If only he could stay away… Storm Hunter's return to Whitehorn sent tremors through the town–and shock waves of desire through innocent Jasmine Kincaid Monroe. But then Storm discovered the Monroes might have had something to do with this brother's long-ago disappearance….

In the dead of night, there's a knock on the door at Haven, an inner-city youth center in St. Louis. A refugee family–scared, tired and hungry–seeks shelter. Fresh back from Afghanistan, former marine sergeant Duff takes on the mission. He recruits aid worker Liz Wallace, but she has questions for . Such as why a Texan with an oil magnate for a father is working at Haven. Or why a man who fears nothing–including the gang violence threatening the center–seems scared of opening his heart to her. will call upon his training and his faith to protect Liz and Haven. Yet the most dangerous threat lurks closer than they realize.

A convenient wife… An inconvenient love… Francesca walked into the room and Guy Dymoke was mesmerized. But she was pregnant with Guy's brother's baby. An impossible situation…and Guy had been hiding his feelings ever since. Years later, Francesca is now a widow, and when the will is read she's stunned to discover she's been placed into Guy's safekeeping…as his convenient wife! Guy wants to give Francesca and her son all the care in the world. He also yearns to tell her how much he really loves her. But he'll wait for the day that she gives her love freely in return….

‘A writer of extraordinary strengths’ Guardian Set in the mythical small city of Sparta, New York, this searing, vividly rendered exploration of the mysterious conjunction of erotic romance and tragic violence in late 20th-century America. When a young wife and mother named Zoe Kruller is found brutally murdered, the Sparta police target two primary suspects: her estranged husband Delray and her longtime lover Eddy Diehl. In turn, the Krullers's son Aaron and Eddy's daughter Krista become obsessed with one another, each believing the other's father is guilty. Told in halves in the very different voices of Krista and Aaron, Little Bird of Heaven is classic Joyce Carol Oates, in which the lyricism of intense sexual love is intertwined with the anguish of loss, and tenderness is barely distinguishable from cruelty. By the novel's end, the fated lovers, meeting again as adults, are at last ready to exorcise the ghosts of the past and come to terms with their legacy of guilt, misplaced love and redemptive yearning. With Little Bird of Heaven, Joyce Carol Oates once again confirms her place as one of the most outstanding writers at work today.

A famous photographer lying in a coma holds the key to the salvation of the world. But first he must travel back into the traumatic events of his childhood. Will Rabjohns has everything. He’s handsome, he’s rich, and he’s revered as the world’s greatest wildlife photographer. He’s also a haunted man, driven to risk his life for his art – to capture the raw tragedy of the wild, the beauty of nature’s violence. After a near fatal encounter with a polar bear, he lies in a coma. There he must relive a central childhood memory: a meeting with ancient and terrible forces which revealed to him the mystery at the heart of nature. And he realizes that if he awakes, he must confront the darkness of his past and wage a war, not only for his own soul, but for the soul of the planet and every animal that breathes upon it.

‘Of all the books marking the bicentenary Waterloo, this has to be the best’ Spectator ‘A book to die for’ Evening Standard From Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted author David Crane, this is a breathtaking portrait of the Britain that fought the battle of Waterloo. As Wellington’s rain-sodden army retreated towards an obscure valley called Waterloo, the men and women of Britain were still going to the theatre and science lectures, working in the fields and the factories, reading and writing books and sermons, painting their pictures and sitting in front of Lord Elgin’s marbles. David Crane’s stunning freeze-frame of Britain on this day of momentous change shifts hour by hour between Britain and Belgium. The Britain that fought Waterloo – its radicals and patriots, artisans and aristocrats, prisoners and poets – appears through the smoke of battle and the mythology of Waterloo in this magnificent and original tracing of the endless, overlapping connections between people’s lives.

A collection of essays on Jorge Luis Borges by his long-time friend and collaborator. Jorge Luis Borges - Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer - is widely considered one of the giants of 20th-century world literature. Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked alongside Borges for a number of years creating English translations of his work, the only translations personally overseen by Borges himself. In The Lesson of the Master, a memoir and essays, he writes about his time with Borges but also offers us a unique insight on the man and his work. It is an indispensable volume for Borges readers and his growing legion of students and scholars.

