Books by Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
A Fast and Brutal Wing
She leapt, a perfect arc, lithe muscles propelling her through the air, leaving what was human behind, clothes fallen to the ground. She was cat, claws unsheathed, teeth bared. Loving the hunt, the chase, the pounce and the strike, her teeth sinking into flesh, blood spurting in her mouth.Animal justice: ruthless and swift. And totally satisfying. In their chaotic, human world, the one thing that held this brother and sister together was their shared private knowledge: their ability to change from human to animal, and back. Their ability to transform. Or was that a lie to tear them apart?
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A Fast and Brutal Wing
She leapt, a perfect arc, lithe muscles propelling her through the air, leaving what was human behind, clothes fallen to the ground. She was cat, claws unsheathed, teeth bared. Loving the hunt, the chase, the pounce and the strike, her teeth sinking into flesh, blood spurting in her mouth.
Animal justice: ruthless and swift. And totally satisfying.
A provocative, richly layered, and utterly compelling novel that asks the answerable: what is truth, and what does it mean to be human?
Niki and Emmet are siblings with a secret: their ability to change from human to animal, and back-their ability to transform-she to a cat, he to a hawk. Their mother is clueless, but how much does the elusive writer Slanger know? Is their classmate Doug as superficial as he seems? Is the psychiatrist a caretaker or an enemy? And what did she have to do with their father's disappearance?
Alternating 4 voices, paralleling the transformations of adolescence itself, this book is also about the transformative power of great literature, on the border between the darkest fantasy and our own reality.
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Dumb Love
From School Library Journal Grade 9 Up–Carlotta, pleasantly plump (like Botticelli's Venus) and amazingly well adjusted given her crazy life, is struggling to settle in after moving to a small mountain town. She aspires to be a romance novelist, and when she joins the writing circle at the high school, she expects to let her talent shine. Unfortunately, the other two students in the group continuously stall her progress. Walker offers nothing but insults and Andrea keeps stealing her characters. Throughout this tale, Carlotta falls in and out of love; deals with the antics of her mother (who remains offstage) and her mother's endearing live-in boyfriend (who is a recovering alcoholic); and handles the issue of her absent father. While it is funny at times and has heartwarming moments, this meandering tale is hard to follow. Plot threads are picked up and then dropped, making it seem as though part of the story is missing, or that it is unfinished, and the characters never quite develop enough to fully engage readers.–Emily Garrett, Naaman Forest High School, Garland, TX Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product Description What's funnier than true love? Dumb love, that's what. Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson offers an exuberant romp -- somewhere between a screwball comedy of errors and a modern fairy tale.In the tiny town on Brewerton, the minister needs an assistant for his Loney Hearts advice column, someone with a sympathetic, open heart and a confidential, closed mouth. Who better, Carlotta decides, than a Love Expert like herself. In fact, once Pete, her soon-to-be boyfriend -- he just doesn't know it yet -- gets a look at her, she'll be the syrup on his pancake, the cream in his coffee, the crabcake at his clam bake! All she has to do is get rid of her competition: Bernice, Andrea...and Fate. From Booklist Gr. 8-11. In a complete reversal from her recent, haunting fantasy, A Fast and Brutal Wing (2004), Johnson's latest is a romantic comedy, peopled with hilarious, wholly unique individuals. In a small Appalachian town, high-schooler Carlotta yearns for Pete, a teen who works at the local garage. Her ploys to win his heart are paralleled in her novel-in-progress, an ever-changing mix of ghost story, romance, thriller, and western. Johnson plays with genres, too, as she embroils Carlotta in slapstick scenes of romantic pursuits, rivalries with classmates, and affectionate, sometimes misguided parenting from her winningly imperfect guardian, her "father-in-heart" if not "father-in-fact." The plot, split between Carlotta's wildly imagined family and romantic schemes, isn't the strength here. What will appeal most are the unforgettable characters and Johnson's southern-tinged prose, which mixes the florid language of romance novels with perfectly timed comedy. An unusual, laugh-out-loud romance with particular appeal to aspiring writers and those who, like Carlotta, are amply proportioned. Gillian EngbergCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson is the author of three highly regarded novels for teens: The Parallel Universe of Liars, selected as an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, and Target and A Fast and Brutal Wing, both selected as ALA Best Books for Young Adults. She lives in Germantown, Maryland
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Gone
by Lisa Gardner, Mo Hayder, Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Kit Craig
From New York Times bestseller Lisa Gardner, author of Alone and The Killing Hour, comes a thriller that goes from heartbreaking to heartstopping in the blink of an eye.…
When someone you love vanishes without a trace, how far would you go to get them back?
For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it’s the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver’s seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Conner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate.
