My nightmare started like this.I was standing on a deserted street in some little beach town. It was the middle of the night. A storm was blowing. Wind and rain ripped at the palm trees along the sidewalk. Pink and yellow stucco buildings lined the street, their windows boarded up. A block away, past a line of hibiscus bushes, the ocean churned.Florida, I thought. Though I wasn't sure how I knew that. I'd never been to Florida.Then I heard hooves clattering against the pavement. I turned and saw my friend Grover running for his life.Yeah, I said hooves.Grover is a satyr. From the waist up, he looks like a typical gangly teenager with a peach-fuzz goatee and a bad case of acne. He walks with a strange limp, but unless you happen to catch him without his trousers on (which I don't recommend), you'd never know there was anything un- human about him. Baggy jeans and fake feet hide the fact that he's got furry hindquarters and hooves.Grover had been my best friend in sixth grade. He'd gone on this adventure with me and a girl named Annabeth to save the world, but I hadn't seen him since last July, when he set off alone on a dangerous quest a quest no satyr had ever returned from.Anyway, in my dream. Grover was hauling goat tad. holding his human shoes in his hands the way he does when he needs to move fast. He clopped past the little tounst shops and surfboard rental places. The wind bent the palm trees almost to the ground.Grover was terrified of something behind him. He must've just come from the beach. Wet sand was caked in his fur. He'd escaped from somewhere. He was trying to get away from... something.A bone-rattling growl cut through the storm. Behind Grover, at the far end of the block, a shadowy figure loomed. It swatted aside a street lamp, which burst in a shower of sparks.Grover stumbled, whimpering in fear. He muttered to himself, Have to get away. Have to warn them!I couldn't see what was chasing him, but I could hear it muttering and cursing. The ground shook as it got closer. Grover dashed around a street corner and faltered. He'd run into a dead-end courtyard full of shops. No time to back up. The nearest door had been blown open by the storm. The sign above the darkened display window read: ST AUGUSTINE BRIDAL BOUTIQUE.Grover dashed inside. He dived behind a rack of wedding dresses.The monster's shadow passed in front of the shop. I could smell the thing a sickening combination of wet sheep wool and rotten meat and that weird sour body odour only monsters have, like a skunk that's been living off Mexican food.Grover trembled behind the wedding dresses. The monster's shadow passed on.Silence except for the rain. Grover took a deep breath. Maybe the thing was gone.Then lightning flashed. The entire front of the store exploded, and a monstrous voice bellowed, 'MIIIIINE!'I sat bolt upright, shivering in my bed. There was no storm. No monster.Morning sunlight filtered through my bedroom window.I thought I saw a shadow flicker across the glass a humanlike shape. But then there was a knock on my bedroom door - my mom called, 'Percy, you're going to be late and the shadow at the window disappeared.It must've been my imagination. A fifth-storey window with a rickety old fire escape... there couldn't have been anyone out there.'Come on, dear, my mother called again. "Last day of school. You should be excited! You've almost made it!'Coming 1 managed.I felt under my pillow. My fingers closed reassuringly around the ballpoint pen I always slept with. I brought it out, studied the Ancient Greek writing engraved on the side: Anaklumas. Riptide.1 thought about uncapping it, but something held me back. I hadn't used Riptide for so long...Besides, my mom had made me promise not to use deadly weapons in the apartment after I'd swung a javelin the wrong way and taken out her china cabinet. I put Anaklusmos on my nightstand and dragged myself out of bed.I got dressed as quickly as I could. I tried not to think about my nightmare or monsters or the shadow at my window.Have to get away. Have to warn them! What had Grover meant?I made a three-fingered claw over my heart and pushed outwards an ancient gesture Grover had once taught me for warding off evil.The dream couldn't have been real.Last day of school. My mom was right, I should have been excited. For the first time in my life, I'd almost made it an entire year without getting expelled. No weird accidents. No fights in the classroom. No teachers turning into monsters and trying to kill me with poisoned cafeteria food or exploding homework. Tomorrow, I'd be on my way to my favourite place in the world - Camp Half- Blood.Only one more day to go. Surely even I couldn't mess that up.As usual, I didn't have a clue how wrong I was. My mom made blue waffles and blue eggs for breakfast. She's funny that way, celebrating special occasions with blur food. I think it's her way of saying anything is possible.

