CAROL PACK
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one." —Mark Twain
Magic is under attack!
A trusted former friend is waging war against the Library of Illumination by posting harmful videos about it online. Major media outlets have picked up the sensational stories and are running with them nonstop.
* An insider claims the library holds untold riches, which are kept from the public. True.
* He also accuses the library of having intergalactic portals, giving alien beasts access to our world. Also true. But come on, are Terrorians really beasts?
* Then there's the talk of magic and sorcery. Uh-oh.
* The public is upset because—now that they have discovered the library—they also learned it's private, so they can't get inside. It's by invitation only.
* To top it all off, the place is run by teenagers. Whoever heard of such a thing!
Tension is escalating. A Library of Illumination has endured on this world since time immemorial but could soon cease to exist. And, oh, what a brouhaha that is causing!
An ancient artifact made of space debris has the power to destroy the world.
Tray and Carey Lennox are identical twins—one a suave and sophisticated art appraiser searching for an obscure artifact for the FBI, the other an outgoing yet down-to-earth engineer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, hot on the trail of a saboteur.
Their individual investigations into ruthless power-mongers gain momentum until a fateful day in the Hamptons when one twin is gunned down and the other sacrifices his identity to find his brother’s killer.
Are some ancient mysteries better left buried?
Solving a puzzle is irresistible to the human mind…
* Especially if it's very old,
* The key is trapped inside an intriguing work of art,
* And the solution could change your life forever.
Who wouldn't want to solve it?
Johanna and Jackson believe they have put any threats against the Library of Illumination to rest and are embracing the next chapter in their lives. However, their journey takes a detour when they discover an antique puzzle box that holds a key to the past. Solving its clues sparks an exciting new adventure, until they learn some ancient mysteries are better left buried.
Imprisoned on a distant realm—her love life in a shambles—Johanna Charette wonders how to extract herself from Nero 51’s grasp. She needs to resolve the threats against the Library of Illumination and protect the people she holds dear. But how?
She’s felt different, ever since meeting a secret society of wizards, and believes magic is growing inside her. Meanwhile, her feelings about Jackson are still unresolved. Unfortunately, the battle to control all the Libraries of Illumination is about to explode.
Their lives are all in peril. And everything everyone on every realm once believed, could be stripped away, plunging future generations into stone-age ignorance.
’Tis the season to be jolly! Or is it?
Johanna Charette and Jackson Roth, curators of the Library of Illumination, are finding it hard to get into the holiday spirit.
They have incredibly busy schedules, now that they’ve started college, and the weather is unseasonably warm—hardly Christmas-like at all. Not even a tree can lift their spirits. But then, a spark ignites something inside them.
Unfortunately, it may be too late to save the season.
Life is falling apart at the Library of Illumination.
Johanna and Jackson have allowed a sneaky shapeshifter to slip through their fingers—
Unfortunately, he hitches a ride with the Terrorians in a stolen time machine which escapes into the layers between time and space.
Meanwhile, Johanna and Jackson are having problems of a more personal nature: their relationship is falling apart.
No wonder teenagers have angst!
Too naive to know the odds are stacked against her.
Since the age of three, the austere conditions and strict directives of a group home have ruled Josefina Charo's life. Her inquisitive nature and love of books underscore an intelligence that allows her to graduate high school two years early. However, she's crestfallen to learn her caretakers cannot provide a higher education, nor will they allow her to leave because she's too young.
She searches for a way to escape her prison, without thought to how difficult life might be for a teenage girl with no real-world experience.
An alien invasion is threatening the existence of all the knowledge in the universe.
Eighteen-year-old Johanna Charette and seventeen-year-old Jackson Roth rely on their wits, guts, and pluck to protect the fantasy-come-to-life world of the Library of Illumination.
Unfortunately, Johanna and Jackson are the ones responsible for breaching the portals to a dozen distant worlds. Now, outside forces are causing shock waves in the space-time continuum. And if that isn’t enough, someone from another dimension is trying to steal a book of powerful spells created by a very famous wizard.
Now, the teens must decide if they will sacrifice their own welfare and the safety of their loved ones for the greater good.
There’s Magic Here!
Within the walls of a centuries-old building lies the magical Library of Illumination where books literally come to life. What makes this library even more unusual are the two teenagers chosen to oversee its operation. Johanna Charette and Jackson Roth must use their wits to deal with the sometimes humorous, sometimes dangerous situations that arise when characters and scenes from enchanted books become real.
As the teens learn about the library, themselves, and each other—their fates become intertwined. And when they stumble upon a scheme by someone in a distant realm to take control of all the knowledge in the universe, Johanna and Jackson are forced to put their lives on the line to battle an ancient foe.
She’s a ghost. She’s a spy. She’s unique!
Evangeline has been recruited into the Celestial Hierarchy’s version of the CIA, and she’s ready to take on her first official assignment. She and her old flame, Christian, are helping 16-year-old Gabriella find her father—an inventor who disappeared in 1925 while demonstrating a new illusion for the famous magician, Harry Houdini. The task sounds simple enough but there’s a problem. The trio of ghosts need to make contact with Houdini—who is on a public tour to debunk psychics, clairvoyants, and charlatans. As far as he’s concerned, ghosts do not exist.
