Showing results by narrator "Chris Andrew Ciulla" in All Categories

On a cold, misty Sunday night, two women are alone in the offices of fashion conglomerate Claudine de Martineau International. One is the company’s human resources director. Impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed, she sits at her desk and stares somberly out the window. Down the hall, her colleague, one of the company’s lawyers, is buried under a pile of paperwork, frantically rushing to finish. Leaving at the same time, the two women, each preoccupied by her own thoughts, enter the elevator that will take them down from the 30th floor.

Now published in five languages, Strange Medicine casts a gimlet eye on the practice of medicine through the ages that highlights the most dubious ideas, bizarre treatments, and biggest blunders. From bad science and oafish behavior to stomach-turning procedures that hurt more than helped, Strange Medicine presents strange but true facts and an honor roll of doctors, scientists, and dreamers who inadvertently turned the clock of medicine backward.

Many of the men and women doing today's most consequential environmental work - restoring America's grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans - would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land - the iconic terrain where explorers and cowboys, pioneers, and riverboat captains forged the American identity. They feel a moral responsibility to preserve this heritage and natural wealth.

The horrific 1988 murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn shocked the citizens of Philadelphia. Plucked from her own front yard, Barbara Jean was found dead less than two and a half hours later in a cardboard TV box dragged to a nearby street curb. After months of investigation with no strong leads, the case went cold. Four years later it was reopened, and Walter Ogrod, a young man with autism spectrum disorder who had lived across the street from the family at the time of the murder, was brought in as a suspect.

For years, guitarist Quinn Porter has been on the road, chasing gig after gig, largely absent to his twice-ex-wife Belle and their odd, Guinness records' obsessed son. When the boy dies suddenly, Quinn seeks forgiveness for his paternal shortcomings by completing the requirements for one of his son's unfinished Boy Scout badges. For seven Saturdays, Quinn does yard work for Ona Vitkus, the spry 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant the boy had visited weekly. Quinn soon discovers that the boy had talked Ona into gunning for the world record for Oldest Licensed Driver.

An interview recorded on an iPhone. A police interrogation tape. An FBI wire. At the center of them all is a writer researching a legal thriller...or is he? And somewhere within those recordings is the truth about a murder trial and a web of lies stretching back three decades.

Shadow demons plague the city reservoir, and Red King Consolidated has sent in Caleb Altemoc - casual gambler and professional risk manager - to cleanse the water for the sixteen million people of Dresediel Lex. At the scene of the crime, Caleb finds an alluring and clever cliff runner, crazy Mal, who easily outpaces him.

For nearly a decade, twenty-nine-year-old Hudson Miller has made his living in the boxing ring, but a post-fight brawl threatens to derail his career. Desperate for money, Hudson takes a gig as a bouncer at a dive bar. That’s when life delivers him another hook to the jaw: his estranged father, Leland, has been murdered in what appears to be a robbery-gone-bad at his salvage yard, Miller’s Pull-a-Part.

Joseph Antonelli has never lost a case he should have won and has won nearly every case he should have lost - yet he's about to see his client, Justin Friedrich, convicted for a crime he didn't commit. His wife was found shot to death in the bedroom of their yacht in the San Francisco marina, and Friedrich doesn't stand a chance. But then the real killer approaches Antonelli. Famous and enigmatic, James Michael Redfield, the head of a high tech company that leads the world in the development of artificial intelligence, Redfield gives Antonelli evidence proving Friedrich's innocence.

Welcome to Danforth Putnam, boarding school for the elite, sprawled across its own private island off the coast of New England. Sam, a war vet who feels sure he’s seen it all, has been called here to find a stolen rare book. But as he corners D&D nerds, grills steroid-raging linemen, and interviews filthy-rich actresses, he soon senses that something far stranger—“witchy”, in fact—is afoot. When students start to meet mysterious and gruesome deaths, Sam realizes just how fast the clock is ticking.

Corey Goltz grows up in the working-class outskirts of Boston as the only child of Gloria, whose ambitions were derailed early but who has always given her son everything she can. Corey, restless, dreams of leaving home for a great adventure. Instead, when he is fifteen, the world comes crashing down upon him, when Gloria is diagnosed with ALS and, too late, his estranged father, Leonard—a man of great charisma but dubious moral character—reenters the picture.

Barnabas has made some enemies - enemies who want to track him down through space and kill him. But he's more than ready to take on this challenge.

When a mutilated body is found hanging in a seedy motel in Philadelphia, forensics specialist Liam Dwyer assumes the crime scene will be business as usual. Instead, the victim turns out to be a woman he’d had an affair with before breaking it off to save his marriage. But there’s a bigger problem: Liam has no memory of where he was or what he did on the night of the murder.

A newly minted graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1890, Dr. Thomas Parks heads to the big timber country of Puget Sound to practice trauma medicine. An hour after stepping off the boat, he's nearly crushed to death by a less-than-sure-footed mule and finds himself a patient rather than a physician. As he convalesces, he discovers that his host, a venerable physician friend of his father's, is running an elaborate medical scam, selling worthless concoctions nationwide, with enormous sales.

Someone sent three fully armed ships to High Tortuga to back the slave-owners running the mines, and Barnabas and Shinigami are determined to find out who.

Everyone wonders what it's really like in space, but very few of us have ever had the chance to experience it firsthand. This captivating collection brings together stories from dozens of international astronauts - men and women who've actually been there - who have returned with accounts of the sometimes weird, often funny, and awe-inspiring sensations and realities of being in space.

Luke Chase made history as a child when he escaped a kidnapping. Now, all he wants is to be a normal teenager. So when he sneaks out to the woods one night to drink with friends and flirt with the new British girl at school, he's excited to feel some freedom. Except the next morning, one of their teachers is found murdered—in the exact same spot where they had been partying. Soon, Luke's roommate and best friend Oscar is the #1 suspect.

A year after THE BAIT, Ania Throne is on the prowl. Gone into hiding, she’s planned her next move to perfection, intent on winning her dangerous game of cat-against-cat with the Leopard. But Ania doesn’t know that even the best-laid heists have hidden flaws. Jerome Curtis has taken a job at a Hollywood movie studio to try and put his life back together. When a familiar face from the past shows up unexpectedly, Jerome realizes that much as he’s tried to forget her, there’s no escaping Ania. And this time, what she’s about to do could be her doom.

The novel begins when the man who assaulted Andrew Harrison’s sister is released from prison. Benjamin Williams was barely more than a kid when he was sentenced to 11 years, but it is impossible to know what he has become since. Andrew, nicknamed H, is compelled to learn for himself when his uncle Billy hands him a gun and says to go find the man. As H’s interest in Williams grows, he struggles to keep his world in balance.

In the world of business, who you know is usually more important than what you know. While most research highlights the personal characteristics and expertise important to business success, this book demonstrates that networking is the core of entrepreneurship. Both counterintuitive and powerful, this perspective reframes entrepreneurial action by placing networking at the center of the process.