The truth is never skin deep.It was supposed to be a romantic getaway weekend in New York City. Breanna’s new boyfriend, Ty, took care of everything—the train tickets, the dinner reservations, the rented four-story luxury rowhouse in Jersey City with a beautiful view of the Manhattan skyline. But when Bree comes downstairs their final morning, she’s shocked. There’s a stranger laying dead in the foyer, and Ty is nowhere to be found.A Black woman alone in a new city, Bree is stranded and out of her depth—especially when it becomes clear the dead woman is none other than Janelle Beckett, the missing woman the entire Internet has become obsessed with. There’s only one person Bree can turn to: her ex-best friend, a lawyer with whom she shares a very complicated past. As the police and a social media mob close in, all looking for #JusticeForJanelle, Bree realizes that the only way she can help Ty—or herself—is to figure out what really happened that last night.But when people only see what they want to see, can she uncover the truth hiding in plain sight?and makes them targets of random people who are out for blood and it’s all the more upsetting. It combines the already insidious racist implications of the ‘missing white woman syndrome’ (see the title) and how that kind of case gets ALL the focus while victims of color are all too often ignored, with a misguided mob of people who take a real tragedy and try to make themselves a part of it for clout, attention, or to feel like they are doing SOMETHING by targeting two Black people. It would be SO EASY to make this kind of commentary about true crime and social media feel well meaning and correct but SO clunky and preachy that it’s just obnoxious, as we have seen this kind of thing before (looking at you, “Black Christmas” 2019). But Garrett nails the tone, captures the gravity of it, and finds the nuance and trusts her readers to be able to parse it out without having to spoon feed it. Apparently this is a fine line to walk for some, but Garrett succeeds.One quibble that I will note because it probably explains the lower rating number after all the well earned praise: the ending. It’s not a bad ending by any means, but it did feel a bit rushed and anticlimactic because of it. I also would have perhaps liked a little bit more time to see some of the fallout of how it all shook out. I never like feeling super rushed in a thriller.But that’s just a quibble! Overall I enjoyed “Missing White Woman” quite a bit. It’s engaging and addicting, and with summer coming up and a need for vacation reads about to skyrocket, this is a good one to keep in mind!

Five years ago, a tragic murder-suicide rocked the small town of Little Kilton, Buckinghamshire when popular schoolgirl Andie Bell was brutally murdered and her boyfriend, Sal Singh, was accused before seemingly taking his own life. While at first Sal was just a person of interest, he later became named the killer because of a confession text he allegedly sent. But seventeen-year-old Pippa is convinced that the real killer is still out there. She befriends Sal's younger brother, Ravi, and launches an investigation under the disguise of a school project. Unfortunately for Pip, each interrogation puts Pip in greater danger, yet she still persists. She finds evidence that Andie was selling drugs to students, including Max Hastings, and was having an affair with Mr. Ward, history teacher and father of Cara Ward, Pippa's longstanding best friend.Pippa finds out Mr. Ward pushed Andie into a desk in a moment of fury. When Andie went missing, Mr. Ward thought he had killed her, so he framed Sal and murdered him while making it look like a suicide. A few days later, Mr. Ward saw a girl walking through the street and mistook her for Andie. Pippa discovers that the girl wasn't Andie, but a girl that looked like Andie. Becca, Andie's sister, confesses that Max Hastings had drugged and raped her - with rohypnol sold to him by Andie. In anger, Becca pushed Andie, who fell, convulsed and died. While still in shock, Becca takes Andie's body and hides it in an old septic tank in a farmhouse near Pip's home. When Pip learns of the truth and goes to confront Becca, she is drugged with rohypnol and Becca tries to choke her to death. That doesn't happen as Ravi comes to save her. Pip later finds out that Becca killed her dog by accident and that she was in charge of the death threats she received that were quite violent and literal. The truth is told and Sal is declared innocent. The final verdict on the tragedy is that there were 5 people in charge of this double homicide; Elliot Ward, Becca Bell, Max Hastings, Howie Bowers- Andie's drug dealer, Jason Bell- Andie and Beccas' dad. Even though it is said to have been just Elliot Ward due to his actions against her, it is actually a number of people who - in a way- worked together to make it.Pippa later launches a podcast named, A Good Girl's Guide To Murder, where she talks about the truth of what happened and makes updates on Max's trials.

