Mr. Ransom clearly expended much time getting such a thorough concise book that provides ready reference of the Saints. Looking forward to more quality religious efforts from Ed Ransom. Congrats.

Dupin's poetry brings together fear and desire, death and life, oppositions which fuse together not out of juxtaposition but out of a bleeding neccesity for eachother. Death and life do not contrast in dupin, they are one. Opposing themselves within themselves, self rending and fusing simulataneously. Parageneous and sublime.

As a big fan of Dana Ransom aka Rosalyn West aka Nancy Gideon, she truly out does herself with this one! Texas Destiny, the second installment of the Bass family series, is by far the most heartfelt page turner I have ever read. The lead character is Jack Bass, a Texas Ranger with a tough spirit and tender heart. He meets Emily Marcus in the aftermath of an Indian ambush. From the very first sentence of this book, the excitement is nonstop. The story boast so many twists and turns that at times you are truly breathless. The events unfold with such perfection thanks to Ms. Ransom's amazing story telling. This book has it all, realistic romance, convincing dialogue, intense action, and best of all..little touches of humor inserted at just the right time. Both characters have darkness in their pasts, Jack even more so. I do suggest reading the first book of the Bass family(Temptation's Trail)which introduces Jack's uncle, tracker for the Texas Rangers. With only a few years apart in age, Jack and Harmon remain close through out the whole series, the darkness of their pasts intertwining. And believe it or not, Emily Marcus has a tie in there as well, even though she had never met Jack or Harmon before.

The story picks up and doesn't stop. I recommend it to all Western/Historical romance fans. Indian beliefs and traditions are involved, Jack's mother and uncle being half Apache. Jack and Emily fall in love quick, the hard part is overcoming the odds. You'll laugh, you may cry, mainly..if you pick up this book, you'll be hooked. Just be careful, Jack Bass is very easy to fall in love with. Enjoy!!

To Know the Sea is a treasure, a new classic - in this beguiling story a determined and spunky heroine pursues her dream, to know the sea, with help from an unexpected source - written in charming prose this book is a must for all young girls - the multicultural pictures are vibrant and add to the story's spirited message - this buoyant story is a must read.

This story provides the reader with strong, honest characters and an uplifting story line. Dana Ransom has taken authentic feelings and created believable characters. The story shows the many facets of people and provides an entertaining look at human interaction. It was an entertaining and relaxing way to spend an afternoon.

I'm an amateur watercolour artist living near Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. My great joy in recent years is that my daughter has begun to sell her watercolours from her home -- a boat in Alaska, where she fishes and hunts with her husband and their black Labrador Retriever. She has sold numerous commissioned dog portraits but is now expanding into local scenes of the commercial fishing boats in action, with the amazing mountains and glaciers of her area looming large in her work. I have long been aware of the work of Ron Ranson, and was excited to discover this collection of paintings (which, it should be noted, didn't include any of his own), with high quality reproductions of a variety of top-ranking watercolourists in England and America. Fifteen artists (most of them known personally to the author) such as Tony Couch, Philip Jamison and Douglas Treasure are included with brief 'snapshots' of their life, together with Ranson's incisive comments on the paintings shown. The book will be the perfect Christmas gift for my daughter and will,I know,inspire her to expand her horizons. Would that I had had this when I was her age!

My seven-year-old daughter and I read together almost every night. In the past two years, no book (besides the Old Testament) has been her selection more than When the Whippoorwill Calls. The Blue Ridge family it depicts finds out the federal government is buying up their mountain to make way for the Blue Ridge Parkway. In the process, the seven-year-old protagonist learns a lesson of hope from the example of her father, who struggles with, but in the end adapts to, their move to the flatlands. The beauty of the story, though, is in its language. Like the mountain people she writes about, Ms. Ransom has a gift for expressing complicated sentiment in simple and concrete ways. After a number of readings, it dawned on me that I was reading good poetry. I should mention that the lllustrations are lovely and the layout of the pages is attractive and interesting.

Who Owns America? is a collection of informative, challenging, iconoclastic and articulate essays on the nature of industrialism, corporate capitalism, the bureaucratic state, private property, the "good" society, and neo-Jeffersonian visions of a decentralized America. From David Cushman Coyle's "The Fallacy of Mass Production", to Frank Lawrence Owsley's "The Foundations of Democracy", to James Muir Waller's "America and Foreign Trade", to Robert Penn Warren's Literature as a Symptom", to Hilaire Belloc's "The Modern Man", these and many more observant and insightful commentaries deserve as wide a readership as possible and are highly recommended to students of American politics, economics, and history.

"Ransom" is a wonderful book. Unlike other romance authors, Julie Garwood knows how to tell a story, instead of just writing detailed sex scenes. This book is the sequel of "The Secret" which is written about the romance between Ian and Judith, the parents of the little boy Alec who was responsible for the meeting between Gillian and Brodick.

The characters were well defined. The painful past made Gillian strong and courageous. Brodick, though a fearsome warrior, possessed a tender and gentle heart. His character was somewhat different from the description in "The Secret", but this book took place 8 years later and therefore, didn't really present itself as a problem. I love those Buchanan men, they were very protective and possessive of Gillian and I think they were real cute!
Contrary to what other viewers belief, I think that it was not the intention of the author to develop two separate love stories in this book. Make no doubt that this book was all about Brodick and Gillian. I think that the reason of the detailed description on Ramsey and Bridgid's first meeting was to lay groundwork to the treachery and deception. I believe that the mystery of Christen's identity also played an important role in the detailed description on the secondary characters. Personally, I don't really care about Ramsey and Bridgid's romance as much as Brodick and Gillian's. I think it's refreshing to read a novel in which the hero of the story knew his own intention and not 'mean'; most of the author of romance seemed to think it was necessary that heros don't know their own hearts. (No wonder Bridgid though men were stupid.)

