When Cylin Busby was nine years old, she was obsessed with Izod clothing, the Muppets, and a box turtle she kept in a shoebox. Then everything changed overnight. Her police officer father, John, was driving to his shift when someone leveled a shotgun at his window. The blasts that followed left John's jaw on the passenger seat of his car-literally. While clinging to life, he managed to write down the name of the only person he thought could have pulled the trigger. The suspect? A local ex-...

“Always have a view,” one of Preston Bolton’s favorite sayings, speaks to his architecture, which made the landscape an integral part of the built environment. In his sixty-plus–year architectural career, Bolton, outstanding alumnus of the Texas A&M College of Architecture, designed over 798 projects, has had designs featured in 74 publications, and won 34 design awards. While many of his peers moved on to more public or larger-scale designs, Bolton chose to make his mark on residential ar...

This book examines many examples of the nocturnal behaviour of birds.For many people, watching and studying birds is exclusively a day time activity. However, for many birds twilight and night time are not a barrier to useful activity. It is true that very few birds are exclusively nocturnal, but many birds which are active by day also conduct limited, and often crucial, activities after dusk.Examples range from the occasional night feeding of wildfowl and ...

This thought-provoking text offers many insights not generally perceived by ornithologist or botanist and is illustrated in masterly fashion by John Busby's lively drawings.The book's subtitle - A study of an ecological interaction - properly reflects the author's theme but may tend to hide the fact that the relationships between birds and berries can be much more than the simple, mutually advantageous systems ('eat my fruits, spread my seeds' ) they may s...

Birdwatching has become an increasingly popular pastime in Ireland as elsewhere. Nor is all of the birdwatching done by the Irish.Many professional ornithologists from Britain and Western Europe find good reason to study Ireland's birds, as do the numerous birdwatching visitors each year. Clive Hutchinson, a leading Irish ornithologist, has compiled this comprehensive review of birds in the Republic and Northern Ireland to coincide with the 21st anniversary year of...

A peaceful summer night is shattered by gunfire as an unseen assailant tries to murder police officer John Busby. Though horribly wounded, Busby survives. But the perpetrator remains at learge, meaning Busby and his family remain in danger.In alternating chapters, John Busby and his daughter, Cylin, tell the harrowing true story of the year that followed - John from his perspective as parent, Cylin from the point of view of the nine-year-old child that she was. Together father and daughter...

Inspired by a true story, My Mother’s Secret is a captivating and ultimately uplifting tale intertwining the lives of two Jewish families in hiding from the Nazis, a fleeing German soldier, and the mother and daughter who save them all.Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people...until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly...

Jacob and Macon dont have anything in common. He's a thirteen-year-old city boy trying to find his place in the world and she's his little country cousin the prodigy painter who hardly speaks. When Jacob is sent to stay with his Aunt and Uncle for the summer and falls ill he's exiled to the attic - the sickroom - and discovers his love of art in the paintings he finds there. Turning his back on his troubles back home Jacob launches himself into a friendship with the younger cousin he alway...

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine"s Home for Peculiar Children , an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine"s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob...

On her first voyage as a stewardess aboard the Empress of Ireland, Ellie is drawn to the solitary fire stoker who stands by the ship’s rail late at night, often writing in a journal.Jim. Ellie finds it hard to think of his name now. After their wonderful time in Quebec City, that awful night happened. The screams, the bodies, the frigid waters … she tries hard to tell herself that he survived, but it’s hard to believe when so many didn’t.So when Wyatt Steele, journalist at ...

When their teacher goes missing during an outing, eleven girls grapple with the aftermath in this haunting, exquisitely told psychological mystery.The Vietnam War rages overseas, but back at home, in a year that begins with the hanging of one man and ends with the drowning of another, eleven schoolgirls embrace their own chilling history when their teacher abruptly goes missing on a field trip. Who was the mysterious poet they had met in the Garden? What actually h...

Annie Richards knows there are a million things to look out for—bicycle accidents, food poisoning, chicken pox, smallpox, typhoid fever, runaway zoo animals, and poison oak. That's why being careful is so important, even if it does mean giving up some of her favorite things, like bike races with her best friend, Rebecca, and hot dogs on the Fourth of July. Everyone keeps telling Annie not to worry so much, that she's just fine. But they thought her brother, Jared, was just fine too, and Ja...