Bøger af Jo Barney

Ellie is a crabby old woman who cleans graffiti off local mailboxes. When she meets Sarah, a black-haired teenager in Goth garb and makeup, neither imagines that they will join forces to stop a psychopathic killer of homeless young people in the neighborhood park and forest. From the moment Sarah sees her dead friend Peter's athletic shoe poking out from a pile of curbside leaves as she helps Ellie wipe off mailbox graffiti, she knows an insane man disguised as a pirate is looking for her. Ellie receives a threatening phone call and understands someone's out to get her too, probably the same pirate. Concern for the kids this killer calls his family leads Sarah, frightened, alone, through the trackless woods to a hidden camp in the county forest where eight scared runaways huddle around a sparking campfire. A few days later, concern for Sarah takes Ellie, armed with a butcher knife, to the same camp. Graffiti Grandma, is told through the eyes of Ellie, Sarah, a cop named Matt, and a man who calls himself Starkey, and the histories of these characters, their loves and losses, are vital in the frantic search for a killer who targets teenagers living on the streets of two Northwest towns. This gritty, shocking path leads them to a murderer with blood on his hands, a gold ring in his ear, and a note from his long-lost mother.With fear as a backdrop, the unlikely relationship of Sarah and Ellie matures into acceptance, then into friendship, and then into even more as each discovers she needs a family to replace the one she lost.Along with the shocking look into the lives of homeless teenagers and the sad beginnings of a serial killer, Graffiti Grandma carries an important message for it readers: Family is the engine that drives our lives, whether it's the one we find ourselves in or the one we seek.

SYNOPSIS: EDITH by Jo BarneyEdith, sixty-seven, wakes on Christmas morning to find her husband Art lying next to her, dead. Their shotgun wedding, forty-some years before, has not led to a happy-ever-after scenario. Edith is pretty sure she doesn't like Art, perhaps never has, and she is sure he has felt the same way, but their senses of responsibility have kept them together. Edith has focused on raising her son Brian, who has become successful in all parts of his life: job, marriage, fatherhood, and he is the joy of her life, just about the only one.Art is cremated and buried, but a mystery uncovered by an autopsy (required because of his sudden, unexpected demise) involves a high alcohol blood content, barbiturates, and Valium. Art, to Edith's knowledge, did not take sedatives or other psychotropic drugs, drank, yes, but not to excess. The insurance company questions the possibility of suicide and the resulting lower payout. Edith, so angry at her husband for guilt-punishing her and their son in this way, goes through the dead man's pockets, discovers a secret life involving bars, restaurants, a hotel, and as she follows up on the clues to this life--matchbooks, receipts, a pink Kleenex--she discovers Art's connection to an l8-year-old girl, dark-skinned, curly wig, and beautiful.She also meets the girl's social worker and Seth, a good-looking older black man who says she is handsome. Edith, trying to begin life over, is glad she's had her hair colored and a make-over.In the meantime, Brian's wife Kathleen reveals that Brian is coming home at night smelling like another woman, sometimes like citrus. He's taken large sums out of their savings account. Brian, the perfect son, apparently isn't so perfect. Edith hasn't liked Kathleen much, but their husbands' secret transgressions bring the two women closer, and they separately and together attempt to find out what is going on. The men, one dead, the other saying, "It's going to be all right," aren't talking.Their clues lead them to a bar, to a rib joint, to a high-class restaurant, and to the Hilton; Edith agrees to meet Latisha, who calls herself Art's friend, and who is about to go to college. Kathleen discovers more money missing and that Brian has a code in his datebook that indicates secret meetings. She goes to a lawyer, discusses divorce.Edith decides that Latisha, the black-haired teenager, may be either Art's lover or his daughter. Either way, she's had it with Art's secrets, but somewhere in her sleepless nights she also realizes that if he committed suicide, it could have been her fault, her un-love of him. A phone call from a kind policemen lessens her guilt about his death, but not about what Art might have been up to the nights he left the house late at night, coming home smelling like alcohol and one night, oranges. Seth and the social worker who has worked with Latisha are brother and sister. They know more than anyone what has gone on, what is happening at this point, including who Latisha's mother is. But not everything. They don't know who is paying for Latisha'scollege tuition and that both Art and Brian have been involved with Patsy, Latisha's mother. Brian isn't the perfect son Edith believed he was, and the mysteries settle into truths, as he confesses to his mother. Edith discovers that Art's pockets have revealed his secrets and have brought her a new life.

