One woman’s passion for books and search for romance lie at the heart of this touching and funny novel about literature and longing in Los Angeles. ‘Women do different things when they’re depressed. Some smoke, others drink, some call their therapists, some eat…And I do what I have always done – go off on a book bender that can last for days.’ Whenever she’s in crisis – her marriage ends, her career stalls, her fantasy man shows signs of human frailty – Dora (named after Eudora Welty) escapes into not one, not two, but a carefully selected stack of books, shutting the door on the outside world until she emerges from her book binge strong enough to face her problems. Books have always been her saving grace, sheltering her during a difficult childhood and arming her with lessons and epigrams that are right for nearly every situation. But life is more complicated than a-book-a-day, and people – like her ex-alcoholic mother and judgmental sister – aren’t as compliant as beloved characters in a novel… Whether she’s being seduced by a quotation-quipping Quixote, or explaining death to a child by reading from ‘Charlotte’s Web’, Dora is Every-reader, and her charming story, shot through with humour and humanity, will delight anyone who’s ever sought solace in the pages of a book.

A powerful and entracing romance, set in the Celtic twilight of 10th century Ireland: a new MISTS OF AVALON for readers of historical fantasy. The forests of Sevenwaters have cast their spell over Sorcha's daughter Liadan, who, like her mother, has inherited the talent to heal and to see into the spirit world. The forest spirits warn Liadan that she must remain for ever at Sevenwaters if the sacred isles are to be won back from the Britons who took them by force. For the Lord and Lady of the forest spirits have seen in Liadan's future a doomed romance, death; a child; and a terrible choice to be made. Liadan is taken captive by the Painted Man, who is revealed to be a man quite unlike his legend. Liadan is drawn to him, despite the ancient prophesy of doom, but can she reclaim her life and defy the spirits, or will a curse fall upon Sevenwaters because of her forbidden love? Will the fight for the sacred isles end in tragedy? History and fantasy, myth and magic, legend and love come together in this magical story.

In a world where everyone and everything has its price, who do you trust? The Third Woman is a powerful and fascinating thriller following the adventures of Burnell’s unique heroine Stephanie Patrick. From conspiracy to terrorism, Vienna to Paris, will she find the truth? The world isn't run by governments. It's run by corporations. In other words, everything and everyone has a price. Stephanie Patrick operates under a number of names; Petra Reuter, known as a gun for hire, is probably the one she uses most frequently. She used to work for the government. Now she works for herself. Robert Newman, who spends more nights at 35,000 feet than in his own bed, is an international troubleshooter. But twenty years at the top have still not purged for him the ghosts of the past. A plea for help from an old friend draws Stephanie to Paris, where she narrowly survives a terrorist attack, an outrage that according to the authorities was masterminded by Petra Reuter. Betrayed in every way, pursued ruthlessly by a faceless enemy, her identity stolen from her, Stephanie seizes a hostage to give her a slim possibility of escape. But is the encounter with Robert Newman really just chance? Hunted from Paris to Vienna, Stephanie and Newman are forced together to survive. Yet the more she learns, the closer Newman seems to be to the heart of the conspiracy. Stephanie becomes sure of only one thing: that the answers will lie with the person who she knows as The Third Woman. ‘The Third Woman’ is vividly contemporary, with a welcome return for a unique heroine.

The fourth action-packed quest in an exciting six book character-led series for 7+ girls who love fantasy, adventure, and high-kicking heroines! Very few people ever enter the Shadow Woods, for these woods are like no others. Hidden deep within them is the Gateway to the Shadow Realm – a dark and chaotic world where all kinds of gruesome creatures live… On her tenth birthday, tomboy Sophie learns she is the Guardian of the magical gateway, and that her destiny is to protect the human world from the goblins, trolls and evil sprites that inhabit the Shadow Woods. Each book sees Sophie having to outwit weird and terrifying creatures from the Shadow Woods, and in this fourth action-packed adventure, we meet the stinky Fog Boggarts!

It was a grand white wedding that would make the society pages the world over–handsome British aristocrat Jarvis Larne was marrying beautiful American oil heiress Meryl Winters. But behind the lavish ceremony, their vows were a sham. Marrying for convenience had been the only way Jarvis could save his estate–and that had hurt his pride. But after the wedding came the wedding night–which exceeded both their expectations! Was their society wedding set to become a marriage for real?

