Showing results by narrator "William Dufris" in All Categories

Nilly is the new kid in school, but he doesn’t let that or his tiny size slow him down. After all, he has his smart mouth, quick wits, and fearless nature to see him through. Nilly quickly makes two special friends: Lisa, a girl whose own best friend has just moved, and Doctor Proctor, who has (1) a tragic past (including lost love and betrayal) and (2) a talent for inventing things like industrial strength fart powder.

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is both a whimsical fantasy and a social satire chock-full of brilliant Twainisms. Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American---a Connecticut Yankee---by a stroke of fate is sent back into time to sixth-century England and ends up in Camelot and King Arthur's Court.

In an effort to improve relations with the Earth, the Colonial Union has invited a contingent of diplomats from that planet to observe Ambassador Abumwe negotiate a trade deal with an alien species. Then something very bad happens to one of the Earthings, and with that, the relationship between humanity’s two factions is on the cusp of disruption once more. It’s a race to find out what really happened, and who is to blame. "The Observers" is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories set in the Old Man's War universe.

When Hugh MacLeod was a struggling young copywriter living in a YMCA, he started to doodle on the backs of business cards while sitting at a bar. Those cartoons eventually led to a popular blog - gapingvoid.com - and a reputation for pithy insight and humor, in both words and pictures. MacLeod has opinions on everything from marketing to the meaning of life, but one of his main subjects is creativity. How do new ideas emerge in a cynical, risk-averse world?

A new school year and new friends for everyone's favorite classroom pet! Humphrey is excited to get back to Room 26 and see all his old classmates. But on the first day of school, a bunch of strange kids arrive and no matter how loudly he squeaks up, they don't realize they're in the wrong room! Finally Humphrey realizes that these kids are his new classmates, and he sets off to learn all about them.

In Cuba, Earl Swagger finds himself up to his neck in treacherous ambiguity where the old rules about honor and duty don't apply, and where Earl's target seems to have more guts and good luck than anyone else in Cuba.

Created more than 40 years ago by secret executive order, Red Cell Seven is a highly classified intelligence agency tasked with protecting America from the most catastrophic of terrorist attacks. But in the aftermath of a string of deadly terrorist attacks across the nation, Red Cell Seven finds itself drawn into a conspiracy that threatens to tear the organization apart. The president himself calls on Troy Jensen, a high-level clandestine operative and the son of Red Cell Seven’s current leader, to spearhead the hunt for the terrorists.

How is tonight different from all other nights? For Jacob Rappaport, a Jewish soldier in the Union army, it is a question his commanders have answered for him: on Passover in 1862, he is ordered to murder his own uncle, who is plotting to assassinate President Lincoln. After that night, will Jacob ever speak for himself?

John Carter, Prince of Helium, has been imprisoned for a Martian year, his wife in another cell - alive or dead, he doesn't know. In this continuation of the saga of the amazing world of Barsoom, the love story of Carter and Dejah Thoris - the red-skinned, oviparous princess - unfolds. Like all the tales in the series, fantasy and adventure combine in a style as malleable as dreams, exotic and dangerous and unending.

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

Although he is a decorated officer of the Mounted Police, Madoc Rhys' tin ear has long been an embarrassment to his musically fixated family. But when his father's orchestra needs a policeman, the Mountie gets a chance to make daddy proud. It began as pranks among the brass instruments, but something is rotten inside the Wagstaffe Symphony, and is about to graduate to something criminal. Called in to look into the tensions within the group, Madoc arrives just in time to see the French horn player keel over.

At the peak of his professional career, after having led the Asia Society for nearly a decade, Oxnam was haunted by periodic blackouts and episodic rages. After his family and friends intervened, Oxnam received help from a psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffery Smith, and entered a rehab center. It wasn't until 1990, during a session with Dr. Smith, that the first of Oxnam's 11 alternate personalities, an angry young boy named Tommy, suddenly emerged.

1893 is a tough year in Montana, and any job is a good job. When Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer sign on as ranch hands at the secretive Bar-VR cattle spread, they're not expecting much more than hard work, bad pay, and a comfortable campfire around which they can enjoy their favorite pastime: scouring Harper's Weekly for stories about the famous Sherlock Holmes.

Meet Cole: hapless space rogue, part-time smuggler, on a path to being full-time dead. His sidekick just stole his girlfriend. The galaxy's most hideous and feared bounty hunter wants to lay eggs in his brain. And the luxury space yacht Cole just hijacked turns out of be filled with interstellar do-gooders, one especially loathsome stowaway, and a cargo of freeze-dried orphans.

Holland and Niles Perry are identical thirteen-year-old twins. They are close, close enough, almost, to read each other's thoughts, but they couldn't be more different. Holland is bold and mischievous, a bad influence, while Niles is kind and eager to please, the sort of boy who makes parents proud. The Perrys live in the bucolic New England town their family settled centuries ago, and as it happens, the extended clan has gathered at its ancestral farm this summer to mourn the death of the twins' father in a most unfortunate accident.

The War of Spanish Succession is over, many sailors are out of work, and the thriving American colonies are quickly becoming the place of opportunity. For Sam Bellamy it is the opportunity to become the captain of his own ship.

There's a turning point in every war, but I didn't expect this one to be in my front yard. Allies of the Fae king have moved against the military stationed in Saint Charles. Our unsteady alliances are threatening to fracture, providing the water witches and vampires an opportunity to strike. With losses on both sides, things are far more dire than we realized, and the return of a long-forgotten enemy has made that clear. Thankfully, I know a very grumpy parrot.

Sam Blackman is an angry man. A chief warrant officer in the criminal investigation detachment of the U.S. military, he lost a leg in Iraq and has been outspoken in his criticism of his medical treatment. Then, ex-marine and fellow amputee Tikima Robertson walks into his hospital room, hinting that she has an opportunity for Sam to use his investigative skills. But before she can return, Tikima is murdered.

Captain Sophia Coloma of the Clarke has a simple task: Ferry around representatives from Earth in an aging spaceship that the Colonial Union hopes to sell to them. But nothing is as simple as it seems, and Coloma discovers the ship she’s showing off holds suprises of its own...and it’s not the only one with secrets. "Tales from the Clarke" is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories set in the Old Man's War universe.