanced at him suspiciously.
It landed on the cobbled street with a soft, musical tinkle.A Book for Today: Midnight for Charlie Bone by Jenny Nimmo
Within my family on Bainbridge Island was Fanny's father, D C Challis, purblind but savoring the island life in a surprising way.A Book for Today: Bretz Flood by John Soennichsen
He was invited to speak at a 1940 meeting of the [AAAS] in Seattle titled "Quaternary Geology of the Pacific."A Book for Today: Bretz Flood by John Soennichsen
The moral conscience that so many thoughtless people have offended against and many more have rejected, is something that exists and has always existed, it was no the invention of the philosophers of the Quaternary, when the soul was little more than a muddled proposition.Quotation from:
Cannula: A cannula is (literally) a small tube - used in various medical applications to introduce liquids or gasses into the body. It shares its etymology with cane (botany), cannoli, cannon, and canal.The amnesia of comfort, soothing, anodyne, too seductive. They wereA Book for Today: The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K Lee
all too soon back to themselves.
Salver: A salver is a (usually silver) tray. How did this word, which shares its etymology with savior, save, salvation, and salvage, come to mean a simple silver tray? The history is that following tasting of the food for poison, a protective process caller salver in Spanish, the food was served on a silver tray. Eventually the tray took the name of the process and the word migrated to England in the 17th century.But after that, they did nothing else unusual: they ate good meals, napped after tiffin, had champagne at the hotel bar, walked around and looked at Macau, so she assumed that was what he had come for.A Book for Today: The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K Lee
Where if you catch two taels of houseflies, you are entitled to a catty of rice if you bring it to the district bureau.A Book for Today: The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K Lee
I think the only time I'd go there before I met you was when I needed plimsolls for the beach.A Book for Today: The Piano Teacher by Janice Y K Lee
The wooden pinfold nearest to the hut was large enough to contain a flock of sheep. ... Several older pinfolds lay some distance away, made of rough stone walling which had been collapsed in places.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
We sent up some roasted meat, a trotter, and a little of the wine to the healer by way of payment for the herbs.
The we sat under the stars warming our stomachs with sweet roasted meat and picking the flesh off the trotters steeped in the rich blood gravy.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
It was true that hunger in recent years had brought packs close to crofts and isolated villages in the dead of winter.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
The alleys and snickets were darker than before, but the odd squeal or yell which emanated from their depths suggested they were not deserted.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
"Are they dead or fled?"A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
It was a good question for the chantry chapel certainly appeared to be abandoned. ... The chantry was newly constructed.
Palfrey: During the middle ages, there were three general horse classifications: war, riding, and working. The riding horses (palfreys) had smooth, ambling gaits and were used for hunting and by women. Both war horses and plafreys were expensive and prized by the upper classes. Modern horses that are similar to the medieval palfrey are the Tennessee Walking horse and the Peruvian Paso.I didn't notice the man who sat on a palfrey in the shadows until he trotted forward and dismounted.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
Pleasance had shown a couple of the lads how to make rastons in one of the cooling ovens, loaves sweetened with wild honey and scooped out to be stuffed with a mixture of breadcrumbs, butter and onions, then heated again until the butter melts.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
She was a spirited besom, ready to defend her property with a pitchfork in one hand and a dog whip in the other.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
And what of those who lay unshriven and unmourned in mass graves, would they ever be released from purgatory?
It was early December, the feast of Saint Barbara, to be exact, the saint who protects us from sudden death, lest we die unshriven with all our sins upon us.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
It was not a well-trodden track and the only other travelers we saw were local people passing with wood for their fires or moving their livestock from field to byre and back again.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
Didn't I say she was a little poppet? Have you ever seen a child so angelic?A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
A priest gave us until the compline bell to leave the bounds.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
Hurdle: The original meaning for hurdle (and one still used in England) is a portable section of fencing for constructing temporary pens for livestock, especially sheep.The hut was constructed of three sheep hurdles bound together with rope, and with an assortment of broken planks nailed together to form a kind of roof which glistened green with slime.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
Jacinth: Jacinth is a red zircon. It shares it etymology with hyacinth.I displayed a few amulets and rings of amber, jacinth, and sardonyx, known cures for deadly fevers, and for those who could not afford gemstones, genuine or otherwise.A Book for Today: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
He wore a wifebeater white T under an unbuttoned gray short-sleeve shirt.A Book for Today: Long Lost by Harlan Coben
Mansard Roof: The mansard roof has eaves all the way around (hip roof) and two different slopes. The overall look is one of a pyramid with the top smashed down. It is named for a 17th century architect, oddly enough named Francois Mansart - yes, Mansart with a "t." This style saw a revival in the mid-19th century.The mansard roofs were grey slate, as were the cone-capped towers scattered throughout the sprawl.
Up ahead, I saw a line of shrubs and over that, a little bit in the distance, I could make out a gray-blue mansard roof.A Book for Today: Long Lost by Harlan Coben
His eyes were bloodshot and his pallor could have been better, but his being up and about at all seemed a triumph considering how he'd felt earlier.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
His nose wrinkled as he chewed the soggy bread and fatback.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
Corbel: A corbel is an extension built out from a wall to support a shelf, sill, or balcony. A corbelled chimney employs corbels widen the top of the chimney. Corbel shares its etymology with corvus, the genus of crows and ravens.A drift of smoke rose from the corbelled chimney.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
Maybe nothing, just a rusty, the sheriff had told her, but he didn't want to take a chance.
It could have been just a rusty somebody was playing, couldn't it, like you said?A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
Only the desk's lamp was on when he entered the office, and Pemberton's eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloaming.
At first there was only gloaming. As her eyes adjusted, Rachel saw a mattress made of corn shucks ...A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
After a few moments, when the alpenglow had faded, they would turn again and gaze at the lake and admire in silence the smooth surface of the water shimmering in the metallic light reflected of the burnished clouds. And then at last they would notice Vanessa Cole standing alone...
Red Ralston's suggestion that [Jordon Groves] ought to paint the early sunset, catch the alpenglow here at the Second Lake, went nowhere, and Ralston slipped off to the porch to smoke a cigar in the gloaming.Quotations from:
Peeling her sodden hair back with both hands, she started up the step in the shallow end.A Book for Today: Texas! Lucky by Sandra Brown
But most of what adorned the graves attempted to brighten the bleak landscape, not just wildflowers and holly wreaths but something more enduring - yellow-feathered hadicaws, Christmas ornaments, military medals with trailing ribbons, on the grave itself bits of indigo glass and gum foil and rose quartz, which sometimes were cast over the soil like seeds for planting, other times set in elaborate patterns to spell what might be as discernible as a name or obscure as a petrograph.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
He pulled off the road and opened the door, waiting to see if his stomach was strong enough to hold its moiling contents.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
Plato's Demiurge has merely been replaced by the Christian God.A Book for Today: The Dancing Universe by Marcelo Gleiser
She did all this with a frenetic alacrity, as if her mind had to make up for her body's inactivity.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
They knew that tone and obeyed with alacrity, leaving me alone with him.
Borrowing from Plato's teleological ideas, [Aristotle] looked for final causes that explained not only the motions of the heavenly objects, but everything else that moved, from animals and plants to projectiles and people.A Book for Today: The Dancing Universe by Marcelo Gleiser
In short, here as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles.
The lack of humour is yours, Doctor, not mine. Yours is choleric while mine is phlegmatic.A Book for Today: Serena by Ron Rash