Pediatrician Veronica Powers could handle crying babies and sticky-fingered toddlers without batting an eye, but in her personal life, order reigned supreme. So the beautiful and hardworking doctor was unnerved by her fascination with strong, sexy hospital administrator Ryan Malone–especially since his chaotic life involved three rambunctious kids and an inquisitive mother-in-law. Nevertheless, the single father was wreaking havoc with Ronni's well-ordered notions. And whether she wanted it or not, this man and his family were chipping away at Ronni's guarded heart and changing her mind about marriage!

Her Christmas gift came in a small velvet box… "Isn't it strange how things turn out? A week ago I was virtually jobless, almost homeless, and had totally sworn off men–a sad way to be before Christmas, don't you think? Now I'm not only working for the most gorgeous man alive, but I'm living in his house!" Meet sassy, smiley Sophie Harrington. Read in her own words how a much-needed job brings her up close and personal with rugged bachelor Gabriel York. Although Sophie is hardly a waif or stray, Gabriel ends up taking her in as a temporary lodger in his exclusive London home. How long before he realizes Sophie isn't just for Christmas–but for life…?

A very public proposal! Gorgeous Sicilian Lorenzo Martelli had proposed to Helen in front of his whole family! How could she say anything other than…yes? Now the Big Day was getting alarmingly close–and the bride-to-be was getting cold feet! The groom, however, was as hot-blooded as ever. He wanted Helen, and Lorenzo always got what he wanted. But would he have to wait until she was ready to be his bride–by choice…?

BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE? Her life looked perfect, but Julie Ryan wondered why she felt so empty inside. Why did her charming husband and teenage daughter seem so distant? Julie whispered a simple prayer, asking that her family grow closer. Suddenly her world went into a tailspin. First, a shocking suspicion about her husband, Michael. Then, just as the couple were weathering stormy emotions, their daughter made a startling confession. As Julie fought to save her family, she looked to the Lord for a helping hand…and prayed for the wisdom to understand His answers…. Welcome to Love Inspired?–stories that will lift your spirits and gladden your heart. Meet men and women facing the challenges of today's world and learning important lessons about life, faith and love.

A Family of Strangers Matt Bolt. A top homicide detective before he made one–almost fatal–mistake and ended up with a bullet in his chest, another in his leg. And not to complicate matters, his son–a child he's seen only twice in ten years–is placed in his care. Bolt's life is a shambles, his house a wreck–and he can't cook. Worse, his son seems to hate him. Then, as if he doesn't have enough. troubles, he's suddenly stuck with Virginia Carney, a woman running from her past. Running for her life. Matt Bolt's a stubborn man; even he admits that. He's never asked anyone for help, but he needs it now. Still, he has two questions: First, is Ginny's presence in his home likely to be a danger to his son? Second, can she cook?

Ashley Gallagher had wished for money and power, then she received a promotion… and a new boss: Max Caine, corporate shark and the first man to break her heart. But Ashley knew better than to trust a bad boy, even one in a suit. Was he in town to destroy his grandfather's company? She'd find out–no matter what it took, even if it meant wining and dining Max while resisting his potent half smiles and sizzling glances. But then the riches of his love began to glitter more temptingly than gold….

HER LIFE CHANGED OVERNIGHT…. Unbelievable…but true! Allison Sayre woke one day to learn she was a millionaire. Yet Allison never dreamed that her legacy would include a shocking secret about her own identity. Or a reunion with Benton Lockhart, the man whose powerful spiritual convictions had inspired her faith. But Allison knew that all the money in the world could never soothe Benton's troubled soul–or heal his battered spirit. She prayed to understand the meaning of her new life–and to find a way to touch Benton's heart.

Adam Donovan' s good looks and charm may win over every other woman in the world, but divorced mother Dana Taylor is immune. Or so she thinks, until the night Adam poses as her date… and the pretence is so real that they become close. Now she' s thrilled to discover she' s pregnant! But she' s also wary. She' s been through one difficult marriage, and has had enough emotional trauma to last a lifetime. What will it take for her to believe Adam is different–that he can bring her the happiness she deserves?

