Bøger af Robert Hartley

Haunted by the horror of death, Kiltie Hartley emerges from a troubled past. He is sent to an Episcopalian school in the tidewater of eastern Virginia. Into the conventional society celebrated by prep school he does not fit. His final year at a public high school is darkened by deepening alienation. The shadow of death which swallowed him up during his early life catches up with him again the following year in college. Like a snake, the darkness of death coils itself around him, suffocating him in its grip. Resistance-not wanting to be forced to do anything by anyone-pitches him into another direction. Far from home, the boy travels, physically and emotionally. He survives. Is that all? No. He survives in style!

Jeb, a lecturer at Harvard, meets a mysterious pilot with a map who is murdered, the eyes sucked out of his skull while he is still alive. Jeb, shaken by the horror and wanting no more of it, is asked by the faculty at Harvard to travel to Colombia in search of ancient emeralds. In an Indian dialect, the map tells of their secret location. A Monster guards this secret for which the eyes of humans are sacrificed. General Junco, his contact person, finds refuge with an obscure woman, while his red-headed wife Lourdes, once a great beauty, is served nightly by a shadow lover. Jeb is provided a house in which to live with a housekeeper, Lucy, who remains strangely distant. His lady back home, Courtney, teaches at Sarah Lawrence. Lola, the beautiful secretary of General Junco, commands his attention, providing a momentary distraction from the horror that awaits him. An assassin has been sent to Colombia by Geneva emerald dealers, who, though leaving many bodies, is never seen. Jeb guesses the source of the Monster's emeralds, a dark rainforest where Indians have been tortured for centuries, and again enslaved and murdered during the nineteen hundreds by the rubber barons, a horror called the Devil's Paradise. Lucy, the housekeeper, follows him. She is caught by thugs and deposited among the rotting corpses to await the sucking out of her eyes. From nowhere, the unseen assassin appears and frees her. She finds Jeb in the rainforest and together they elude the Monster, escape warring Indians, the descendants of those who were tortured, survive an electric eel, avoid the drug lords, and finally fall through the ground into a cave filled with skeletons, and gold-and-emerald artifacts, from which there appears to be no escape. Only after a cruel twist of fate is the shocking truth of this green horror revealed.

A true story The world in which the child finds himself is one of vivid and wondrous beauty, and horrifying ugliness, too, that thrills with its suggestion of evil. The father, old enough to be a granddaddy, prides himself a self-made man, likes to dress well and doesn't take crap. The younger mother, a former school teacher, can be teasingly friendly: at other times, as coldly indifferent as ice. School proves difficult. Neither parent is ever satisfied, not even with passing. By the fourth grade, the boy is confined to the principal's office every afternoon. And on the bus, required to sit in plain sight on the heater by the driver, this for fighting. Military school faces him at age eleven. Fun with girls leads to an obsession with sex and daring escapades. However, the cadet's growing sense of abandonment imposes a death sentence upon him: he envisions a hanging. A shadow looming, this hanging spells trouble. To parents who are stunned, outraged, and deeply saddened he returns. The child survives, most of him does; we do not leave childhood without sacrificing something. At the very end, he is saved in a way that is not unexpected, yet still astonishing!

Along the Mississippi River lies a swampy island, haunted by an old plantation that was abandoned during the 1800s. An asylum was later built onto the house where bizarre experiments were performed. The asylum, too, was abandoned after the 1940s. Even so, weird tales remain of men being made into monkeys. A Russian mail-order bride lands in the Mississippi Delta. Kat has secret reasons for coming to America. But she has no intention of staying with her prospective husband, Joe Leigh, a pilot. Politicians are regularly flown from the Delta to a secret location in Arkansas, a motel where they are bribed, drugged, and soothed with live entertainment. Joe who refuses any involvement in the Arkansas skulduggery is compromised nonetheless, and both he and Kat are endangered. Ahead of them looms that bizarre island and a dark presence of unfathomable evil.

The Oxen Are Slow is a story of taboo love. Cary, an American writer newly arrived in 1958 Malaya, encounters four sisters, who are each unique in a provocative way. "A handsome stranger appears and no one can find a decent dress to wear," laments Noor. Noor, their mother, is married to her fourth husband, the owner of a eucalyptus plantation who is murdered. The murder mystery may be solved, but what of the four daughters? Down what forbidden path, winding into the dark unknown-for their love is forbidden-do Cary and his lover tumble?

Haunting the Baltic nation of Latvia is a creeping monster. The Creeper is a sadist. The victims are women in their twenties who share two physical characteristics, a secret tattoo and another unmentionable. Into the forest the creeping monster drags each captive to perform his cruel ritual. A matchbook cover is found at a crime scene that says "Sioux Falls, South Dakota." A Lutheran missionary, Samantha Norlunder, is missing. Her brother Luke does postgraduate work at a Lutheran college near Sioux Falls, where he also teaches. His girlfriend, Constance, has begun a prison ministry at the South Dakota State Penitentiary. Luke is compelled to travel to Latvia in search of his sister, leaving Constance behind. Much of Latvia is still pagan and Luke indulges himself in Latvian women and drink. He is not ready to settle down and marry Constance; too seductive are the pleasures of the flesh. A stalker begins menacing Constance, a dark figure from the past, who threatens to reveal an ugly secret about her that no one must know. Meanwhile, the Creeper continues to horrify Latvia. Luke and a lady with whom he has fallen deeply in love stumble across The Creeper's den in the mediæval city of Riga, witnessing a chamber of horrors! Beloved persons perish before The Creeper is found out. Fate plays a double hand in the shocking denouement of this romantic but cruel tale.

This book tells a true story. An airplane crash sends a dying pilot to the hospital. From death and darkness, he rises to brilliant colour, entering upon a Romantic passion that may only be described as profound. He defies injury, surviving, always surviving, winning the companionship of ladies, until he meets one who gives him an offer he can't refuse! The narrative includes the crafting of poems, too, for we cannot have love without poems.

Examines two of the most devastating coal mine disasters in United States history since 1928. This book explains the causes of the accidents, identifies who was to blame, and details the emotional impact the disasters had on the survivors, their families, and their communities.