Showing results by narrator "Sara Sheckells" in All Categories

Aidan Thomas is a hard-working family man and a somewhat beloved figure in the small upstate New York town where he lives. He’s the kind of man who always lends a hand and has a good word for everyone. But Aidan has a dark secret he’s been keeping from everyone in town and those closest to him. He’s a kidnapper and serial killer. Aidan has murdered eight women and there’s a ninth he has earmarked for death: Rachel, imprisoned in a backyard shed, fearing for her life.

FBI special agent Julianna James is a top-notch negotiator who has never lost a hostage. Surely she can manage to take care of her much younger sister, Dottie, who showed up unannounced to live with Julianna while she finished her senior year of high school. A former sniper with the 75th Ranger Regiment, Clay Snyder left the army after a tragic incident that he can't get past. Now he's working as a high school resource officer until he can figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Their paths cross when Julianna is called in to negotiate a courtroom hostage situation.

EMS helicopter pilot Penny Carlton is used to high stress situations, but being forced to land on a mountain in a raging storm with a critical patient - and a serial killer on the loose - tests her skills and her nerve to the limit. She survives with FBI Special Agent Holt Satterfield's help. But she's not out of the woods yet.

For social worker Mallory Ward, working with at-risk youth is a calling. But when one of her clients is tragically killed, she finds herself at a crossroads. Despite long-held resentments toward her distant mother, Mallory retreats to her childhood home on the Rhode Island coast to contemplate her future. Instead, she’s confronted by her past, not only in the renewed tensions with her mother but in the unexpected appearance of a familiar face—and the wrenching losses that drove her away a decade ago.

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of disintermediation: cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. Flow is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub.

Samantha Rose, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter, steps out of the shadows to unravel the mystery surrounding her mother's suicide. What begins as a solitary journey of grief shifts form when her mother emerges from the darkness beyond to reconcile her irreversible choice. Raw, resilient, and with surprising humor, Giving Up the Ghost explores the layered complexity of mental health, the love between mothers and daughters, and how, in the aftermath of inconceivable loss, we can release our inner ghosts and write a new story for ourselves.

Women around the world do extremely well when it comes to their education. They graduate at higher rates than men and have higher average GPAs. But then a strange thing happens: upon entering the workforce, they immediately lose their advantage. When the first promotions come around, the slide continues. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women overall and 77 women of color get promoted. This is what McKinsey senior partners Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez call "the broken rung," and its effects compound throughout women's careers.

Millie Sanders has settled into her new position as assistant cruise director of the Siren of the Seas and is loving every minute of the adventure and excitement. A fresh wave of passengers have just boarded, and as the deck party gets into full swing, a frantic cry of man overboard is shouted over the loudspeakers. Millie rushes towards the crowd that has gathered on the portside upper deck and watches in horror as the ship's crew desperately tries to save a young man who has just gone over.

Chenoweth draws on her decade-long journey into neighborhood schools where low-income students and students of color are learning at unexpectedly high levels to reveal a key ingredient to their success: in one way or another, their leaders have confronted the traditional ways that schools are organized and have adopted new systems, all focused on improvement. In profiles of once-embattled schools, Chenoweth shows how school leaders doggedly reorganized internal systems in order to prioritize teaching and learning, resulting in improved outcomes that in many cases exceeded statewide averages.

Millie Sanders’ happily ever after is suddenly destroyed when her husband of 35 years comes home one day and informs her that he is leaving her for another woman. To make matters worse, the other woman happens to be her "friend" and hairdresser, Delilah Osborne! After months of mourning and moping around the house, she stumbles upon a help wanted ad in the newspaper for the perfect job as an assistant cruise ship director. Before Millie can talk herself out of it, she fills out the application and mails it in.

Communication problems can erode a relationship in and out of the bedroom. This guide takes a proven communication method, which has been used to counsel millions of couples, and applies it to sex for the very first time. The Imago Relationship Therapy, which was pioneered by Harville Hendrix in the national bestseller and self-help classic Getting the Love You Want, shows how to understand and build trust with their partners through a unique form of dialogue.

For Denver Homicide detective Sarah Spillman, a secret from her past haunts each new investigation and could derail her hard-earned career. A missing boy’s body is found in a dumpster in a seemingly idyllic Denver neighborhood, and the list of suspects includes the boy’s mother and father. Sarah barely begins her investigation when a man who lived nearby is also discovered dead, an apparent suicide. Sarah continues to dig deeper, looking for a link between the two deaths, only to find the lies are piling up.

Welcome to the town of Barksdale, where the canine residents strive for perfection. Every shopkeeper claims to be the "best groomer" or sell the "best biscuits". And at Barksdale Academy, the pressure is on every year for one pup to be named Best in Show. Nova, Duke, Harley, and Peanut have never won Best in Show...which is okay with them! But they have to work together to pass their Agility Exam, because either the whole pack passes or the whole pack fails.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing the natural world, chronicling the customs of precontact hunter-gatherers and the secret lives of deer and dogs. In this audiobook, the capstone of her long career, Thomas, now 88, turns her keen eye to her own life. The result is an account of growing old that is at once funny and charming and intimate and profound, both a memoir and a life-affirming map all of us may follow to embrace our later years with grace and dignity.

FBI Special Agent Grace Billingsley tracks serial killers, using her skills as a psychiatrist and behavioral analyst to get dangerous people off the street and safely behind bars. But prison psychiatrist Sam Monroe knows that just because a killer is incarcerated doesn't mean they're not a threat. His own father, Peter, is a serial killer-in prison but certainly not out of Sam's life, as much as he wishes he was.

A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The "climate generation"—late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z—is demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science. Those inheriting our planet's environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise when they confront this seemingly intractable situation.

Forty-nine-year-old Margot Hughes has lived and breathed theater for the past twenty-five years. After a devastating breakup with her playwright fiancé, she wants nothing to do with the industry. She has sworn off New York, theater, actors—all of it. She returns to her hometown on California’s central coast and takes a job in real estate, where she manages significant investment properties. But Margot’s suddenly thrown back into the theater world when Sally, her friend and boss, who had been restoring and funding Cambria’s historic theater, has a heart attack.

Women from all walks of life. Artists, musicians, authors, fashion designers, entrepreneurs, and others from a multitude of creative careers share their experiences with depression, bullying, infertility, cancer, assault, loss of loved ones, drug addiction, and many other issues women often do not have a safe space to talk about. These stories show you just how real life is.

The first patient-to-patient guide for people living with Long COVID—with expert advice and an afterword by the leading research scientist

In VOLUME 9 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series, ‘Homefront/Women At War’, we will take an often-overlooked view of the story of World War II. You will visit with the people on the homefront, from schoolkids navigating growing up during the Great Depression and the War, to the women on the factory floor and the armed services, newly independent but having to fight for their rights and later, their jobs, laying the seeds of societal change for the future.