A novel from Susan Fletcher, author of the bestselling Eve Green and Oystercatchers. The Massacre of Glencoe happened at 5am on 13th February 1692 when thirty-eight members of the Macdonald clan were killed by soldiers who had enjoyed the clan's hospitality for the previous ten days. Many more died from exposure in the mountains. Fifty miles to the south Corrag is condemned for her involvement in the Massacre. She is imprisoned, accused of witchcraft and murder, and awaits her death. The era of witch-hunts is coming to an end - but Charles Leslie, an Irish propagandist and Jacobite, hears of the Massacre and, keen to publicise it, comes to the tollbooth to question her on the events of that night, and the weeks preceding it. Leslie seeks any information that will condemn the Protestant King William, rumoured to be involved in the massacre, and reinstate the Catholic James. Corrag agrees to talk to him so that the truth may be known about her involvement, and so that she may be less alone, in her final days. As she tells her story, Leslie questions his own beliefs and purpose - and a friendship develops between them that alters both their lives. In Corrag, Susan Fletcher tells us the story of an epic historic event, of the difference a single heart can make - and how deep and lasting relationships that can come from the most unlikely places.

The follow-up novel to the hugely successful debut THE STREET In this dank corner of town, you have to keep your friends close and your enemies closer – even if those enemies are your family. Jimmy Wild saunters around the streets of Campbell Road, and among the people he used to terrorise. Even though the years have passed, he’s still a tyrant. The sight of his lanky frame is enough to terrify the inhabitants of this close-knit community, who reside in this villainous corner of London. Jimmy’s beautiful step-daughter Faye and his downtrodden wife Edie eek out a meagre existence for their family, having left behind their lives in Kent. What devastating act was so bad that it drove them away from the place they called home to this hovel of a house in Campbell Road? Robert and Steven Wild thought they’d moved on. It was hard enough coming to terms with the death of their mother – and now their abusive father, presumed dead, has returned. One thing you can bet on, Jimmy Wild’s not returned to start playing happy families… How can young Faye make a life for herself and carve a future for young siblings? Who is this aged woman that Jimmy Wild has come back to see? And can a romance between Faye and Rob blossom amidst a family at War?

The time management secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Time Management. Includes how to: ? Identify your biggest priorities and find time to achieve them ? Deal with the biggest hidden time-wasters ? Communicate effectively with colleagues and clients ? Cope with information overload ? Take control of your inbox and voicemail

The presenting secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Presenting. Includes how to: ? Enjoy presenting and approach it with confidence ? Assess your audience and their reactions ? Prepare presentations for maximum impact ? Use your voice and body to make your point ? Use visual aids and handle questions

The leadership secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Leadership. Includes how to: ? Understand and develop your leadership style ? Identify strategic goals for your department ? Motivate and manage teams of all sizes ? Build a culture of results and responsibility ? Lead the way out of a crisis

The communication secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Communication. Includes how to: ? Use body language to build rapport with anyone ? Deal with clients and colleagues at all levels ? Get what you want in sales or negotiation ? Excel in meetings and presentations ? Master email and written communication

Learn how to write scalable and concurrent programs in Scala, a language that grows with you. About This Book ? Get a grip on the functional features of the Scala programming language ? Understand and develop optimal applications using object-oriented and functional Scala constructs ? Learn reactive principles with Scala and work with the Akka framework Who This Book Is For This book is for programmers who choose to get a grip over Scala to write concurrent, scalable, and reactive programs. No prior experience with any programming language is required to learn the concepts explained in this book. Knowledge of any programming language would help the reader understanding concepts faster though. What You Will Learn ? Get to know the reasons for choosing Scala: its use and the advantages it provides over other languages ? Bring together functional and object-oriented programming constructs to make a manageable application ? Master basic to advanced Scala constructs ? Test your applications using advanced testing methodologies such as TDD ? Select preferred language constructs from the wide variety of constructs provided by Scala ? Make the transition from the object-oriented paradigm to the functional programming paradigm ? Write clean, concise, and powerful code with a functional mindset ? Create concurrent, scalable, and reactive applications utilizing the advantages of Scala In Detail Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala. Style and approach This book is for programmers who want to master Scala to write concurrent, scalable, and reactive programs. Though no experience with any programming language is needed, some basic knowledge would help understand concepts faster.

