Books published by River Grove Books

POLO IS NOT JUST THE GAME OF KINGS. IT''S A BLOOD SPORT IN THE PERFECT 10.The final of the US Open is just days away, and Juancito Harrington, the world''s best polo player, is found dead in a posh Palm Beach hotel suite.The good news is that Palm Beach P.D. quickly identifies the trophy wife of Juancito''s team owner as the primary suspect. The bad news is that everyone in polo knows that Kelly Dick doesn''t murder her lovers. She recycles them.Only one man can crack the case: Rick Hunt, a West Point graduate currently assigned to the White House. Hunt is no detective, but he''s a lifelong polo player who needs no introduction to the world''s top pros. Or his ex-fiancée. Or her new boyfriend, an old teammate with a score to settle.

Unleash Your Inner Company distills John Chisholm’s four decades of successful entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley into ten steps to discover, launch, and scale the ideal business for you. You will learn how to:• Mobilize your passions and perseverance to reinforce each other and achieve your goals• Discover unsatisfied human and customer needs in those areas where you have natural advantages• Match those needs with your resources and strengths (your “STARS”) to assess which needs fit you best• Improve those fits by acquiring and developing the right resources and strengths; differentiate yourself by being not better, but different, from competitors, even well-established ones• Innovate by combining things you already know in novel ways• Partner with firms and individuals so you and your business can focus on what you do best• Evaluate your options and choose the best one for you• Launch and scale up your successful business, uniquely tailored to you and your strengths.Along the way, you will discover:• That you have many more resources and advantages for success than you realize • How and when to choose a co-founder and team members• How to avoid competitors, and thus gain time and space to get established• How to find, nurture, and ride positive feedback loops within yourself, with your team members, and among your customers• How to build and maintain your self-confidence despite setbacks• If, when, and how to raise money• How to evolve and scale your business, no matter how modest, into a large enterprise, if you so desire• When to comply with, or circumvent, or oppose regulations that impede the formation or growth of your business• What you can learn from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Uber.You will learn from the author’s mistakes—as many as he was able to squeeze into the 400 pages of this book—so you don’t make the same ones.Regardless of your background, location, interests, and passions, the timeless and universal insights, principles, anecdotes, and exercises of Unleash Your Inner Company will inspire and guide you from your first steps, through every kind of obstacle, to the ultimate success of your venture.

Enable Your Buyers for Faster B2B SalesWhat drives B2B sales most effectively—focusing on what you do as a salesperson or on what your champion and the buying group does behind the scenes? The latest research makes it clear that the B2B buying process has become too complex and difficult and buyers today crave companies and experienced guides who make the process easier. Focus on making buying easier and your prospects will buy from you faster and more often.Sales teams can shorten the sales cycle by as much as 68% when they learn to equip their champion—the people promoting their solution inside the target account—using the DEEP-C™ buyer enablement framework: Discover, Engage, Equip, Personalize, and Coach. This book guides sales leaders and professionals through the process of moving from a sales-focused approach to a buyer enablement model that reduces buying friction and accelerates the purchase.

Gary Dickson is an inveterate traveler, an avid gourmet, and a Francophile sans merci. He received his B.A. degree in history while in the United States and then attended graduate school at l’Université de Lausanne, Faculté des Lettres to study l’histoire in Switzerland. In addition to his poetry, Gary has written two novels: An Improbable Pairing, a 1960s historical romance, and its romantic thriller sequel, A Spy with Scruples. Gary lives in Los Angeles with his wife Susie where he continues to write.

The unintended consequences of acing a test . . . or when all else fails, try blackmailIn July of 1964, after marrying in Paris, Desirée and Scott Stoddard are honeymooning in the South of France when their idyll is interrupted by a notice from Scott’s draft board advising him that his status is being reviewed. Desirée, the former French countess who is already three months pregnant, doesn’t understand why her new husband, an American, must traipse off to some military base in Germany to be tested. Scott’s remarkable scores on the tests attract the attention of the CIA, and Scott, much to his dismay, becomes part of their world of intrigue and deceit. How can he get back to the life that he and Desirée had envisioned? When all else fails, blackmail is the answer.A Spy with Scruples plunges readers into the complicated political world of Cold War Europe. From neutral Switzerland to the aristocratic salons of Paris to bombed-out Berlin, Scott ingratiates some and offends more. But he has a plan.

