Club Calf Shorthorn

Suspenseful, romantic, and filled with humor, "The Killing Club is a mystery "written" by popular "One Life to Live character Marcie Walsh with award-winning writer Michael Malone. Over a decade ago in the small town of Gloria, New Jersey, feisty, red-headed outcast Jamie Ferraro and eleven friends from Gloria Hart High School started a club. They would come up with ingenious ways to kill people they didn't like-pretty much everybody they knew-and write down these "pretend" murders in a Death Book. Calling themselves the Killing Club, the group of misfits voted on who was most likely to get away with their imaginary murders. It was harmless fun...or so they thought. Now, more than a decade later, Detective Sergeant Jamie Ferrara of the Gloria Police Department has a homicide investigation on her hands. The victim is Ben Tymosz, one of her fellow Killing Club members. And worse, Ben's death is an exact replica of a "murder" once dreamed up in the club. Jamie's boss (her fiance, Rod) is sure the death is just a ghoulish accident. But when the club reunites for Ben's funeral, the unimaginable happens: another murder, another Killing Club member dead, another crime copied from the Death Book. Soon, Jamie is getting death threats-anonymous notes with details only those in the club would know. Someone is targeting the Killing Club, and all signs point to one of their own. Jamie's oldest friends turn into suspects. In a race against time, Jamie must separate her teenage memories from her hardened cop's instincts and find the killer before everyone in the group is dead, including Jamie.

To media representatives, they're soup clubs. To young professionals new to a community or interested in making the right contacts, they may represent a chance to get ahead. To local charities, they're a source of funds. But groups such as the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs, according to Jeffrey Charles, have over time been a mirror reflecting changes within the American middle class. In this first full-length study of men's service clubs, Charles argues that they have played a crucial role in helping business and professional men adapt to corporate development and community change. Placing the clubs in the context of twentieth-century middle-class culture, Charles maintains that they represented the response of locally oriented, traditional middle-class men to societal changes. The groups emerged at a time when service was becoming both a middle-class and a business ideal. As voluntary associations, they represented a shift in organizing rationale, from fraternalism to service. The clubs and their ideology of service were welcome as a unifying force at a time when small cities and towns were beset by economic and population pressures. The clubs originally served to strengthen the community via local business activism, Charles states, but they also were agents for change that altered community traditions and helped place local practices in line with national trends. A chief target in the 1920s of cultural critics led by Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, the clubs later benefited from the conservative response to the New Deal and the cold war. Though they suffered during the turbulent 1960s, these clubs continued building international organizations that now claim memberships in themillions.