Showing results by narrator "Robin McAlpine" in All Categories

Using granular data and authoritative Chinese sources, Oriana Skylar Mastro demonstrates that China was able to climb to great power status through a careful mix of strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage. This “upstart approach”—determined by where and how China chose to compete—allowed China to rise economically, politically, and militarily, without triggering a catastrophic international backlash that would stem its rise.

A young woman clinging on to life. A desperate family fighting for answers. Will Selena be able to discover the truth in time to save her? Selena Bailey returns with her Private Investigator license in one hand and the first official case for Bailey Investigations in the other. When the sister of a young woman, fighting for her life in the Intensive Care Unit, pleads with Selena to explore her sister, Stephanie’s, last days before she slipped into a coma, Selena must go undercover in the billion-dollar weight loss industry to discover the truth.

This boxed set includes the first three books in the Martina Monroe crime thriller series: What She Left (Book 1), If She Ran (Book 2), All She Wanted (Book 3).

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.

When a woman is discovered beaten and bloodied in a park, with no ID, no memory, and no past she can recall, Martina and her team at Drakos Monroe Security & Investigations are called in to uncover the truth. But from the start, this case defies all logic. The woman, known only as "Jane Doe," has no fingerprints or DNA matches. No social media. No records. It’s as if she never existed. Every lead Martina follows only deepens the mystery, raising questions that pull her further into an unsettling puzzle.

In the thick of the current cold case investigation, PI Martina Monroe receives a hand-written letter from a desperate mother pleading for Martina and Hirsch to reopen the cold case of the woman’s missing daughter and five-year-old grandson. Feeling a deep connection to the request, Martina knows that Hirsch and she have found their next case.

Detective Leslie, once a key figure in the Cold Case Squad, is convinced she’s closed the case on Darren, Martina’s brother, for a cold-blooded murder. But Martina, shaken by her brother’s guilty plea and an anonymous tip claiming his innocence, starts questioning the conviction. As Martina delves into the details, she encounters a series of unsettling discrepancies. The investigation’s weak foundation, coupled with the lack of physical evidence and a dubious motive, ignites Martina’s suspicions.

Seventeen-year-old Selena Bailey longs to flee her uneasy home life. Prepping every spare minute for a college escape, the headstrong, high school senior vows never to be like her alcoholic mom with her string of abusive boyfriends. So when Selena finds her beaten nearly to death, she knows safety is slipping away...

With haunted eyes, a survivor steps into the offices of Drakos Monroe Security & Investigations, asking for Martina’s help. Thirty-five years earlier, Nancy made a harrowing escape from the clutches of a ruthless sex-trafficking syndicate in San Francisco, forced to leave her best friend Victoria behind. Clean and with a family of her own, Nancy hires Martina to find Victoria in a search for closure, justice, and the friend she lost so many years ago.

PI Martina Monroe has found her groove working cold cases alongside Detective Hirsch at the CoCo County Sheriff’s Department. With a growing team of cold case detectives, Martina and Hirsch are on the heels of bringing justice for Julie DeSoto—a woman Martina failed to protect one year earlier. But when Martina receives a haunting request from her past, it nearly tears her in two.

Martina and Detective Hirsch, still reeling from their last high-profile case, agree to reopen the missing person case of Sadie Jarreau, a friend of one member of the Cold Case Squad. At first glance, Sadie’s disappearance from the local marina looks like the typical unhappy marriage resulting in a deadly end. But between the marina’s surveillance cameras malfunctioning that day, her husband’s air-tight alibi, and no one with a motive to harm Sadie, Martina and Hirsch are forced to consider a less common scenario - a stranger abduction.

Five years on from the adrenaline-fueled days of the Cold Case Squad, PI Martina Monroe is now a managing partner at the renowned, Drakos Monroe Security & Investigations. She spends her days running the firm—a safe desk job—allowing her to spend more time with her sixteen-year-old daughter and less time in the line of fire. But her quiet life shatters when a meeting with the desperate parents of Katie Kimble, a young woman missing for two years, pulls her back into the fray.

In Echoes of Her, the 12th installment of the Martina Monroe series, a maze of family secrets and shocking revelations unravel. By the time Kay was six, she had lost both her mother and sister. With only fuzzy memories of them, she had pleaded with her father since she was a little girl to tell her stories about them and to visit their graves. He claimed it was too painful to discuss, and refused—up until the day he died.

Many people have a set of runes lurking around on a bookshelf, but not many people truly know how to use them…or the rich history behind them. Perhaps you’re unsure of how to prepare your runes for a reading, or perhaps you need a little help with interpretation.

Twenty years earlier, a set of female eighteen-year-old twins went missing in the Bay Area. There were no news reports or national coverage. The original investigators had barely touched the case, and like so many other cases of missing teens, were quickly labeled runaways, and the file sat on the shelf. Baffled by the lack of attention for the sisters, Martina insists it will be Hirsch and the Cold Case Squad’s next case.

Jacklyn Stone's husband dies in front of her on their anniversary. Bereft and alone, her children betray her, lock her in a psych ward, cut her off from her friends, and rapidly dismantle her life. Blood is the tie that binds, but can she cut the bonds and regain her freedom?

PI Martina and Detective Hirsch accept the new sheriff’s request to reopen a ten-year-old serial killer case. Not that they could refuse. One victim was the sheriff’s brother, a married father of two. The case is strange. Someone has murdered three successful men within a six-month time period. There were no suspects and no motive. The only connection is their cause of death. The links are thin and the motive is unknown, but Martina and Hirsch know better than to ignore the similarities.

Embark on a transformative auditory journey with “The Orchid: The Secret Code of Modern Goddesses,” where the serene whispers of self-discovery meet the echoes of empowerment.

Ten years earlier, two teenage girls were found murdered by what appeared to be a satanic sacrifice. The case had dominated the news headlines for months before the original investigators failed to arrest the perpetrators of the crime—despite multiple suspects. Without solid evidence to prosecute, and even with the near-heroic efforts of the original detectives, the homicide investigation turned cold. For years, the families of the two victims fought to keep the young women’s memory alive and to get the attention of law enforcement to not give up on finding those responsible.

What leads to political turbulence and social breakdown? How do elites maintain their dominant position? And why do ruling classes sometimes suddenly lose their grip on power? For decades, complexity scientist Peter Turchin has been studying world history like no one else. Assembling vast databases mined from 10,000 years of human activity, and then developing new models, he has transformed the way we learn from the past. End Times is the result: a ground-breaking account of how society works.