Author: Susan Musgrave
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307363910
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
Susan Musgrave’s bestselling third novel, Cargo of Orchids, examines the life of a woman on death row in the United States. Our narrator recalls what brought her to this place, where she awaits the last of her appeals. We learn that along with her cellmates, Frenchy and Rainy, this Mother Without a Heart, otherwise known as the Cocaine Queen, has been sentenced to death for the crime of killing her child. Unlike the others, the narrator has not had a life marked by abuse and hardship. When her story begins, she is translating a book about the kidnapping of a woman connected to a drug cartel. At the book launch, she meets her husband-to-be, a lawyer. When their marriage fizzles out, she falls in love with one of his clients, Angel, a Colombian from a drug cartel family, imprisoned in British Columbia on a drug-smuggling charge. Pregnant, the narrator is taken hostage by Angel’s wife to a hot and squalid island off the coast of Colombia; in an atmosphere of extreme violence, she is fed drugs until she becomes addicted to cocaine and useless to her child. When she winds up on death row, it is because the evidence in her trial suggests she sacrificed her baby for drugs. Her narrative – violent and bizarre, but also riveting and erotic – runs parallel to an account of life in “Death Clinic” at the Heaven Valley State Facility for Women. A moving story emerges of the friendship of three female inmates who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner. There is humour and emotion in their lives, however harsh their stories. When Musgrave was asked how humour finds its way into such an unlikely place, she replied, “It’s a survival technique. People make jokes when they survive tragedies – that’s how they deal with the world.” In this novel about prison and drug culture, filled with brutality and injustices, the compassion we feel for the narrator lends the story a moral message: that nobody is so simply bad as to deserve the death sentence. As the Gazette commented, the book puts “a human face on convicted criminals,” makes us face squarely the issue of capital punishment and assess how we judge guilt, innocence and the ambiguous space in between. The Calgary Straight called the book “a love letter to those who are serving time and the families who serve with them.” It’s also a book about unconditional love and how far we will go for it, according to Musgrave, who spent eight years writing this novel and knows plenty about prison life, having met and married her husband Stephen Reid during his incarceration in the 1980s. She had just finished a draft of the novel when Reid was arrested again following a bank robbery in 1999, just months after the CBC aired a Life and Times documentary about the couple. A brilliant mix of black humour, stark tragedy and poignant humanity, Cargo of Orchids is Musgrave’s first novel in over ten years. She has three times been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, once for fiction (The Charcoal Burners) and twice for poetry (A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury and Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries), and has published over twenty books. She likes novels with intense use of language and good plotting. “I want to give readers a harrowing ride,” she says. “I like to think of Cargo of Orchids as a suspense novel which is also an exploration of the heart.”
Cargo of Orchids
Author: Susan Musgrave
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307363910
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
Susan Musgrave’s bestselling third novel, Cargo of Orchids, examines the life of a woman on death row in the United States. Our narrator recalls what brought her to this place, where she awaits the last of her appeals. We learn that along with her cellmates, Frenchy and Rainy, this Mother Without a Heart, otherwise known as the Cocaine Queen, has been sentenced to death for the crime of killing her child. Unlike the others, the narrator has not had a life marked by abuse and hardship. When her story begins, she is translating a book about the kidnapping of a woman connected to a drug cartel. At the book launch, she meets her husband-to-be, a lawyer. When their marriage fizzles out, she falls in love with one of his clients, Angel, a Colombian from a drug cartel family, imprisoned in British Columbia on a drug-smuggling charge. Pregnant, the narrator is taken hostage by Angel’s wife to a hot and squalid island off the coast of Colombia; in an atmosphere of extreme violence, she is fed drugs until she becomes addicted to cocaine and useless to her child. When she winds up on death row, it is because the evidence in her trial suggests she sacrificed her baby for drugs. Her narrative – violent and bizarre, but also riveting and erotic – runs parallel to an account of life in “Death Clinic” at the Heaven Valley State Facility for Women. A moving story emerges of the friendship of three female inmates who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner. There is humour and emotion in their lives, however harsh their stories. When Musgrave was asked how humour finds its way into such an unlikely