For nearly thirty years Lionel Richie has never looked back as a performer. From fronting his group the Commodores - the premier R&B pop unit of the seventies - he became the most popular singer/songwriter in the world by the eighties. A decade later he was the ultimate star entertainer with a 'nice guy' image. The "Lionel Richie" story is about a five-time Grammy winner who has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide. For nine consecutive years he had no 1 singles in America, a feat matched only by Irving Berlin. It is also the story of two broken marriages, personal insecurities, near-death experiences and an insight into the man behind a success story that broke the rules. "Lionel Richie" is the first book written about Lionel Richie and the Commodores and draws on Sharon Davis' unique access to the Motown archive, her numerous in depth interviews with Richie as well as her time as the Comodores' publicist.

A delightful collection of four funny little stories that will teach, inspire and amuse the young reader.

It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer's motive? The priest had married Stephenson's eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.
Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and "foreigners" as well. In one of the case's most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black.
Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.
"Davies takes us deep into the dark heart of the Jim Crow South, where she uncovers a searing story of love, faith, bigotry and violence. Rising Road is a history so powerful, so compelling it stays with you long after you've finished its final page."
--Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award-winning Arc of Justice
"This gripping history...has all the makings of a Hollywood movie. Drama aside, Rising Road also happens to be a fine work of history."
--History News Network

It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer's motive? The priest had married Stephenson's eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic.
Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and "foreigners" as well. In one of the case's most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black.
Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow.
"Davies takes us deep into the dark heart of the Jim Crow South, where she uncovers a searing story of love, faith, bigotry and violence. Rising Road is a history so powerful, so compelling it stays with you long after you've finished its final page."
--Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award-winning Arc of Justice
"This gripping history...has all the makings of a Hollywood movie. Drama aside, Rising Road also happens to be a fine work of history."
--History News Network

Lacey Chase knows love is a curse...it's the reason she has sacrificed everything to stand by her father while he devotes all of his time and attention to finding her mother, who abandoned them years ago. After the search relocates them to a small, isolated community in Virginia, she finds herself in an unfamiliar world-but not completely alone as she believed. It's hate at first sight when she meets her cocky new neighbor, who refuses to take no for an answer...a response that becomes harder to give when Zane awakens a part of her she never knew existed. Zane Nikolas knows something about curses...punished because of his ancestry, his very existence depends upon the consumption of human blood, an act which provides the only pleasure he is capable of experiencing. After discovering a single female residing nearby, he decides to add her to the group of women he regularly feeds upon-but finds her unreceptive to his advances. It's an unwelcome challenge that becomes a driving obsession when he realizes that Lacey alone is the gateway to a forbidden world...one filled with everything he's been denied.

A delightful collection of four funny little stories that will teach, inspire, and amuse the young reader.