Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Pickens" in All Categories

Now that Geraldine Porter is retired, she's got time to devote to her favorite craft. You'd think the world of shoe-box-sized Victorian shadowboxes and little ceramic bathtubs would be trouble free. But Gerry's problems are anything but tiny. As chairwoman of the local Dollhouse and Miniatures Fair and babysitter for her precocious granddaughter, Gerry's got enough to think about without the curious behavior of her friend Linda Reed.

Another state. Another city. Another dead-end job. A stellar FBI agent until tragedy set her adrift, Karen Pantelli finds herself working at a pizza joint in Billings, Montana, trying to ignore the increasing global unrest dominating the news, when three armed men walk through the door. Soon a shocking turn of events launches her on a cross-country quest for a former college classmate, an alluring but manipulative woman with just one goal in life: to marry rich. Very rich.

When Diana of the cursed house Bellatrix loses her life, she is forced to admit to the king of the underworld that she had not become the hero she promised him. He did not rage, nor smite her soul where she stood. The king’s only demand for resurrection was her attendance at Afterlife Academy, a rehabilitation center for failed heroes of history. A place where she can learn to control her destructive, bloodthirsty power. As she adapts to her new home, she unexpectedly encounters a godchild of Mars known as Calix.

Most cops have a past. A past they can speak of. A past they can share. But not Diane.... That is until one night a body is discovered on the highway close to her home. But Diane Larsen, a tough cop chick who has had to prove herself over and over to the cops she works with, is ordered by her new boss to investigate the one case that could be her undoing.

Keep your head up, put one foot in front of the other, and never stop. For Bunny Beckman, former cop-turned-stripper, that motto had always been enough to keep the gun out of her mouth. Now, her beliefs, and her life, will be challenged in a way she never even imagined as the dead rise with a hunger for the living. To survive, she must face the monsters outside, and the demons within.

Marcie is crazy in love with Dan, who has been using her and promising his love in return. And she'll do anything for him, which is fast becoming a one-way ticket to trouble. But in a freak accident, she loses her memory, landing in the path of sexy DEA Agent Sam Carre. For DEA Agent Sam Carre, when this attractive stranger lands in his path, he just can't resist helping her, even though he's haunted by a past that gives him no peace. But as the sparks fly, so do questions of what she's really involved in. This complex case pushes them both to explain the unexplainable.

Marcie, Maggie, and Diane all have one thing in common: Dan McKenzie, an unscrupulous man who uses women. His motto in life is "Lie, cheat, and steal". He faked his death and tried to frame Maggie's husband with his murder. He blackmailed Marcie to run drugs for him. And Diane, a cop, had to stand by, knowing he was responsible for planting drugs in her partner's locker. He's always walked away scot free. Until now.

In her work as a 'death doula', Clover Brooks ushers people peacefully through their last days, collecting their final words into three notebooks: ADVICE, CONFESSIONS and REGRETS. But Clover spends so much time with the dying that she's forgotten how to live . . . Can her clients' hard-won wisdom - and the inspiring love story of a spirited old woman named Claudia - show Clover the way to a happy ending After all, what's the point of giving someone a beautiful death if you can't give yourself a beautiful life?

Intersexion is a life-giving true story about choosing between social acceptance or health, fear or authenticity. Cynthia, an adjunct professor with a trunk full of ungraded papers and snack wrappers, has been an LGBTQIA+ ally for years—in convenient ways. She enjoys the company of her queer friends—but her support isn’t risky; it hasn’t cost her anything. Until she meets Danny.

It was supposed to be a road trip to reconnect with my younger sister. We weren’t getting any younger and life had thrown us a few curves lately. Like her divorce and my…well, I’m not getting into that. Just two days into the trip, (getting lost, but that’s beside the point!) our world tipped off its axis. It began that frightening morning when we woke up, still sitting in the front cab of the RV. We were never the same women after that.

Diana Bellatrix has discovered the truth. She is the last surviving heir of the Athens throne, and the reason the Netherportal remains open. In her guilt, she leaves Afterlife Academy with the conviction of eradicating the curse on her bloodline and restoring the Overworld. In need of an army, she returns to her homeland to prove she is a worthy successor. And while queen Minerva accepts, it is with contempt and suspicion, for she has not forgotten the treachery of her son.

Over the past decade, Colleen and Jason Wachob, co-founders of mindbodygreen, have cultivated a leading wellness lifestyle media brand for everyone seeking to cut through this noise, and live a happier, healthier, and greener lifestyle. The Joy of Well-Being is a distillation of almost fifteen years of this experience on the forefront of the well-being conversation: they've done the legwork so you don't have to.

Biography of a Body is a lyrical meander through the development of a messy, flawed, imperfect human and what it means to live in a society that both pulls a person into itself and fiercely pushes back. In personal essays and snippets of verse that shift back and forth through time and place, Lizz Schumer fidgets with the puzzle pieces of a life that are at once starkly unique and glaringly obvious. This is less a narrative than a trail of breadcrumbs through an experience, where strange things whisper from the shadows and draw the listener into the dappled darkness.

In Turn Up the Sun, Hazard, the eccentric drug dealer from Criterium, is horrified to discover he has a doppelganger who appears at the scene of a grisly murder. In Stridor, a pediatrician is not only haunted by her mistakes, but stalked by them. In Sidewinder, a young musician receives a custom, otherworldly guitar pedal.

Emily Scott is a stand-up comedian and one-time bank robber who came into possession of knowledge that could get her killed. She knows the identity of Big Wheel. When presented with a chance to run away with a bag full of cash, she didn’t hesitate. But now pout on the road she’s stuck between two worlds. After spending 20 years getting good at one thing, and building her identity around it, can she abandon all that work and become someone new? And what happens when she finds out Chloe Medina is on her tail, the hot girl who broke her nose at high school after one kiss?

Building on years of deep reporting, Pulitzer Prize-winner Eliza Griswold paints an intimate portrait of pastors and church members' desperate wrestling to find a way to remain together despite their dividing truths. Through generational rifts, an increasingly politicised religious landscape, a pandemic and a rise in foundation-shaking activism, Circle of Hope tells a propulsive, layered story of what we do to stay true to our beliefs. It is a soaring, searing examination of what it means for a community to love, to grow, and crucially to disagree.

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.

Inspired by his journals and writing, this moving novel inhabits the life and mind of renowned nineteenth-century naturalist, poet and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau, revealing the deep connections between his time and our own. Composed in short, compelling scenes, Followed by the Lark is a novel of significant moments in a life, capturing loss, change and the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world, set against a backdrop of great change and tumult in America.

To be a bookseller or librarian...you have to play detective. Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. A brilliant listener. A person who creates a kind of magic by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, 'You've got to read this. You're going to love it'. In this love letter to the heroes of literacy, James Patterson uncovers true stories from booksellers and librarians.

Two women - strangers - board a plane. Different lives, different purposes for their trip. Three days later, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man. They say they've fallen for handsome stranger Trent McCarthy and are running away with him. And then the texts go cold, the red flags go up, and the woman are declared missing. Who's telling the truth? Who is this Trent, and what has he done with these women? Or, what have they done with him? . . .