Product Description: Laurie Brown has long been fascinated with what happens at the edge of cities. In her pioneering, photographic work on Los Angeles, her focus was on the terraforming activities in that quintessential modern metropolis, where nature is literally scraped away and terraced to accommodate the most recent version of the American Dream: more roads and highways, more residential and commercial developments, more golf courses and city services, more pressure on the natural systems that undergird the city and region...read more

Product Description: Rachel Gibson meets spine-tingling suspense in this fabulous romantic thriller from debut Little Black Dress author, Laurie Brown After the collapse of her wedding-planning business, Caroline Tucker returns to her childhood New Mexico home, hoping to leave recent troubles behind her...read more

Product Description: A modern career woman thrust back in time into the glittering Regency period and the arms of an unscrupulous rake... Josephine Drummond is a professional paranormal researcher (aka, a ghostbuster) hired to prove that the ghost of Lord Deverell Thornton, the very handsome Earl and a notorious rake in his time, haunts the crumbling Waite Castle...read more

Southern belle Cordelia Weston embarks on an adventure of a lifetime when she goes undercover in London to find her sister's missing fiance - a mission that leads her into the arms of Viscount Deering, who has been ordered by the Diplomatic Corps to expose a Confederate spy. Original.

When Anne Weathersby, who has embarked on a secret and scandalous career as a novelist, saves the life of the Earl of Marsfield, giving him only her pen name of Cassandra, she learns that her secret identity is in danger of being exposed when the Earl becomes obsessed with finding her. Original.

In this book of sixty black-and-white panoramas, photographer Laurie Brown documents the changing landscape along the western edge of Southern California. These stark, compelling images reveal a world scraped and reshaped by construction equipment--boulders pushed aside, stretches of earth flattened and then measured with surveyor sticks. High-tech housing developments rise in these places, lines of identical homes that simultaneously offer a pleasing vision of order and a numbing prospect of sterile conformity. Recent Terrains: Terraforming the American West is a thoughtful sequence of photographs that consider how the planet's surface has been transformed to meet the needs of our consumer society.The term terraforming originated in Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction trilogy about the colonization of Mars, in which that planet is reshaped for human settlers. The panoramic format of Brown's photographs is partly inspired by space photography--with their long and low perspectives of the horizon, these photos give us views of our own planet as it might be seen by the Mars explorer. But if many of the images look like alien landscapes, they reveal a familiar shift in American geography: the wild, agricultural terrain of our early frontier gives way to densely built suburban communities.Brown's photographs are neutral about what they record, dramatizing some of the tensions and dualities that comprise our society's complex relationship to nature. She shows the invasion of unspoiled territory by the high-tech developments we so often label with the pejorative term suburban sprawl. At the same time, however, she uncovers surreal stillness and beauty in the built environment, searching for a postindustrial idea of the sublime.Taken during the last decade of the twentieth century, these photographs serve as an archive of change at a specific place on the coastal edge of California at the turn of the millennium. But these images have larger relevance for all of us, exploring our ideas about what constitutes a home and what defines our sense of community.The book is divided into three sections, each prefaced by a poem by Los Angeles poet Martha Ronk; it concludes with an essay by renowned writer and conservationist Charles E. Little. Recent Terrains is a major photographic work--a thoughtful, serious book of time and place. (view table of contents)

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