Showing results by narrator "Hillary Huber" in All Categories

A woman visits a friend who is dying of cancer. Brilliant and stubborn, her friend makes a momentous request. She wishes to end her life on her own terms - and she wants the narrator's help. Stricken, she agrees. 'I promise,' says the friend, 'to make it as much fun as possible.' What follows is an extraordinary tale of a friendship put to the greatest test: to witness, unflinching, its end. It is also a portrait of the way we live now, in a world endlessly troubled by crises and the dramatically changing nature of human relationships in our time.

In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir", this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.

Susan B. Anthony Rabinowitz Gersten assumed her marriage was great—and why not? Jonah Gersten, M.D., a Park Avenue plastic surgeon, clearly adored her. He was handsome, successful, and a doting dad to their four-year-old triplets. So when Jonah is found dead in the Upper East Side apartment of a second-rate "escort," Susie is overwhelmed with questions.

Marilyn Johnson's Lives in Ruins is an absorbing and entertaining look at the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, and chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu. Her subjects share stories about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, Chinese woman warriors, sunken fleets, and mummies.

Psychologist Jodie Eckleberry-Hunt, author of Move on Motherf*cker, provides the tools to survive and thrive after a breakup in this empowering, BS-free guide. This seriously motivational guide mixes salty straight talk, humor, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and positivity to lead you to growth and recovery. Overcome self-defeat, smash the sh*t out of heartbreak, and get ready to move on, motherf*cker!

In Suzanne Palmieri's thrilling novel The Witch of Belladonna Bay, Bronwyn is forced to return home to Magnolia Creek, Alabama - a place she hasn't been since her mother, Naomi, died 14 years earlier - and the troubled family she left behind. With her brother Patrick behind bars for the murder of her childhood friend and her eccentric father, Jackson, at wit's end with her 11-year-old niece, Byrd, Bronwyn finds herself back at her childhood home, the Big House, and surrounded by ancient Magnolia trees dripping with Spanish moss.

After years of struggling in the Chicago theater scene, ambitious actress Kira Rascher finally lands the role of a lifetime. The catch? The mercurial Malcolm Mercer is the director, and he’s known for pushing his performers past their limits - on stage and off. Kira’s convinced she can handle Malcolm, but the theater’s cofounder, Joanna Cuyler, is another story.

The Light in the Piazza takes place in Italy in the summer of 1953. Margaret Johnson and her beautiful, twenty-six-year-old daughter, Clara, are touring the Tuscan countryside. While sightseeing, Clara meets a good-looking young Italian man, Fabrizio, and quickly embarks on a whirlwind romance with him, despite her mother's stern disapproval.

When a shipwrecked stranger washed up on the beach near research scientist Samantha Bryton's home, she was unaware that he was something more than human. He said his name was Turner Pascal - but Pascal was dead, killed in a car wreck. This man only held the remainder of Pascal's consciousness in a technologically enhanced humanoid body.

Climbing over adversity. In her groundbreaking memoir, Another Step Up the Mountain, Dianette tells of her unique experiences climbing the Seven Summits, participating in adventure races (including four Eco-Challenges and ultra marathons around the world), as she raised three wonderful children. Trying to survive a tumultuous marriage, Dianette felt empty and unhappy. However, everything changed when she discovered adventure racing.

Patsy MacLemoore, a history professor in her late 20s, has a brand-new Ph.D. from Berkeley and a wild streak. She wakes up in jail after an epic alcoholic blackout. "Okay, what'd I do?" she asks her lawyer and jailers. In fact, two Jehovah's Witnesses, a mother and daughter, are dead, run over in Patsy's driveway, and Patsy will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. She goes to prison, gets sober, and upon her release finds a new community (and a husband) in AA.

Five hundred years from now, ex-corporate mercenary Koko Martstellar is swaggering through an easy early retirement as a brothel owner on The Sixty Islands, a manufactured tropical resort archipelago known for its sex and simulated violence. Surrounded by slang-drooling boywhores and synthetic komodo dragons, Koko finds the most challenging part of her day might be deciding on her next drink. That is, until her old comrade Portia Delacompte sends a squad of security personnel to murder her.

Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn't perfect; yet she sees him through a three-month stint at Riker's Island, their bond growing tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a youth that took her to Turkey and other far-off places - and loves - around the world, admires her niece's spirit but worries that motherhood to four-year-old Oliver might complicate a difficult situation. Little does she know that Boyd is pulling Reyna into a smuggling scheme across state lines, violating his probation.

Off the coast of Georgia, near Savannah, generations have been tempted by strange blue lights in the sky near an island called Lyra. At the height of WWII, impressionable young Elle Ranier leaves New York City to forge a new life together on the island with her new husband, Simon. There they will live for decades, raising a family while waging a quixotic campaign to find the source of the mysterious blue offshore light—and the elusive minerals rumored to lurk beneath the surface.

It’s June 2012. The magical and slightly cultish River Run swim club is alive with the spirit of fun competition when a perfect storm brews between team moms and best friends Gillian Cloud and Kristy Weinstein. The ghost of family addiction has turned up, looming over their carefully planned pasta parties, tie-dye nights, and pep rallies, forcing them to face their unresolved childhood trauma. Gillian responds by trying to control everyone around her while Kristy relapses into her dangerous addiction to love.

Kate knew immediately what to do with it: open a cider house. But her hopeful plans fall far from the tree when she finds the body of the orchard manager, Carl Randolph, leaving her to figure out who is at the core of this murder. She had been in correspondence with Carl, who had agreed with her brilliant idea of opening a cider house. But not everyone is so quick to buy what she was selling—Uncle Stan’s lawyer, Robert Larabee, paints a less rosy financial outlook of the orchard’s past, present, and future.

Something sits in a bunker lab buried 50 feet below the grounds of Lakehurst Naval Air Station. The product of the Lange-Tür technology confiscated from the Germans after World War II occupies a chamber of steel-reinforced ballistic glass. Despite experimentation for nearly three-quarters of a century, no one knows what it is, but illegal human research reveals what it can do. Humans with special abilities have been secretly collected - abilities that can only have come from whatever occupies the underground bunker in Lakehurst.

In this raw and redemptive debut memoir, Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores the silent suffering of the ballerina - and finds it emblematic of the violence that women quietly shoulder every day. For O'Connell Whittet, letting go of one meant confronting the other - only then was it possible to truly take flight.

Alexandra Van Ness has the perfect life. She lives in an idyllic resort town tucked away in the Rocky Mountains, shares a designer loft with her handsome boyfriend, Chase, and has her dream job working in child protection. But when her long-lost sister, Ruth, unexpectedly shows up at her door, Alex's perfect life is upended. Growing up, Ruth was always the troublemaker, pulling Alex into her messes. When trouble befalls a local child, both women are forced to confront the secrets they've promised to keep buried.

The mission was supposed to be simple. Infiltrate an enemy's stronghold outside Rome and eliminate its leader. For a Breed warrior as lethal as Ettore Selvaggio, aka "Savage", stealth assassinations are only one of his many coldhearted specialties. But the last thing Savage expects to find behind enemy lines - in his target's bed - is a woman he once adored.