place, she replied, “It’s a survival technique. People make jokes when they survive tragedies – that’s how they deal with the world.” In this novel about prison and drug culture, filled with brutality and injustices, the compassion we feel for the narrator lends the story a moral message: that nobody is so simply bad as to deserve the death sentence. As the Gazette commented, the book puts “a human face on convicted criminals,” makes us face squarely the issue of capital punishment and assess how we judge guilt, innocence and the ambiguous space in between. The Calgary Straight called the book “a love letter to those who are serving time and the families who serve with them.” It’s also a book about unconditional love and how far we will go for it, according to Musgrave, who spent eight years writing this novel and knows plenty about prison life, having met and married her husband Stephen Reid during his incarceration in the 1980s. She had just finished a draft of the novel when Reid was arrested again following a bank robbery in 1999, just months after the CBC aired a Life and Times documentary about the couple. A brilliant mix of black humour, stark tragedy and poignant humanity, Cargo of Orchids is Musgrave’s first novel in over ten years. She has three times been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, once for fiction (The Charcoal Burners) and twice for poetry (A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury and Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries), and has published over twenty books. She likes novels with intense use of language and good plotting. “I want to give readers a harrowing ride,” she says. “I like to think of Cargo of Orchids as a suspense novel which is also an exploration of the heart.”
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307363910
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Book Description
Susan Musgrave’s bestselling third novel, Cargo of Orchids, examines the life of a woman on death row in the United States. Our narrator recalls what brought her to this place, where she awaits the last of her appeals. We learn that along with her cellmates, Frenchy and Rainy, this Mother Without a Heart, otherwise known as the Cocaine Queen, has been sentenced to death for the crime of killing her child. Unlike the others, the narrator has not had a life marked by abuse and hardship. When her story begins, she is translating a book about the kidnapping of a woman connected to a drug cartel. At the book launch, she meets her husband-to-be, a lawyer. When their marriage fizzles out, she falls in love with one of his clients, Angel, a Colombian from a drug cartel family, imprisoned in British Columbia on a drug-smuggling charge. Pregnant, the narrator is taken hostage by Angel’s wife to a hot and squalid island off the coast of Colombia; in an atmosphere of extreme violence, she is fed drugs until she becomes addicted to cocaine and useless to her child. When she winds up on death row, it is because the evidence in her trial suggests she sacrificed her baby for drugs. Her narrative – violent and bizarre, but also riveting and erotic – runs parallel to an account of life in “Death Clinic” at the Heaven Valley State Facility for Women. A moving story emerges of the friendship of three female inmates who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner. There is humour and emotion in their lives, however harsh their stories. When Musgrave was asked how humour finds its way into such an unlikely place, she replied, “It’s a survival technique. People make jokes when they survive tragedies – that’s how they deal with the world.” In this novel about prison and drug culture, filled with brutality and injustices, the compassion we feel for the narrator lends the story a moral message: that nobody is so simply bad as to deserve the death sentence. As the Gazette commented, the book puts “a human face on convicted criminals,” makes us face squarely the issue of capital punishment and assess how we judge guilt, innocence and the ambiguous space in between. The Calgary Straight called the book “a love letter to those who are serving time and the families who serve with them.” It’s also a book about unconditional love and how far we will go for it, according to Musgrave, who spent eight years writing this novel and knows plenty about prison life, having met and married her husband Stephen Reid during his incarceration in the 1980s. She had just finished a draft of the novel when Reid was arrested again following a bank robbery in 1999, just months after the CBC aired a Life and Times documentary about the couple. A brilliant mix of black humour, stark tragedy and poignant humanity, Cargo of Orchids is Musgrave’s first novel in over ten years. She has three times been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, once for fiction (The Charcoal Burners) and twice for poetry (A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury and Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries), and has published over twenty books. She likes novels with intense use of language and good plotting. “I want to give readers a harrowing ride,” she says. “I like to think of Cargo of Orchids as a suspense novel which is also an exploration of the heart.”
