Showing results by author "Donna Andrews" in All Categories

When Meg's grandmother, Cordelia, hosts a Renaissance Faire at her craft center, the whole family is put to work: Meg handles the blacksmithing, Michael and the boys will be performing, and no one misses the opportunity to dress up in full regalia. More exciting to Grandfather is the pair of rare falcons he discovers breeding at the fairgrounds. Concerned for their well-being amid all the activity, he appoints himself their protector. When one of the actors performing at the fair is found dead, Grandfather is a prime suspect.

While trapped by a snowstorm at a conference, a visiting ornithologist is murdered. Now, nobody may make it home in time for Christmas...unless Meg comes to the rescue.

Meg Langslow is spending the summer at the Biscuit Mountain Craft Center, helping her grandmother Cordelia run the studios. But someone is committing acts of vandalism, which threaten to ruin the newly opened center's reputation.

Meg has been roped into participating in a weaponsmithing competition, a Forged in Fire wannabe organized by a blacksmith friend. Meg originally turned down an invitation to participate, but the night before the filming starts, someone attacks Faulk, her blacksmithing mentor, breaking his arm and eliminating him from the contest before it begins. Meg agrees to step in as his replacement to keep the project from failing. She's not thrilled that the filming will take place during December—Christmas is already a crazy time for her.

Meg Langslow’s in for a busy summer. Her husband is directing a production of Macbeth, and most of the cast and crew are occupying spare bedrooms in their house. She also has to keep an eye on Camp Birnam, where a group of medieval reenactors are commemorating the real-life Macbeth by setting up what they fondly believe is an authentic medieval Scottish military camp. And then there’s Damien Goodwin, a filmmaker who has been hanging around, trying to document the production.

John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Thomas Carew, and Henry Vaughan: these were some of the 17th-century writers who devised a new form of poetry full of wit, intellect and grace, which we now call Metaphysical poetry. They wrote about their deepest religious feelings and their carnal pleasures in a way that was radically new and challenging to their readers. Their work was largely misunderstood or ignored for two centuries, until 20th-century critics rediscovered it, finding in it a deep originality and a willingness to experiment.

It's Christmas time in Caerphilly, and the town is preparing for their live nativity. During rehearsals, Meg discovers a real baby in the manger, with a note attached that says the mother is leaving the baby girl there so that her father can take care of her, and the wording of the note implicates Meg's brother, Rob, as the father. Rob protests that he can't possibly be the father, but the town's suspicion creates a rift between him and his new girlfriend. Rob asks Meg to investigate on his behalf‚ to clear his name and to find the real parents of the baby.

Meg’s running Caerphilly’s Helping Hands for the Holidays project, in which neighbors help each other with things they can’t do and can’t afford to have done. Her hopes for a relatively peaceful (if busy) Christmas vanish when someone murders Harvey the Hoarder, whose house the Helping Hands were decluttering. Was there any truth to the rumor that he had something valuable hidden beneath all his junk? Was one of his friends, neighbors, or relatives greedy enough to murder him for the rumored treasure?

Meg's grandfather has been booked to give lectures on a cruise as part of the education/entertainment itinerary, and he's arranged for a passel of family members to join him. The passengers’ vacation quickly becomes a nightmare when they wake up to find themselves broken down and in need of repairs. Things get even worse when a crew member announces to all that a woman has jumped overboard, leaving behind her shoes, shawl, and a note. The note reveals she's a disliked member of a writers' group onboard for a retreat, and the group is split on whether this is in-character for her.

Zack is a workaholic computer expert who created his friend Turing. Turing is a sentient artificial-intelligence personality who has thousands of mystery novels downloaded to her database. With a self-improvement feature, Turing and Zack have taken on numerous challenges together. But when Zack disappears, Turing suspects foul play. She'll have to utilize her personality, her knowledge, and her unique abilities in order to find out what happened to her creator - and her friend.

When Turing Hopper, Artificial Intelligence Personality and sleuth, uncovers information tied to criminal Nestor Garcia's long-dormant credit cards, she sends her human assistants to investigate. But when one of them becomes embroiled in murder, the A.I. detective must find a way to bring the guilty party to light.

Ray Santiago's friends from work know him as a brilliant-but-easygoing systems engineer who spends a lot of time on his favorite online role-playing game. But the game is over for Ray: His colleagues from work, Maude, Tim, and Turing, have just found out about Ray's murder in a dark alley. He was shot, and his laptop stolen. It could be just another DC street crime. But if Turing's password was in that computer‚ and it's fallen into the wrong hands‚ she could be in terrible danger.

Sex, science and spirituality! These were the triad of influences on the poetry of the seventeenth century. Following the golden age of Elizabeth I this century was to be one of great tensions; between Parliament and the Monarchy, Canterbury and Rome, science and religion; a civil war, the beheading of a King, The Republic, The Restoration, and finally, the Glorious Revolution which deposed a King and firmly reasserted the Protestant ascendancy.

The Caroline era was dominated by the growing religious, political and social conflict between the King and his supporters; the Royalists and it's Puritan opposition; the Roundheads. In contrast to the wars raging across Europe at the time, the Caroline period in Britain was an uneasy peace, as a dark shadow of civil conflict between the King and Parliament worsened toward the latter part of Charles’ reign. Whilst theatre unquestionably fell from its glittering peak achievements of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, in poetry the standard was perhaps only just shy of this bar.

When a high-tech geek named Eddie ends up in the hospital, the victim of a hit-and-run accident, Turing the investigative artificial-intelligence computer comes to the aid of her private-detective friend Tim to find out who was responsible. The following investigation leads to some of Eddie's unsavory friends who are using his computers in a variety of scams, cons, and other less-than-legal endeavors.

An upbeat podcast exploring the world of food and drink, infused with extra doses of entertainment, fun, and interactive elements. Basically, some serious stuff and some daft stuff.