A Very Maverick Christmas (Harlequin Special Edition Series #2374)

by Rachel Lee

Overview

A CHRISTMAS TO REMEMBER 

RUST CREEK RAMBLINGS 

Holiday greetings, dear readers! As our cozy little town battens down the hatches for the biggest blizzard Montana has ever seen, everyone is talking about mysterious newcomer Julie Smith. No one knows much about the quiet blonde, least of all herself! A tragic accident left her with no memories of her past—and no clues to her real identity. And with the Yuletide season bearing down, you've gotta wonder where the poor gal will turn for shelter. 

Never let it be said that a Rust Creek rancher leaves a damsel in distress! For the way sexy cowboy Braden Traub has been looking into Julie's blue eyes, could our last living Traub bachelor provide the key to Julie's future—and her happiness? Snuggle up by the fire and join us as we discover who Julie really is and share a Christmas Rust Creek Falls will never forget!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781460343678
Publisher:	Harlequin
Publication date:	12/01/2014
Series:	Forschungen Zum Junghegelianismus,
Sold by:	HARLEQUIN
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	64,887
File size:	271 KB

About the Author

Rachel Lee was hooked on writing by the age of twelve, and practiced her craft as she moved from place to place all over the United States. This New York Times bestselling author now resides in Florida and has the joy of writing full-time.

Editorial Reviews

05/26/2014
Again deriving prose from his troubled life, Bottoms offers 13 short slices of factually based crime fiction. He opens and closes with Michael, his older brother, a paranoid schizophrenic portrayed in harrowingly painful detail in Bottoms’s 2005 memoir, Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent into Madness. Now, emerging from 15 years in a psychiatric treatment facility for setting the family home ablaze, Michael reaches out for contact, but Bottoms feels forced to “cut him loose” for his own sanity’s sake. Other entries, most of them set in suburban Virginia, include “The Minister’s Handyman,” in which a young woman is stalked, raped, and murdered by a crazed neighbor, who then buries her in her own garden; “The Shooter,” about a gun-crazed high schooler; “Scarface,” about a drug-dealing pothead with deadly hubris; “Attempted Murder Mystery,” about the author’s tribulations as a kindhearted landlord; and “The Man Who Found Two Bodies,” about the discovery of several young boys’ bodies in the woods. Graphically fortified with crude line drawings by W. David Powell, the book depicts these atrocious events with economy, precisely delivering mood and motive in the span of a page or two. Though sunny skies are a rarity here, Bottoms has created a skillfully rendered and devilishly unorthodox set of meditations on the “horrors people do.” Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Pitiful Criminals

"From the consequences of his brother's schizophrenia to a pastor who suspects murder, these tales are told in a laconic voice that only amplifies their power. With black-and-white line drawings throughout; highly recommended for uncommon readers." —Library Journal

"[...] the book depicts these atrocious events with economy, precisely delivering mood and motive in the span of a page or two. Though sunny skies are a rarity here, Bottoms has created a skillfully rendered and devilishly unorthodox set of meditations on the “horrors people do.” —Publishers Weekly

"…Yet [Bottoms] keeps on telling these stories that humanize horror without minimizing it, capturing the potential for pitiful transgressions in all of us. Entertaining as these tales are, they cut to the bone." —Vermont Weekly

"By turns evocatively understated and rapturously outrageous, Pitiful Criminals is a collision of memory and fiction that compassionately reminds us what makes us human, what makes us stupid, what makes us genuinely abhorrent, and why we are sometimes still worth loving nevertheless." —John D'Agata, author of About a Mountain and Lifespan of a Fact

Praise for Greg Bottoms

“The line between fact and fiction is often blurred in Greg Bottoms's collection of short stories…but one thing is clear: Bottoms writes about people and places for which he has a wonderful sense of understanding and compassion.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“[Bottoms’s writing is invested] not with distance but with an unbearable intimacy. Everything matters, is what he means to tell us, and yet we can never understand what it all means.” — David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

06/01/2014
Bottoms famously slides along the line between fact and fiction, so it's no surprise to see this series of 13 vignettes, reputedly drawn from his past, labeled crime fiction. VERDICT From the consequences of his brother's schizophrenia to a pastor who suspects murder, these tales are told in a laconic voice that only amplifies their power. With black-and-white line drawings throughout; highly recommended for uncommon readers.

Library Journal