Kelly Mills Johnson becomes restless in her thirty-ninth year. An appetite for more forces her to take stock of her middling middle-American existence and her neighbors’ seemingly perfect lives. Her marriage to a successful attorney has settled into a comfortable routine, and being the mother of two adorable sons has been rewarding. But Kelly’s own passions lie wasted. She eyes with envy the lives of her two best friends, Kathryn and Charlotte, both beautiful, successful businesswomen who seem to have it all. Kelly takes charge of her life, devising a midlife makeover plan.From page one, Kelly’s witty reflections, self-deprecating humor, and clever tactics in executing that plan—she places Post-it notes all over her house and car—will have readers laughing out loud. The next instant, however, they might rant right along with Kelly as her commitment to a sullen, anorexic teenager left on her doorstep tries her patience or as she deflects the boozy advances of a divorced neighbor. Readers will need to keep the tissue box handy, too, as Kelly repairs the damage she inflicted on a high school friend; realizes how deeply her husband, Patrick, understands and loves her; and ultimately grows into a woman empowered by her own blend of home and career.Here, Home, Hope will surely appeal to readers of chick lit and other women’s fiction titles who are ready to transition into something new in their own life.

A Balanced ApproachEmotional awareness is critical for entrepreneurs throughout every stage of the business life cycle. As their businesses begin and then mature, entrepreneurs face increasingly complex emotional challenges that they must navigate as they take their businesses from an idea to the maturation period of growth and expansion, to succession planning and divestiture, to the day they step aside. John Waldron has leveraged his own entrepreneurial experience and that of the hundreds of business owners he has counseled to build an essential framework that addresses the important balance between the tangible and intangible complexities of each stage of The Entrepreneurial Journey.To achieve the greatest level of success, you have to balance the technical with the emotional. The Entrepreneurial Journey will help potential entrepreneurs navigate both, so so that they may bring their businesses to their full potential.

A business parable that teaches the value of cultivating multiple streams of income—the surest, most achievable means of creating generational wealth.The Honey Bee tells the story of Noah—a disappointed, disaffected salesman who feels like his life is going nowhere until the day he has a chance encounter with a man named Tom Barnham, the beekeeper. In his charming, down-home way, Tom the “Bee Man” teaches Noah and his wife Emma how to grow their personal wealth using the lessons he learned from his beekeeping passion.Full of concrete lessons delivered through chapter after chapter of engaging vignettes, each of which includes actionable advice for new or aspiring entrepreneurs. Workbook-style sections at the end of each chapter help bring the lessons home, including questions to help you apply the lessons to your own business, and links to rich digital resources for even more information on how to get started creating your own multiple streams of income.

You’ve got yourself a startup! But now where’s the funding going to come from?In this day and age, creating a startup seems to be an easy process. After some meetings with an equally passionate cofounder, you discover you have a creative idea, the outline of a business plan, and a willingness to spend nights and weekends doing really hard work. But most startup founders have never run a company—much less had to secure funding to reach crucial milestones. If you don’t get the funding you need, you may either make progress at a snail’s pace, or you may have to give up altogether.With stakes this high, improving a startup founder’s odds of fundraising successfully—even just a little—can make a huge difference in the outcome of a venture. In this informative and enlightening book, Gordon Daugherty demystifies the fundraising process that takes place during the early phases of a startup’s evolution.Every founder cares about the valuation they will be able to negotiate with investors, and anyone who has attempted fundraising has encountered numerous debates about the valuation they’re asking for. Startup Success dedicates a whole chapter to negotiating valuation, which, in the end, involves a serious combination of art and science to execute effectively.Daugherty’s book serves as a valuable educational and planning tool for use before the fundraising campaign begins and a reference guide for interacting and negotiating with investors after things get underway. Startup Success is written in a logical sequence that follows the general life cycle of planning and executing a successful fundraising campaign. Actionable tips, tricks, and aha realizations will have readers dog-earing pages and highlighting passages for future reference. The author’s own words tell it all: “I decided to write something different that best exploits the gray in my hair and the hard lessons I’ve learned.” Any startup founder, advisor, or angel investor—regardless of their experience level—will come away with improved skills and an increased knowledge base.Gordon Daugherty is a seasoned business executive, entrepreneur, startup advisor, and investor. He has made more than 200 investments in early-stage companies as a venture fund manager and angel investor, and he has been involved in raising more than $80 million in growth and venture capital.

