Bøker av Owen Thomas

An easy case turns deadly, spiraling down into the kind of bloody chaos that the streets of Chicago know only too well as the heart-pounding twists in this must-read mystery thriller keep coming and coming.Still grieving the death of his wife, Marlo, and wasting away in a retirement forced upon him under a cloud of suspicion, Raymond "Mack" Mackey finds a new job with the Chandler Illinois Police Department. It might be reason for hope. Or not. Mack can't seem his to shake his reputation for corruption. Undeserved, sure, but most of his colleagues want to see him locked up or dead anyway.A welcome diversion shows up in the form of Nadia King, an alluring single mother who asks Mack to recover a missing heirloom: an antique Russian nesting doll that belongs to Nadia's immigrant mother.It might just be the easiest assignment he's ever had.Until it isn't.Just like the woman on his doorstep and the doll she wants him to retrieve, appearances are not what they seem. Success, and even Mack's own redemption, requires separating truth from deception as he travels a path fraught with danger, littered with bodies, and confounded by cold homicide cases suddenly coming back to life.Like, for example, the popular Chicago restauranteur, gunned down in his bedroom. Or, the casino manager, bludgeoned by his own employees. Or, the police officer, shot to death in the home of his widowed mother as she listens, bound and gagged, from the kitchen.Not to mention the bald giant with a broken poker chip in his pocket and Mack on his mind. Maybe he works for Big Man. It seems like almost every criminal and most of the cops in the city work for Big Man.It's also starting to seem like Big Man has developed a strange obsession with Ray Mackey.If Mack can keep himself alive, he has a chance to clear his name and salvage his career. But Big Man is always watching, with a thousand eyes and from every corner of the city. Marlo is still dead. The Russian doll knows everything, but she isn't talking. The only one who can truly look out for Mack... is Mack.This astounding sequel to Message in a Bullet (shortlisted as the Best Mystery Novel of the Year by FORWARD Indies Best of the Year Awards), is the latest thrilling noir detective novel in multi-award-winning author Owen Thomas' Raymond Mackey Mystery series. The Russian Doll is a unique and exhilarating read that's packed with high-octane action and page-turning suspense.

Raymond Mackey is a struggling crime writer. His friends call him Mack. But friends are in short supply these days. Mack's thirty years as a homicide detective came to the kind of abrupt, ignominious end that tends to make friends dry up and blow away. It matters little that Mack was never actually a mole working for a shadowy, seemingly omnipresent mob boss. Somehow, the evidence was there anyway and the scandal ended everything for him overnight. Lucky to stay out of prison, Mack lives in a netherworld of forced retirement, spinning his memories of old homicide cases into pulp fiction and working part time as a shopping mall cop. His wife Marlo, the greatest criminal investigator Mack has ever known, has been dead of pancreatic cancer for nearly five years. That leaves his ancient Smith-Corona Corsair, a pack of Camels, a bottle of Old Forester, and Marlo's bourbon-loving cat, Phil, as Mack's only company.Almost. Because Mack also keeps himself company. The psychiatrists call it Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder. Mack calls it Triple-D. But crazy also works. It means he watches himself, usually from an overhead perspective, as though someone has tied a floating camera to a back beltloop on a long string. It makes him feel watched, and not by someone inclined to judge him kindly. So Raymond Mackey comes complete with his own Greek chorus. "Watch yourself, Mack," people tell him. He has no choice.When one of Mack's old informants goes missing and Mack's face turns up in a dead man's camera, his past comes roaring painfully back to life. Now the police want him for questioning, the mob want him dead and it's increasingly difficult to tell who, exactly, is working for who. As a mercilessly hot Chicago summer finally breaks and it starts to rain bodies, Mack finds himself past his prime for this kind of action. Retirement has added weight and subtracted agility. He hasn't fired a weapon in years. His antiquated cell phone will not stop ringing with a mysteriously blocked number. In the end, as Mack watches himself from above, it is razor-sharp instinct, cheap consumer electronics and his dead wife that offer his only hope.

Two one man shows - ''Grav'' which was first produced by the Torch Theatre in 2015, and ''Carwyn'' which was first produced by the Torch Theatre in 2022. Both plays explore the lives and achievements of two of Wales''s most celebrated sons, and were warmly received by both press and audiences alike.

What convinces us that we have been wrong about the world? When do we know that the usual ways are no longer working; that it is time to set down one life and pick up another? Winner of the Pacific Book Award for short fiction, Signs of Passing presents ten stories told from the nearside of epiphany, less a time or place than a state of mind in which one can hear the voice calling from beyond the veil of conscious understanding and singing of how life can be better: -A young boy, abandoned by divorce, discovers something inexplicable happening in the two-dimensional world of Winchester County, his favorite TV western;-A waitress at a bar called The Office, so alienated from the tedium of her own existence she no longer feels any fear walking home at night in the dark when perhaps she should;-A crime detective novelist so beset by writer's block that he attends the funerals of strangers in hopes of gleaning some advice from the dead, unaware that he is being followed;-A young and secretly talented widow struck by the revelation that her late husband was not the man she thought she had married;-A homeless, rural bus driver forced to confront the possibility that the dreams keeping him alive have been too small for him and that it is better to embrace peril in risking everything for a better life than to live safely in a prison of the familiar;-A squared-away child psychiatrist forced to confront the reality that one of his immature patients and an erotic dancer know more than he does about the fraud of his own existence and the excruciating secret to happiness;-An assistant veterinarian for a small-town zoo who, unbeknownst to her undeniably perfect husband, has taken to following random strangers around the city as a way of escaping both her guilt and her contentment;-A young photojournalist surrendering herself to the control of a brutish and degenerate winemaker, all to exorcise a past that will not let her go and that holds all love at bay;-A shopping mall employee whose enmity for a local television meteorologist is rewarded with an unlikely opportunity for revenge; and-An entertainment media mogul, stricken with sudden news of cancer as he battles in court to retain the rights to remake an old television western about a better life in Winchester County.A collection of separate stories about interconnected characters, Signs of Passing is devoted to the experience of waking up-of recognizing the better life in all of its unlikely disguises-and then summoning the courage to leave everything else behind, and to give chase before it's too late.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Transformationelle Grammatik und Englischunterricht" verfügbar.

Offers a collection of articles from young academics who delivered papers to a seminar, entitled Llenyddiaeth Mewn Theori held at the University of Wales Lampeter in April 2005. This volume presents an assessment of Welsh literature from many historical periods and highlights the political questions of modern Wales.