Air Cargo
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics, Commercial
Languages : en
Pages : 708
Book Description
Includes Guide section: Official reference of the Air Traffic Conference of America (varies slightly).
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics, Commercial
Languages : en
Pages : 708
Book Description
Includes Guide section: Official reference of the Air Traffic Conference of America (varies slightly).
Report
Author: Hawaii. Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry. Division of Forestry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Forests and forestry
Languages : en
Pages : 898
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Forests and forestry
Languages : en
Pages : 898
Book Description
Report
Author: Hawaii. Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 614
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 614
Book Description
List of Intercepted Plant Pests
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural pests
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural pests
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Hothouse Orchid
Author: Stuart Woods
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101144939
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
Home gets hot for CIA Special Agent Holly Barker in this novel in #1 New York Times bestselling author Stuart Woods’s thrilling series. After Holly Barker lets an international terrorist slip through her fingers for a second time, the CIA thinks she might want a long vacation. So Holly returns to her hometown of Orchid Beach, Florida, where she had been police chief for many years. But a very unpleasant surprise awaits her. Many years earlier, while she was in the army, Holly and another female officer had brought charges against their commander for sexual harassment. Holly had managed to fight him off, but the other woman, a young lieutenant, had not. The officer in question was acquitted of all charges, and has also left the army—for a job as Orchid Beach’s new police chief. Now Holly must decide whether to return to the CIA—or seek her revenge...
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101144939
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
Home gets hot for CIA Special Agent Holly Barker in this novel in #1 New York Times bestselling author Stuart Woods’s thrilling series. After Holly Barker lets an international terrorist slip through her fingers for a second time, the CIA thinks she might want a long vacation. So Holly returns to her hometown of Orchid Beach, Florida, where she had been police chief for many years. But a very unpleasant surprise awaits her. Many years earlier, while she was in the army, Holly and another female officer had brought charges against their commander for sexual harassment. Holly had managed to fight him off, but the other woman, a young lieutenant, had not. The officer in question was acquitted of all charges, and has also left the army—for a job as Orchid Beach’s new police chief. Now Holly must decide whether to return to the CIA—or seek her revenge...
Littell's Living Age
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 742
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 742
Book Description
The Living Age
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 636
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 636
Book Description
Chamber's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 434
Book Description
Economics of Agricultural and Wildlife Smuggling
Author: Peyton Ferrier
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1437922619
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 35
Book Description
The U.S. bans imports of certain agricultural (ag) and wildlife goods that can carry pathogens or diseases or whose harvest can threaten wildlife stocks or endanger species. Despite these bans, contraband is regularly uncovered in inspections of cargo containers and in domestic markets. This study characterizes the economic factors affecting ag and wildlife smuggling by drawing on inspection and interdiction data from the U.S. Dept. of Ag. and the Fish and Wildlife Service and existing economic literature. Ag and wildlife smuggling includes luxury goods, ethnic foods, and specialty goods, such as traditional medicines. Incidents of detected smuggling are disproportionately higher for ag goods originating in China and for wildlife goods originating in Mexico.
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1437922619
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 35
Book Description
The U.S. bans imports of certain agricultural (ag) and wildlife goods that can carry pathogens or diseases or whose harvest can threaten wildlife stocks or endanger species. Despite these bans, contraband is regularly uncovered in inspections of cargo containers and in domestic markets. This study characterizes the economic factors affecting ag and wildlife smuggling by drawing on inspection and interdiction data from the U.S. Dept. of Ag. and the Fish and Wildlife Service and existing economic literature. Ag and wildlife smuggling includes luxury goods, ethnic foods, and specialty goods, such as traditional medicines. Incidents of detected smuggling are disproportionately higher for ag goods originating in China and for wildlife goods originating in Mexico.