The Life You Want is Closer Than You ThinkOur wild world is, in many ways, backward and upside down; we've created a culture that supports poor health, loneliness, stress, emotional angst, and polarity. But buckle your seatbelt. Laurie Warren is a change agent, kicking our limiting "common but not normal" cultural mores to the curb and working to shift both our personal and societal approach in favor of empowered well-being.Wild World, Joyful Heart is both a rally cry and a guidebook for attaining the physical, emotional, and mental health that you deeply desire. Will you use your mind as a bridge or a barrier? This question is the thread that you'll follow through Laurie's extensive research, clinical experience, and unique storytelling style to create better health and more joy in your everyday life. This book is an invitation to bravely inhabit your life in a whole new way-while your joy, contentment, and wholeness reverberate out to stitch up our wounded world.

Perry Robins, MD, saved our skin-literally.The world-renowned surgeon took on an enemy of unimaginable power: the sun. At a time when most people worshipped a sun-kissed glow, the medical techniques and messages Dr. Robins promoted had the power to affect every human being on the planet.Born in Newark during the Great Depression, Perry Robins never had it easy, but he always made the best of it. Struggling in school with dyslexia and grueling part-time jobs, being drafted by the Army and sent overseas-none of the obstacles life threw his way could slow him down.After his medical training from Germany to NYU, Dr. Robins studied a type of skin cancer surgery invented by Frederic Mohs, MD, at the University of Wisconsin. He brought the technique back to NYU and established the first fellowship program in Mohs surgery. Despite resistance, Dr. Robins upended conventional wisdom in the medical community by showing dermatologists that they could be skin cancer surgeons.Today, about 40 percent of all doctors who specialize in Mohs surgery were either trained by Dr. Robins or by the doctors he trained. The Skin Cancer Foundation he founded and helped raise millions for continues to spread his message, educating the public on skin cancer and the dangers of sun exposure.

The gripping story of Gracianna—a French-Basque girl forced to make impossible decisions after being recruited into the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied ParisGracianna is inspired by true events in the life of Trini Amador’s great-grandmother, Gracianna Lasaga. As an adult, Amador was haunted by the vivid memory of finding a loaded German Luger tucked away in a nightstand while wandering his great-grandmother’s home in Southern California. He was only four years old at the time, but the memory remained and he knew he had to explore the story behind the gun.Decades later, Amador would delve into the remarkable odyssey of his Gracianna’s past, a road that led him to an incredible surprise. In Gracianna, Amador weaves fact and fiction to tell his great-grandmother’s storyGracianna bravely sets off to Paris in the early 1940s—on her way to America, she hopes—but is soon swept into the escalation of the war and the Nazi occupation of Paris.  After chilling life-and-death struggles, she discovers that her missing sister has surfaced as a laborer in Auschwitz. When she finds an opportunity to fight back against the Nazis to try to free her sister, she takes it—even if it means using lethal force.As Amador tells the imagined story of how his great-grandmother risked it all, he delivers richly drawn characters and a heart-wrenching page-turner that readers won’t soon forget. 

This third book in Jane Marlow’s Petrovo Series brims with pathos, poignancy, and humor.In the mid-1800s, naïve fifteen-year-old Anna finds herself pregnant out of wedlock and is banished from her tiny Russian village of Petrovo. The homeless, illiterate girl makes her way to Moscow, only to discover that the city’s frozen streets are filled with women as destitute and vulnerable as she is. Lacking other options, young Anna follows their example and accepts a yellow ticket—the government’s license to work as a prostitute. She takes up residence in a brothel, whose veneer of faded magenta silk, flaking gold leaf, and faux diamonds disguises the age-old perils of disease, unwanted pregnancy, and savage abuse that will mark her future.Anna eventually comes to grips with the realization that she must escape from her life as a prostitute before she either meets a premature death or becomes a used-up whore living in the city’s cockroach- and maggot-filled gutters. With an indomitable spirit and the help of three men (a grandpa intent upon bringing revolution to Russia, a young accountant who views life from a wheel chair, and a wealthy banker who rekindles her deeply buried dreams), she embarks on a most unusual path to a new life.