Get to grips with the essentials of deep learning by leveraging the power of Python About This Book ? Your one-stop solution to get started with the essentials of deep learning and neural network modeling ? Train different kinds of neural networks to tackle various problems in Natural Language Processing, computer vision, speech recognition, and more ? Covers popular Python libraries such as Tensorflow, Keras, and more, along with tips on training, deploying and optimizing your deep learning models in the best possible manner Who This Book Is For Aspiring data scientists and machine learning experts who have limited or no exposure to deep learning will find this book to be very useful. If you are looking for a resource that gets you up and running with the fundamentals of deep learning and neural networks, this book is for you. As the models in the book are trained using the popular Python-based libraries such as Tensorflow and Keras, it would be useful to have sound programming knowledge of Python. What You Will Learn ? Get to grips with the core concepts of deep learning and neural networks ? Set up deep learning library such as TensorFlow ? Fine-tune your deep learning models for NLP and Computer Vision applications ? Unify different information sources, such as images, text, and speech through deep learning ? Optimize and fine-tune your deep learning models for better performance ? Train a deep reinforcement learning model that plays a game better than humans ? Learn how to make your models get the best out of your GPU or CPU In Detail Deep Learning a trending topic in the field of Artificial Intelligence today and can be considered to be an advanced form of machine learning, which is quite tricky to master. This book will help you take your first steps in training efficient deep learning models and applying them in various practical scenarios. You will model, train, and deploy different kinds of neural networks such as Convolutional Neural Network, Recurrent Neural Network, and will see some of their applications in real-world domains including computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and so on. You will build practical projects such as chatbots, implement reinforcement learning to build smart games, and develop expert systems for image captioning and processing. Popular Python library such as TensorFlow is used in this book to build the models. This book also covers solutions for different problems you might come across while training models, such as noisy datasets, small datasets, and more. This book does not assume any prior knowledge of deep learning. By the end of this book, you will have a firm understanding of the basics of deep learning and neural network modeling, along with their practical applications. Style and approach This step-by-step guide is filled with real-world practical examples and use cases to solve various deep learning problems.

Learn, develop, and design applications using the new features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM About This Book ? Implement business logic using processes, plugins, and client-side *s with MS Dynamics 365 ? Develop custom CRM solutions to improve your business applications ? A comprehensive guide that covers the new features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and increasingly advanced topics. Who This Book Is For This book targets skilled developers who are looking to build business-solution software and are new to application development in Microsoft Dynamics 365, especially for CRM. What You Will Learn ? Discover new designers tools included in Dynamics 365 CRM ? Develop apps using the platform-agnostic Web API ? Leverage Azure Extensions to design cloud-aware applications ? Learn how to implement CRUD operation ? Create integrated real-world apps using Microsoft PowerApps and Flow by combining services such as Twitter, Facebook, and SharePoint ? Configure and use Artificial Intelligence Azure Cognitive Services for Recommendation and Text Analytic services In Detail Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM is the most trusted name in enterprise-level customer relationship management. Thelatest version of Dynamics CRM comes with the important addition of exciting features guaranteed to make your life easier. It comes straight off the shelf with a whole new frontier of updated business rules, process enhancements, SDK methods, and other enhancements. This book will introduce you to the components of the new designer tools, such as SiteMap, App Module, and Visual Designer for Business Processes. Going deeper, this book teaches you how to develop custom SaaS applications leveraging the features of PowerApps available in Dynamics 365.Further, you will learn how to automate business processes using Microsoft Flow, and then we explore Web API, the most important platform update in Dynamics 365 CRM. Here, you'll also learn how to implement Web API in custom applications. You will learn how to write an Azure-aware plugin to design and integrate cloud-aware solutions. The book concludes with configuring services using newly released features such as Editable grids, Data Export Service, LinkedIn Integration, Relationship Insights, and Live Assist. Style and approach The book takes a pragmatic approach, exploring Dynamics 365 and its CRM features with the help of real-world scenarios.