I was surprised by the outcome of Christen and Gillian's meeting and must applaud for Garwood. Though I am sorry about the outcome, it made the story more realistic and unpredictable.

With all the treachery and deception, this book was full of wits, too. I laughed so much when I was reading the part involving the wedding. It was terribly funny and I appreciated the humor.

I strongly recommend this book to you. If you like to read love stories and do not like to be overloaded with sexual descriptions, I suggest you read the novels by Julie Garwood.

I really liked this one! I read it, loved it, then proceeded to re-read The Secret (the first introduction of Brodick and Ramsey) as well as my entire Garwood collection (with the exception of the Roses series - yuck!). A minor downfall in the beginning -- there is maybe a little too much information to grasp. But alas, things pick up as Brodick and Gillian meet. I enjoyed Brodick's character as I did in The Secret. I had a constant silly grin on my face throughout the majority of the book and much to my own embarassment, laughed out loud quite a few times. I did find Gillian a bit questionable, but could deal with that. She was fearless and courageous one minute and accident prone the next? Whatever. I enjoyed the incessant dialogue and witty bantering of these characters much more than reading paragraph upon paragraph of blah, blah, blah. There were things I didn't understand such as the loose end of Gillian's nightmares and a few other things.

I agree that Ramsey and Brigid deserved their own novel and would have preferred the hint of a relationship forming in Ransom only to have it blossom into their own special story. All things considered, I highly enjoyed this book and did NOT want it to end, therefore I had to read it two more times! Thank you Ms. Garwood!

As usual with Julie Garwood's books, I had to make time to sit down and read it in one sitting. I was a little disappointed with Come The Spring, but Ransom is fabulous.

What fun to read Brodick's and Ramsey's stories. Everyone I know has been clamoring for this book from the instant they realized Brodick and Ramsey from The Secret had gone to England to find brides as perfect as Judith. How wonderful to revisit with Iain and Judith Maitland, Frances Catherine and Patrick, Winslow and Isabelle,etc. It's a tribute to Ms. Garwood's writing ability how sad you feel when it's mentioned in passing that one of the older characters from The Secret had died; these characters are alive.

I would've liked Ramsey and Bridgid to have had their own book, but you can't have everything. If you haven't read The Secret, you don't know what you're missing. Read it immediately and then read Ransom; both are on my "keeper" shelf.

While on business in Cartagena, Columbia, American businessman Matthew Rey is kidnapped and a $3 million ransom is demanded for his safe return. His son Nick is a novice attorney who attempts to free him. Nick is thwarted in his efforts by a lawsuit originating from his own firm against his family. It seems that his father had taken out a $3 million kidnapping insurance policy, and it looks as if the whole kidnapping is a set up by Matthew Rey to commit fraud. Worse yet, the FBI won't help because they believe Matthew is a drug smuggler and is somehow in cahoots with his Nicaraguan business partner. Since Nick cannot raise the money or negotiate his father's release through the usual methods, he enlists the help of a beautiful hostage negotiator, Alex Cabrera, as well as his former fiancee Jenna, who still has feelings for him.

A KING'S RANSOM is a taunt, intelligent addition to the genre. Grippando has written a hot thriller, filled with plenty of action and plot twists. This is an author I would not hesitate to read again.

This is my first time reading Grippando, and I thought A King's Ransom was a definite cut above the average thriller out there today, especially anything written by Grisham and his many clones. Its attraction lies in its combination of the legal thriller with a pure action story set against the exotic locales of Columbia and Nicaragua.

Its a story of Nick Rey, a young Florida lawyer, whose father, Matthew, has been kidnapped by a sadistic band of Columbian geurillas. The ransom demand (3,000,000.00) is the exact amount of Matthew's recent "K & R" (kidnap and ranson) insurance policy and the insurance company, who happens to be a client of Nick's law firm, suspects fraud and denies coverage. Nick fights battles on all fronts, with the insurance company, with his former firm (from which he's been fired),with his former mentor and, of course, with the kidnappers.

The prose is brisk and the plot develops nicely, but Grippando seems to want to cover too many bases here (and, in the process, uses too many cliches), from Nick's past rift with his father that needs fixing, to his father's suspicious (and undeveloped) business partner, to Nick's rift with his ex-finance, who's the only lawyer in town who will represent him in the legal fight with the insurance company, to the sexy and exotic "Alex," the hostage negotiator with, what else, a past.

I found the parallel story of Nick's father's experiences at the hands of the kidnappers more compelling than Nick's maneuverings at home. All in all, despite its cliches and more than passing resemblances to The Firm and the recent movie, Proof of Life, A King's Ransom is a very satisfying and enjoyable read. I am looking forward to reading other works by this author.

I've only read a couple of James Grippando's books, but all of them have been totally awesome. "A King's Ransom" may be the best one yet.

Nick Rey is a young attorney working at an enormous law firm in Miami. His law firm has connections all over the country and the world, so it appears he's fast on his way to moving up the ladder. That all changes when his father, Matthew, is kidnapped while in Colombia on business. Nick finds out that his father had a secret kidnapping insurance policy, but then the insurance comapny won't pay up. Something's going on, but Nick has no idea what. He immediately goes to work trying to track down answers and get his father back to the states safely, but someone powerful may be holding him back.

This book was an incredible read. It kept my mind moving a hundred miles an hour. It's full of suspense and the mystery keeps getting bigger. It provides a glimpse into the world of Colombian revolutionaries and what happens when they act. Grippando did an excellent job researching this book. He realy seemed to know all about what happens when an American is kidnapped in South America. The descriptions are vividly realistic, and I just couldn't put this book down. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.