MEN OF GLORY A cowboy town in a cowboy country. This is a place a woman could love. These are men a woman could love! She's pregnant–and she's his brother's wife-to-be She met Jesse Winslow at a cattle show. They had a brief affair–and now Abby Steen is pregnant. Jesse, a rancher from Glory, Alberta, offers to marry her, and Abby accepts. She leaves her home in South Dakota to come to the Lazy SB, jointly owned by Jesse and his brother, Noah. But while Jesse might have good intentions and lots of charm, responsibility isn't his strongest trait. That's always been Noah's department. So when Jesse takes off–just abandons his bride before the wedding–Noah marries her instead. Their marriage might be for the sake of her babies–twins!–but Abby and Noah soon discover they haven't made such a bad bargain. Because love that starts the slowest often lasts the longest….

Abby Miller has everything she wants… Abby' s come to this small town in northern Quebec to research beluga whales. And her dog, Figgy, is all the company she' s interested in. But then she meets widowed captain Marc Doucette and his brokenhearted daughter. Turns out they may be exactly what she needs. Too bad Marc' s dead set against everything Abby and her job represent. But can he keep up his stand once he sees how good Abby–and Figgy–are for his daughter? And can he deny that there might be other–more personal–reasons to change his mind? SINGLE FATHER Sometimes he gets things right. Sometimes he needs a little help.

Maureen Davenport has carried a secret in her heart for many years. That is until she meets Allen Kladis–again. Once in love, they now find themselves corporate competitors. When Allen discovers Maureen's secret, they decide to work on building their personal relationship again with the help from above and with the knowledge that their love, ever after many years spent apart never really died.

Build scalable, reliable, and cost-effective applications with a serverless architecture About This Book ? Design a real-world serverless application from scratch ? Learn about AWS Lambda function and how to use Lambda functions to glue other AWS Services ? Use the Java programming language and well-known design patterns. Although Java is used for the examples in this book, the concept is applicable across all languages ? Learn to migrate your JAX-RS application to AWS Lambda and API Gateway Who This Book Is For This book is for developers and software architects who are interested in designing on the back end. Since the book uses Java to teach concepts, knowledge of Java is required. What You Will Learn ? Learn to form microservices from bigger Softwares ? Orchestrate and scale microservices ? Design and set up the data flow between cloud services and custom business logic ? Get to grips with cloud provider’s APIs, limitations, and known issues ? Migrate existing Java applications to a serverless architecture ? Acquire deployment strategies ? Build a highly available and scalable data persistence layer ? Unravel cost optimization techniques In Detail Over the past years, all kind of companies from start-ups to giant enterprises started their move to public cloud providers in order to save their costs and reduce the operation effort needed to keep their shops open. Now it is even possible to craft a complex software system consisting of many independent micro-functions that will run only when they are needed without needing to maintain individual servers. The focus of this book is to design serverless architectures, and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, along with decision factors to consider. You will learn how to design a serverless application, get to know that key points of services that serverless applications are based on, and known issues and solutions. The book addresses key challenges such as how to slice out the core functionality of the software to be distributed in different cloud services and cloud functions. It covers basic and advanced usage of these services, testing and securing the serverless software, automating deployment, and more. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with knowledge of new tools and techniques to keep up with this evolution in the IT industry. Style and approach The book takes a pragmatic approach, showing you all the examples you need to build efficient serverless applications.

A practical guide to help you undertand the ability of Apache jMeter to load and performance test various server types in a more efficient way. About This Book ? Use jMeter to create and run tests to improve the performance of your webpages and applications ? Learn to build a test plan for your websites and analyze the results ? Unleash the power of various features and changes introduced in Apache jMeter 3.0 Who This Book Is For This book is for software professionals who want to understand and improve the performance of their applications with Apache jMeter. What You Will Learn ? See why performance testing is necessary and learn how to set up JMeter ? Record and test with JMeter ? Handle various form inputs in JMeter and parse results during testing ? Manage user sessions in web applications in the context of a JMeter test ? Monitor JMeter results in real time ? Perform distributed testing with JMeter ? Get acquainted with helpful tips and best practices for working with JMeter In Detail JMeter is a Java application designed to load and test performance for web application. JMeter extends to improve the functioning of various other static and dynamic resources. This book is a great starting point to learn about JMeter. It covers the new features introduced with JMeter 3 and enables you to dive deep into the new techniques needed for measuring your website performance. The book starts with the basics of performance testing and guides you through recording your first test scenario, before diving deeper into JMeter. You will also learn how to configure JMeter and browsers to help record test plans. Moving on, you will learn how to capture form submission in JMeter, dive into managing sessions with JMeter and see how to leverage some of the components provided by JMeter to handle web application HTTP sessions. You will also learn how JMeter can help monitor tests in real-time. Further, you will go in depth into distributed testing and see how to leverage the capabilities of JMeter to accomplish this. You will get acquainted with some tips and best practices with regard to performance testing. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to take full advantage of the real power behind Apache JMeter. Style and approach The book is a practical guide starting with introducing the readers to the importance of automated testing. It will then be a beginner’s journey from getting introduced to Apache jMeter to an in-detail discussion of more advanced features and possibilities with it.