Enhance your organization’s secure posture by improving your attack and defense strategies About This Book ? Gain a clear understanding of the attack methods, and patterns to recognize abnormal behavior within your organization with Blue Team tactics. ? Learn to unique techniques to gather exploitation intelligence, identify risk and demonstrate impact with Red Team and Blue Team strategies. ? A practical guide that will give you hands-on experience to mitigate risks and prevent attackers from infiltrating your system. Who This Book Is For This book aims at IT professional who want to venture the IT security domain. IT pentester, Security consultants, and ethical hackers will also find this course useful. Prior knowledge of penetration testing would be beneficial. What You Will Learn ? Learn the importance of having a solid foundation for your security posture ? Understand the attack strategy using cyber security kill chain ? Learn how to enhance your defense strategy by improving your security policies, hardening your network, implementing active sensors, and leveraging threat intelligence ? Learn how to perform an incident investigation ? Get an in-depth understanding of the recovery process ? Understand continuous security monitoring and how to implement a vulnerability management strategy ? Learn how to perform log analysis to identify suspicious activities In Detail The book will start talking about the security posture before moving to Red Team tactics, where you will learn the basic syntax for the Windows and Linux tools that are commonly used to perform the necessary operations. You will also gain hands-on experience of using new Red Team techniques with powerful tools such as python and PowerShell, which will enable you to discover vulnerabilities in your system and how to exploit them. Moving on, you will learn how a system is usually compromised by adversaries, and how they hack user's identity, and the various tools used by the Red Team to find vulnerabilities in a system. In the next section, you will learn about the defense strategies followed by the Blue Team to enhance the overall security of a system. You will also learn about an in-depth strategy to ensure that there are security controls in each network layer, and how you can carry out the recovery process of a compromised system. Finally, you will learn how to create a vulnerability management strategy and the different techniques for manual log analysis. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with Red Team and Blue Team techniques and will have learned the techniques used nowadays to attack and defend systems. Style and approach This book uses a practical approach of the cybersecurity kill chain to explain the different phases of the attack, which includes the rationale behind each phase, followed by scenarios and examples that brings the theory into practice.

Explore the concepts and tools you need to discover the world of microservices with various design patterns About This Book ? Get to grips with the microservice architecture and build enterprise-ready microservice applications ? Learn design patterns and the best practices while building a microservice application ? Obtain hands-on techniques and tools to create high-performing microservices resilient to possible fails Who This Book Is For This book is for architects and senior developers who would like implement microservice design patterns in their enterprise application development. The book assumes some prior programming knowledge. What You Will Learn ? How to break monolithic application into microservices ? Implement caching strategies, CQRS and event sourcing, and circuit breaker patterns ? Incorporate different microservice design patterns, such as shared data, aggregator, proxy, and chained ? Utilize consolidate testing patterns such as integration, signature, and monkey tests ? Secure microservices with JWT, API gateway, and single sign on ? Deploy microservices with continuous integration or delivery, Blue-Green deployment In Detail Microservices are a hot trend in the development world right now. Many enterprises have adopted this approach to achieve agility and the continuous delivery of applications to gain a competitive advantage. This book will take you through different design patterns at different stages of the microservice application development along with their best practices. Microservice Patterns and Best Practices starts with the learning of microservices key concepts and showing how to make the right choices while designing microservices. You will then move onto internal microservices application patterns, such as caching strategy, asynchronism, CQRS and event sourcing, circuit breaker, and bulkheads. As you progress, you'll learn the design patterns of microservices. The book will guide you on where to use the perfect design pattern at the application development stage and how to break monolithic application into microservices. You will also be taken through the best practices and patterns involved while testing, securing, and deploying your microservice application. At the end of the book, you will easily be able to create interoperable microservices, which are testable and prepared for optimum performance. Style and approach Comprehensive guide that uses architectural patterns with the best choices involved in application development

Build effective regression models in R to extract valuable insights from real data About This Book ? Implement different regression analysis techniques to solve common problems in data science - from data exploration to dealing with missing values ? From Simple Linear Regression to Logistic Regression - this book covers all regression techniques and their implementation in R ? A complete guide to building effective regression models in R and interpreting results from them to make valuable predictions Who This Book Is For This book is intended for budding data scientists and data analysts who want to implement regression analysis techniques using R. If you are interested in statistics, data science, machine learning and wants to get an easy introduction to the topic, then this book is what you need! Basic understanding of statistics and math will help you to get the most out of the book. Some programming experience with R will also be helpful What You Will Learn ? Get started with the journey of data science using Simple linear regression ? Deal with interaction, collinearity and other problems using multiple linear regression ? Understand diagnostics and what to do if the assumptions fail with proper analysis ? Load your dataset, treat missing values, and plot relationships with exploratory data analysis ? Develop a perfect model keeping overfitting, under-fitting, and cross-validation into consideration ? Deal with classification problems by applying Logistic regression ? Explore other regression techniques – Decision trees, Bagging, and Boosting techniques ? Learn by getting it all in action with the help of a real world case study. In Detail Regression analysis is a statistical process which enables prediction of relationships between variables. The predictions are based on the casual effect of one variable upon another. Regression techniques for modeling and analyzing are employed on large set of data in order to reveal hidden relationship among the variables. This book will give you a rundown explaining what regression analysis is, explaining you the process from scratch. The first few chapters give an understanding of what the different types of learning are – supervised and unsupervised, how these learnings differ from each other. We then move to covering the supervised learning in details covering the various aspects of regression analysis. The outline of chapters are arranged in a way that gives a feel of all the steps covered in a data science process – loading the training dataset, handling missing values, EDA on the dataset, transformations and feature engineering, model building, assessing the model fitting and performance, and finally making predictions on unseen datasets. Each chapter starts with explaining the theoretical concepts and once the reader gets comfortable with the theory, we move to the practical examples to support the understanding. The practical examples are illustrated using R code including the different packages in R such as R Stats, Caret and so on. Each chapter is a mix of theory and practical examples. By the end of this book you will know all the concepts and pain-points related to regression analysis, and you will be able to implement your learning in your projects. Style and approach An easy-to-follow step by step guide which will help you get to grips with real world application of Regression Analysis with R