UPRUSH is a story, four stories actually, of four women who come together at a beach house to gossip, laugh and drink wine, only to discover that one of them is determined to kill herself. Madge, a writer, has reasons to do so and to ask for their help, and her friends, of course, have reasons to agree - or not. Madge's gift to them is four fictionalized stories of their lives, lives she has followed since they all graduated forty-some years before from a small college on the west coast. Her stories are not finished yet, just as the women are not yet finished. Their stories will not end, but will take new directions by the time the weekend is over. This novel celebrates the friendships that endure and nourish even after many years and many miles. This book is designated as a contemporary women's novel.

Mom has just died, is a patch of floating dust on the Columbia slough. We see the world through the eyes of her ex-hockey player son: divorced, depressed, ready to settle in for thirteen more weeks of unemployment checks, beer, and reading his mother''s books, not thinking, if he can help it, about what happened the last time he was on the ice. Along with her library, Mom has also left him her ancient iMac, a yellow Post-it, his name written in orange felt tip pen on it, stuck to its screen. Sam''s sister, helping him clear their mother''s house, assumes her sarcastic older-sister self, tells Sam that Mom is leaving him her brain. Instead, when he opens the file entitled THREE to GET READY, he finds three stories written by his mother, which will change everything.

Half of Jan Morrison's life is pure chaos, the half that has to do with her family, her sense of wifeliness, motherliness, womanliness. The other half, the half in which she counsels children whose own lives are as chaotic as hers, is the core of her days, and she is pretty successful at it even though she comes to school hungover, popping breath mints, unsympathetic toward little girls who suck their thumbs, and incapable of calling her autocratic principal by his first name. Asshole seems a much more fitting label.Then Mr. Peterson warns her that her days at James Lee Elementary School are numbered. RIFFING: reduction in force. Six weeks, to be exact. And her only hope of survival is to cure the six most problematic kids in the school or at least make them disappear from the principal's radar.Between her divorce and her unsympathetic school principal, Jan is almost as unstable as the kids in her Wednesday Club who are not following the rules and are creating havoc in classrooms and on the playground. Mr. Pedersen has given her the edict "cure these kids" or else, the else being her job. Jan knows she needs to cure herself while she's at it.The cure may be the Wednesday Club, except that every time it meets, one of its six members either flies away as a pterodactyl, hides behind the tightened strings of his hoody, continues to suck her slick thumb, steals a watch just for the heck of it, or just plain disappears. An irate parent, a scared principal, and Jan's inability to keep her mouth shut bring Jan's job to an abrupt end.However, a couple of good girl friends, a talented lover, a dog, the return of a son, and a belief in her own vision for messed up little kids keep Jan moving through the chaos, hope on the horizon.

The time is 1970; the place is the postwar housing development, the small bungalows built for returning veterans and for shipyard workers. F0r first time in their lives, families had some money. They can afford a new house, two bedrooms, one bath, yards big enough to build a garage in. They begin again, this time without war. The neighborhood fills with working husbands and stay-at-home wives who have time to make friends over morning coffee and play tennis in the local park. The future looks good. But wars continue, not THAT war, but the one in Korea, then Vietnam, then the Middle East. When the first settlers move on, their old homes fill with new surges of veterans' families glad to have chances to begin again. Eleanor, white, meets her new neighbor, Patsy, black, through a break in the twenty year-old overgrown laurel hedge between their houses, planted by Eleanor's husband when they first moved in, . Different wars, different colors, different ages, similar struggles. Their lives entangle, like the limbs of the hedge between them. They have coffee, trim the hedge, begin a friendship that clears the path for hope and trust between the two women. Together they learn to deal with the unlucky hands thev have been dealt: war-scarred husbands, handicapped children, uncertain futures. When tragedy strikes, will they find solace in knowing they are sisters bound by blood?