Advanced analytics on your Big Data with latest Apache Spark 2.x About This Book ? An advanced guide with a combination of instructions and practical examples to extend the most up-to date Spark functionalities. ? Extend your data processing capabilities to process huge chunk of data in minimum time using advanced concepts in Spark. ? Master the art of real-time processing with the help of Apache Spark 2.x Who This Book Is For If you are a developer with some experience with Spark and want to strengthen your knowledge of how to get around in the world of Spark, then this book is ideal for you. Basic knowledge of Linux, Hadoop and Spark is assumed. Reasonable knowledge of Scala is expected. What You Will Learn ? Examine Advanced Machine Learning and DeepLearning with MLlib, SparkML, SystemML, H2O and DeepLearning4J ? Study highly optimised unified batch and real-time data processing using SparkSQL and Structured Streaming ? Evaluate large-scale Graph Processing and Analysis using GraphX and GraphFrames ? Apply Apache Spark in Elastic deployments using Jupyter and Zeppelin Notebooks, Docker, Kubernetes and the IBM Cloud ? Understand internal details of cost based optimizers used in Catalyst, SystemML and GraphFrames ? Learn how specific parameter settings affect overall performance of an Apache Spark cluster ? Leverage Scala, R and python for your data science projects In Detail Apache Spark is an in-memory cluster-based parallel processing system that provides a wide range of functionalities such as graph processing, machine learning, stream processing, and SQL. This book aims to take your knowledge of Spark to the next level by teaching you how to expand Spark’s functionality and implement your data flows and machine/deep learning programs on top of the platform. The book commences with an overview of the Spark ecosystem. It will introduce you to Project Tungsten and Catalyst, two of the major advancements of Apache Spark 2.x. You will understand how memory management and binary processing, cache-aware computation, and code generation are used to speed things up dramatically. The book extends to show how to incorporate H20, SystemML, and Deeplearning4j for machine learning, and Jupyter Notebooks and Kubernetes/Docker for cloud-based Spark. During the course of the book, you will learn about the latest enhancements to Apache Spark 2.x, such as interactive querying of live data and unifying DataFrames and Datasets. You will also learn about the updates on the APIs and how DataFrames and Datasets affect SQL, machine learning, graph processing, and streaming. You will learn to use Spark as a big data operating system, understand how to implement advanced analytics on the new APIs, and explore how easy it is to use Spark in day-to-day tasks. Style and approach This book is an extensive guide to Apache Spark modules and tools and shows how Spark's functionality can be extended for real-time processing and storage with worked examples.

FROM MOVIE STAR…TO A PASTOR'S WIFE? Actress Suzann Condry took on a tough role when she traded lives with her twin sister, Holly. Suzann needed to get away from Hollywood…and Holly believed Suzann might find both peace and faith in charming Oak Valley. Anything can happen when twin sisters trade lives! Could Suzann convince everyone she was the sweet church librarian? Especially Josh Gallagher, the handsome assistant pastor who looked like a rugged rancher. Suzann feared he suspected her…until he asked for a date. She soon dreamed of an "ordinary" life as Josh's wife. But would Josh still love her once he learned her true identity?

WHAT KIND OF MAN WAS HE? Dr. Jasmine Enderlin had once loved Christopher Jordan with her whole heart. And he'd betrayed that love by marrying her sister and then abandoning his pregnant bride. Christopher's actions had made her question her faith. But now her sister was dead, Jasmine was the mother of their child and the prodigal daddy had returned to claim his son…. Christopher wanted to explain what he had done, but Jasmine's hurt and anger prevented her from listening. Until she found her sister's well-worn Bible and learned that appearances could be deceiving. Was God trying to tell her that Christopher deserved a second chance?