Discover Android programming and web development by understanding the concepts of Kotlin Programming About This Book ? Practical solutions to your common programming problems with Kotlin 1.1 ? Leverage the functional power of Kotlin to ease your Android application development ? Learn to use Java code in conjunction with Kotlin Who This Book Is For This book will appeal to Kotlin developers keen to find solutions for their common programming problems. Java programming knowledge would be an added advantage. What You Will Learn ? Understand the basics and object-oriented concepts of Kotlin Programming ? Explore the full potential of collection frameworks in Kotlin ? Work with SQLite databases in Android, make network calls, and fetch data over a network ? Use Kotlin's Anko library for efficient and quick Android development ? Uncover some of the best features of Kotlin: Lambdas and Delegates ? Set up web service development environments, write servlets, and build RESTful services with Kotlin ? Learn how to write unit tests, integration tests, and instrumentation/acceptance tests. In Detail The Android team has announced first-class support for Kotlin 1.1. This acts as an added boost to the language and more and more developers are now looking at Kotlin for their application development. This recipe-based book will be your guide to learning the Kotlin programming language. The recipes in this book build from simple language concepts to more complex applications of the language. After the fundamentals of the language, you will learn how to apply the object-oriented programming features of Kotlin 1.1. Programming with Lambdas will show you how to use the functional power of Kotlin. This book has recipes that will get you started with Android programming with Kotlin 1.1, providing quick solutions to common problems encountered during Android app development. You will also be taken through recipes that will teach you microservice and concurrent programming with Kotlin. Going forward, you will learn to test and secure your applications with Kotlin. Finally, this book supplies recipes that will help you migrate your Java code to Kotlin and will help ensure that it's interoperable with Java. Style and approach This book explains concepts related to Kotlin Programming using a practical approach and with the help of easy-to-follow recipes.

The common patterns and practices of the microservice architecture and their application using the Clojure programming language. About This Book ? Relevance of the microservice architecture and benefits of Clojure's functional and simple features to implement it. ? Learn best practices and common principles to avoid common pitfalls while developing microservices. ? Learn how to use Pedestal to build your next microservices, secure them using JWT, and monitor them using the ELK stack Who This Book Is For You should have a working knowledge of programming in Clojure. However, no knowledge of RESTful architecture, microservices, or web services is expected. If you are looking to apply techniques to your own projects, taking your first steps into microservice architecture, this book is for you. What You Will Learn ? Explore the pros and cons of monolithic and microservice architectures ? Use Clojure to effectively build a reallife application using Microservices ? Gain practical knowledge of the Clojure Pedestal framework and how to use it to build Microservices ? Explore various persistence patterns and learn how to use Apache Kafka to build event-driven microservice architectures ? Secure your Microservices using JWT ? Monitor Microservices at scale using the ELK stack ? Deploy Microservices at scale using container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes In Detail The microservice architecture is sweeping the world as the de facto pattern with which to design and build scalable, easy-tomaintain web applications. This book will teach you common patterns and practices, and will show you how to apply these using the Clojure programming language. This book will teach you the fundamental concepts of architectural design and RESTful communication, and show you patterns that provide manageable code that is supportable in development and at scale in production. We will provide you with examples of how to put these concepts and patterns into practice with Clojure. This book will explain and illustrate, with practical examples, how teams of all sizes can start solving problems with microservices. You will learn the importance of writing code that is asynchronous and non-blocking and how Pedestal helps us do this. Later, the book explains how to build Reactive microservices in Clojure that adhere to the principles underlying the Reactive Manifesto. We finish off by showing you various ways to monitor, test, and secure your microservices. By the end, you will be fully capable of setting up, modifying, and deploying a microservice with Clojure and Pedestal. Style and approach This book highlights the merits of the microservice architecture and its implementation with Clojure. Learn to implement microservices by migrating a monolithic application to a microservice-based architecture.