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The world of pocket billiards and the world of high stakes poker collide and brings two people together, desperate to find the link in a series of murders that involve both worlds. Jay, passionate about pool, meets tournament poker player, Lisa. Together, they tell the story in this roller coaster thriller about the games people play and the price people will pay to win.
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Shoplifting is a practice that has been engaged in for centuries, but it was only after the Civil War that the prevalence of shoplifting and societal awareness of it, became significant. In the 1860s the typical shoplifter was from the lower classes; by 1900 it was an upper-class woman who shoplifted from a huge department store "because" she was a "kleptomaniac", and in the 1960s it was teenagers stealing for kicks. Shoplifting: A Social History looks at the activity of shoplifting for the last 140 years: the types of people singled out as the principal offenders, retailers' ambivalent responses to the activity, selective prosecution, the utilization of high-tech antitheft devices, and suing shoplifters to recover costs. Also examined are media accounts which have often used exaggerated numbers when discussing the activity and the effect of private justice on the offense. Discrepancies in treatment of lower-class women versus "respectable" women shoplifters will be of interest to women's studies scholars.
This groundbreaking study examines the vexed and unstable relations between the eighteenth-century novel and the material world. Rather than exploring dress's transformative potential, it charts the novel's vibrant engagement with ordinary clothes in its bid to establish new ways of articulating identity and market itself as a durable genre. In a world in which print culture and textile manufacturing traded technologies, and paper was made of rags, the novel, by contrast, resisted the rhetorical and aesthetic links between dress and expression, style and sentiment. Chloe Wigston Smith shows how fiction exploited women's work with clothing - through stealing, sex work, service, stitching, and the stage - in order to revise and reshape material culture within its pages. Her book explores a diverse group of authors, including Jane Barker, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, Frances Burney and Mary Robinson.
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'Splendid ... her book does justice to a fascinating woman who was tragic, brave, likable, humorous, and indeed, unruly' Spectator 'Written with elegance, wit and a narrative zest that novelists might envy' Economist At the heart of the extravagant Regency period – nine scandalous, politically fascinating years from 1811 to 1820 – lies the bitter mismatch between the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Prince Regent, later George IV, separated privately from Caroline of Brunswick within a year of their marriage in 1795. The couple remained separated until Queen Caroline's death in 1821, but the mockery of their marriage resisted the most strenuous efforts to dissolve it. Barred from the Regent's court, Queen Caroline travelled through Europe with a small court of her own. The story of The Unruly Queen – a long, courageous fight by an extraordinary individual to see justice done in the face of overbearing authority – is compellingly told by Flora Fraser. This astonishing book culminates with the Queen's House of Lords trial for adultery and exclusion from her bigamous husband's coronation.