We had all become a little complacent; we had bought into the myth that after more than a decade in hiding in the U.K., and another couple of decades somewhat more exposed in the U.S., Salman Rushdie had been forgotten by his persecutors. Ayatollah Khomeini, who had proclaimed the fatwa in 1989 had died months after Rushdie had – in Martin Amis’s evocative words – “vanished into the front pages”. Rushdie himself hadn’t been complacent, though. In August 2022, when a young man interrupted his speech in Chautauqua and stabbed him multiple times, “my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are,” he writes in Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Rushdie lost a lot of blood, and his right eye. It took him eight months of therapy to be able to touch his thumb with his index finger. The attacker had read only two pages of Satanic Verses, and said he disliked Rushdie who was “disingenuous.” A doctor told Rushdie, “You are lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.” The knife of the title is both metaphorical and literal. This is a book of recovery, of torture and resilience, of acceptance, and optimism. It is also a moving love story. A year before the attack Rushdie had married Rachel Eliza Griffiths, American poet and novelist. Much of the tenderness of the narrative derives from that relationship. On their wedding day, Rushdie recited E.E. Cummings’ poem, I carry your heart with me… It had begun with Rushdie walking into a sliding glass door, injuring himself and being taken to his house by Eliza. The sliding door moment could not be an accidental usage - Rushdie is too steeped in popular culture for that. In a previous memoir, Joseph Anton, Rushdie had written about his years in hiding, and the struggle towards normality as a writer and person in circumstances he had no control over. Knife too is about circumstances he had no control over. Yet unlike the previous book which occasionally tended towards personal heroism, this one is more confessional and reveals human weaknesses. It gives the writing a particular allure. Rushdie went to Chautauqua, he says, because “we had some big domestic bills to pay….the money would be very handy.” You have to admire such honesty. The cultural references, from literature to movies to rock music to contemporary celebrities, enrich the tales from the hospital bed and the recovery at home. The fictional ‘interview’ with his attacker (who is not named in the book) is pure Rushdie, and in some ways a personal manifesto of art and literature. It ends with Rushdie telling his attacker (in his mind): “I see you now my failed murderer…you could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh.” There’s much laughter in Knife, helping to bring the pain and frustration of a great writer into sharper focus. Surely the Nobel committee cannot continue to ignore him?

There's barely a product or service on the market today that cus tomers can't buy from someone else for about the same price, about the same quality, about the same level of service and about the same features. If you truly have a firstmover's advantage, it's prob ably lost in a matter of months. If you offer something truly novel, someone else will soon come up with something similar and maybe even better.But if you ask most businesses why their customers are their customers, most will tell you it's because of superior quality, features ,price or service. In other words, most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers. This is a fascinating realization. If companies don't know why their customers are their customers, odds are good that they don't know why their employees are their employees either.If most companies don't really know why their customers are their customers or why their employees are their employees, then how do they know how to attract more employees and encourage loyalty among those they already have? The reality is, most businesses today are making decisions based on a set of incomplete or,worse, completely flawed assumptions about what's driving their business.There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it. When I mention manipulation, this is not necessarily pejorative; it's a very common and fairly benign tactic. In fact, many of us have been doing it since we were young. "I'll be your best friend" is the highly effective negotiating tactic employed by generations of children to obtain something they want from a peer. And as any child who has ever handed over candy hoping for a new best friend will tell you, it works.From business to politics, manipulations run rampant in all forms of sales and marketing. Typical manipulations include: dropping the price, running a promotion; using fear, peer pressure or aspirational messages, and promising innovation to influence behaviorbe it a purchase, a vote or support. When companies or organizations do not have a clear sense of why their customers are their customers, they tend to rely on a disproportionate number of manipulations to get what they need. And for good reason. Manipulations work. Price Many companies are reluctant to play the price game, but they do so because they know it is effective. So effective, in fact, that the temptation can sometimes be overwhelming. There are few profes- sional services firms that, when faced with an opportunity to land a big piece of business, haven't just dropped their price to make the deal happen. No matter how they rationalized it to themselves or their clients, price is a highly effective manipulation. Drop your prices low enough and people will buy from you. We see it at the end of a retail season when products are "priced to move." Drop the price low enough and the shelves will very quickly clear to make room for the next season's products. Playing the price game, however, can come at tremendous cost and can create a significant dilemma for the company. For theseller, selling based on price is like heroin. The short-term gain is fantastic, but the more you do it, the harder it becomes to kick the habit. Once buyers get used to paying a lower-than-average price for a product or service, it is very hard to get them to pay more. And the sellers, facing overwhelming pressure to push prices loveer and lower in order to compete, find their margins cut slim- mer and slimmer. This only drives a need to sell more to compen- sate. And the quickest way to do that is price again. And so the downward spiral of price addiction sets in. In the drug world, these addicts are called junkies. In the business world, we call them com- modities. Insurance. Home computers. Mobile phone service. Any number of packaged goods. The list of commodities created by the price game goes on and on. In nearly every circumstance, the com- panies that are forced to treat their products as commodities brought it upon themselves. I cannot debate that dropping the price is not a perfectly legitimate way of driving business; the chal- lenge is staying profitable. Wal-Mart seems to be an exception to the rule. They have built a phenomenally successful business playing the price game. But it also came at a high cost. Scale helped Wal-Mart avoid the inherent weak- nesses of a price strategy, but the company's obsession with price above all else has left it scandal-ridden and hurt its reputation. And every one of the company's scandals was born from its attempts to keep coats down so it could afford to offer such low prices. Price always costs something. The question is, how much are you willing to pay for the money you make? Promotions General Motors had a bold goal. To lead the American automotive industry in market share.