When a man walks into her grandfather's curiosity shop and asks about a black orchid, Spindrift turns him away. She's never seen such a thing. Until one night it appears. Spindrift, an orphan, has one keepsake from her parents...a clear glass orb. Except it's not quite clear anymore. She watches as a black orchid forms inside the crystal. Then the flower blooms into a towering woman in a dress of midnight silk and air, a woman with the power to grant...

" In the aftermath of Headmaster Boddy's murder, Blackbrook Academy has been thrown into Complete disarray. Half the student body hasn't bothered to return to campus--but those who have include Orchid, Vaughn, Scarlett, Peacock, Plum, and Mustard, now warily referred to by the other students as the Murder Crew. When another staff member is found dead and an anonymous threat begins to target the group, each of the teen's opportunistic reasons for sticking...

Twenty years ago, before she wrote The Orchid Thief or was hailed as "a national treasure" by The Washington Post, Susan Orlean was a journalist with a question: What makes Saturday night so special? To answer it, she embarked on a remarkable journey across the country and spent the evening with all sorts of people in all sorts of places-hipsters in Los Angeles, car cruisers in small-town Indiana, coeds in Boston, the homeless in New York, a lounge...

"The dramatic and deadly conclusion to the thrilling YA mystery series inspired by the classic board game CLUE! After a tragic accident that forever changed the lives of the Murder Crew-killing one of their own-the students at Blackbrook Academy are just trying to get by. As relationships evolve, strain, and break, Orchid, Green, Scarlett, Mustard, Plum, and Peacock find themselves lost. When the dark secret at the heart of Blackbrook forces its way...

When Jack Haines reports a break-in at his greenhouse, the motive of the intruder is unclear. Other than the destruction of some expensive orchids, no damage had been done, and nothing seems to be missing. But Detective Chief Inspector C.D Sloan senses something sinister in this seemingly minor action.

The twelve kids in the seventh grade at Fawn Creek K-12 have been together all their lives so when graceful Orchid Mason arrives, with exotic clothes and glorious hair, the other seventh graders do not know what to think.

Told with a lyrical, almost-dreamlike voice as intoxicating as the moonflowers and orchids that inhabit this world, Monsoon Mansion is a harrowing yet triumphant coming-of-age memoir exploring the dark, troubled waters of a family's rise and fall from grace in the Philippines. It would take a young warrior to survive it. Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines....

"In I was the Jukebox, Sandra Beasley eschews the speaker-as-poet convention and unleashes a collection teeming with the inanimate, the anachronistic, and the animal kingdom. She boldly channels figures from wartime and mythological culture ... In these poems Beasley continues to approach the world--with all its wiled musing, Wednesday compromises, migrating battlefields, and oversexed orchids--with clarity, humor, and compassion."--Jacket.

For generations, the marsh-surrounded town of Shimmer, Maryland has played host to a loose movement of African-American artists, all working in different media, but all utilizing the same haunting color. Landscape paintings, trompe l'oeil quilts, decorated dolls, mixed-media assemblages, and more, all featuring the same peculiar hue, a shifting pigment somewhere between purple and pink, the color of the saltmarsh orchid, a rare and indigenous flower....