If Evangeline can’t get through to Houdini, she will have failed her first mission, and Gabriella’s heart will break. More importantly, she may have to bend the Celestial Hierarchy’s rigid rules of ghostly comportment to contact the magician, and that could result in losing her privilege to return to Earth to bring her own assassin to justice.
“I can’t be dead!"
Victoria Méliès is one of the most beautiful women living in postwar Europe. She lives a life of privilege, and few people suspect that she works as a spy for MI6 under the code name: Evangeline. On her way to the Nuremburg Trials, an assassin’s bullet finds her before she can testify. She's immediately transported to the Pearly Gates where Saint Peter insists on calling her by her code name and assigns her to an eternity in Purgatory. But that just won’t do for the elegant operative, who demands that she be allowed to avenge her untimely death.
Evangeline soon finds herself in New York City, where she is incensed to see her old nemesis, Bunny Stanton, masquerading as a British peer. The spectral spy believes Bunny is involved in a plot to assassinate Harry S. Truman and tries to protect the American president. However, Evangeline quickly discovers that being a ghost has its limitations, and an afterlife handbook filled with regulations could land her on the road to hell because of her good intentions.
LIFE EVERLASTING. It just never ends
This special addendum to the Evangeline's Ghost series delineates the architecture of the Celestial Hierarchy and spells out the rules and regulations governing the newly dead members of the Collective.
Where everyone not damned to the fires of Hell can wear white with impunity after Labor Day .
For King and country. And family.
The year is 1936. Political tension is escalating in Europe, as Hitler's troops march into the Rhineland and break the Treaty of Versailles.
During an important meeting, documents outlining a plot to invade Switzerland are stolen, and a British Commander is taken prisoner by the Germans. They use him as a pawn to lure his sister, Victoria Méliès, into helping Germany retrieve the encrypted documents.
However, even without the documents, the Nazis are able to launch their deadly scheme. And as its culmination draws closer, the need to keep Victoria's brother alive, fades.
Cut to the chase!
From the hilarious authors of Over-Sixty Shades of Gray comes their fourth elucidating treatise on aging, the Book of Lists, an abbreviated attempt to cram everything you need to know about life—into bullet points. From Medicare to bowel movements to sex toys, they’ve got it all.
• As people grow older, time seems to pass more quickly, so getting to the point is more important than ever.
• Everybody loves bullet points. What’s quicker than reading a list of specifics without a bunch of long-winded explanations that might annoy us or slow us down?
• Book of Lists has answers to questions we never knew we had.
Buy the book. You don’t want to be the reason why the authors’ latest endeavor dies in a hail of bullets, do you?
Too much?
Everybody sing: Just a spoonful of sugar …
Until 2020, we had never experienced a pandemic that shut down our country and made us fear for our futures, our friends, and our families — both health-wise and economically.
Then COVID-19 entered our lives, and our hearts went out to everyone who suffered through it or lost someone to it. It is not our intention that anything published in this book diminishes that loss.
However, it is our belief that life with all its treacherous dips and turns is easier to take with a spoonful of sugar. We like to look for the humor in everything because we believe it knocks the things that scare us down to size, making us feel more in control. So, come experience the coronavirus through the diary pages of a couple of old farts. We tried to keep the print large because squinting adds to our wrinkles.
If we want to stay in the game, we need to keep our brains stimulated. Too many of us have developed routines that make life predictable but don't do much to stimulate our cognitive functions. Researchers say the best way to stay mentally sharp is to challenge our brains with puzzles.
Inside this book, we’ve got stuff to help you achieve that goal. Exercise your brain by doing the puzzles in this book. Then color in the pages, afterward, to relax your mind (that’s the soporific). It’s that simple.
Let the games begin!
Time marches on.
There's no getting around it: with every breath we take, we're a couple of seconds older than we were before, and there's no going back. It's great when we were kids and couldn't wait to grow up, but it's kind of horrifying now that we're over sixty and people are looking at us differently. As far as a lot of them are concerned, we're invisible. Or costing the government too many of their tax dollars. Or too slow and out of sync with what's going on in the world today.
We're not alone. As of the last census, more than 68-million people in the United States were older than 60. That's a lot of gray hair and bad teeth. And while we all like to believe we're unique, in many ways we're alike.
That's why we wrote Over-Sixty: Shades of Gray. It's an entertaining yet informative look at many of the changes that come with growing older, filled with fun, cartoons, quotes, heart, and soul. Trust us, you'll like it!
Write on …
The Indie Authors User's Guide is a compendium of helpful information and tips for novelists about to embark on self-publishing their books. It addresses the writing process, touching on plot, characters, and setting; discusses different types of editing to help authors choose what works best for them; and describes the elements to have in place before starting the self-publishing process—like trim size, page count, and metadata.
This book was created as a quick start guide for writers, who are embarking on careers as indie novelists and publishers.