Did one of the ghosts from Rainie’s troubled past finally catch up with her? Or could her disappearance be the result of one of the cases they’d been working–a particularly vicious double homicide or the possible abuse of a deeply disturbed child Rainie took too close to heart? Together with his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Pierce is battling the local authorities, racing against time, and frantically searching for answers to all the questions he’s been afraid to ask.
One man knows what happened that night. Adopting the alias of a killer caught eighty years before, he has already contacted the press. His terms are clear: he wants money, he wants power, he wants celebrity. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, Rainie will be gone for good.
Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it’s still not enough.
As the clock winds down on a terrifying deadline, Pierce plunges headlong into the most desperate hunt of his life, into the shattering search for a killer, a lethal truth, and for the love of his life, who may forever be…gone.
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Gone
by Lisa Gardner, Mo Hayder, Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Kit Craig
From New York Times bestseller Lisa Gardner, author of Alone and The Killing Hour, comes a thriller that goes from heartbreaking to heartstopping in the blink of an eye.…
When someone you love vanishes without a trace, how far would you go to get them back?
For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it’s the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver’s seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Conner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate.
Did one of the ghosts from Rainie’s troubled past finally catch up with her? Or could her disappearance be the result of one of the cases they’d been working–a particularly vicious double homicide or the possible abuse of a deeply disturbed child Rainie took too close to heart? Together with his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Pierce is battling the local authorities, racing against time, and frantically searching for answers to all the questions he’s been afraid to ask.
One man knows what happened that night. Adopting the alias of a killer caught eighty years before, he has already contacted the press. His terms are clear: he wants money, he wants power, he wants celebrity. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, Rainie will be gone for good.
Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it’s still not enough.
As the clock winds down on a terrifying deadline, Pierce plunges headlong into the most desperate hunt of his life, into the shattering search for a killer, a lethal truth, and for the love of his life, who may forever be…gone.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Gone
by Lisa Gardner, Mo Hayder, Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Kit Craig
Praised as a maestro of the sinister” by the New York Daily News, Mo Hayder delivers her most suspenseful novel to date. By turns thrilling and horrifying, Gone follows the investigation of a brilliant and twisted carjacker with a disturbing game to play.
Jack Caffery’s newest case seems like a routine carjacking, a crime he’s seen plenty of times before. But as the hours tick by and his investigation morphs into a nightmare, he realizes the sickening truth: the thief wasn’t after the car, but the eleven-year-old girl in the backseat. Meanwhile police diver Sergeant Flea Marley is pursuing her own theory of the case, and what she finds in an abandoned, half-submerged tunnel could put her in grave danger. The carjacker is always a step ahead of the Major Crime Investigation Unit, toying with their minds in taunting letters and ready to strike again. As the chances for his victims grow slimmer, Jack and Flea race to fit the pieces together in time.
Gone is Mo Hayder at her terrifying best. Each dark and captivating twist reveals a new dimension to this tight-knight plot, burrowing deeper into the chilling and clever world Mo Hayder creates.
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Gone
by Lisa Gardner, Mo Hayder, Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Kit Craig
Michael and his siblings try to convince themselves that their missing mother will return, but as the day comes to an end, they begin to suspect that she has met with foul play. Reprint.
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Gone
by Lisa Gardner, Mo Hayder, Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Kit Craig
Gonealternates between the first person voice of Stella Vanderzee, a California freeway flyer with an unfinished dissertation on Sylvia Plath, and letters written by Judith (Juju) Vanderzee, Stella's aunt and the one-time lover of Stella's mother. Stella is searching for a Winslow Homer painting supposedly left to her by her rich paternal grandfather. Unaware that the painting is gone before her search begins, she sees it as compensation for the loss not only of her idyllic childhood in small town America, but also of her mother, a one-eyed multi-media artist, who she believes committed suicide. Stella, accompanied by Skip, her opium addicted lover and former student, resolutely seeks what she believes is hers. Her assumptions-about her grandfather's mistreatment of her mother, about her mother's failure as an artist, about sexuality and desire-are juxtaposed with the history recounted in her aunt's unsent letters. Goneplays a hide and seek game between desire and loss, giving form to what has been lost even as it undoes what it retrieves.
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Gone
by Lisa Gardner, Mo Hayder, Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, Elisabeth Sheffield, Kit Craig
No more pity love for Connor, from aunts and neighbors, from missing mothers and fathers. From drunks. No, this time the real thing is his. He just has to take it. Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson, known for "riveting" fiction (Kirkus Reviews, starred review of Target), digs deep into the heart of a forbidden relationship. Sometimes, she tells us, loneliness can send a boy down a dangerous path. Sometimes, it can take a while to find the way back.
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