Showing results by narrator "Carrington Macduffie" in All Categories

>Elaine Benson, a successful novelist who let love in the person of an unreliable screenwriter jettison her career, is now divorced, broke, and on her way to a so-called primitive, untamed northern forest on Canada’s Lake Muskoka to interview for a job. Elderly Miss Moira Madison of the fabulously rich Canadian family wishes to write her memoirs. Settling into the family “cottage” and what remains of a lifestyle long gone, Elaine reconnects with her love of researching the past - until she discovers that the first such writer hired died under suspicious circumstances.

Franny Marten's life is unraveling. Expecting to meet her boyfriend, Marcus Marks, for dinner, she finds his wife waiting for her instead. After the initial shock wears off, Franny finds she has more in common with Clare Marks than she could ever have imagined. And, amazingly, the women become fast friends. When Franny is unexpectedly offered an all-expenses-paid invitation to a family reunion in Provence, she goes, and takes Clare along for the ride.

Among the towering firs and windswept beaches of a Pacific Northwest island, a woman's long-ago first love unexpectedly returns, teaching her the damaging power of secrets and the liberating lessons of love. Widow Phoebe Allen has single-handedly raised a wonderful daughter and established a successful business supplying nets to fisherman, and now enjoys the amorous attentions of a longtime friend.

When Artemus Ackerman, retired magician and mayor of Calendar, hears about the first fire on Sabbath Street, he sends his publicist, Maggie Wakeling, to the fire department to find out what caused it. Artemus, who still performs conjuring tricks for his constituents, has his heart set on turning the shabbily elegant Baldwin Theater into a museum of magic. All he has to do is convince wealthy widow Claudette Goodwin to donate the Baldwin to his beloved town. But the theater is located on Sabbath Street, where that first disastrous fire occurred....

TWO SISTERS: Kate is bound for Stanford and an M.D. - if her family will let her go. Mary wants only to stay home and paint. When their loving but repressive father dies, they must figure out how to support themselves and their mother, who is in a permanent vegetative state, and how to get along in all their uneasy sisterhood. THREE YOUNG MEN: Then three men sway their lives: Kate's boyfriend Simon offers to marry her, providing much-needed stability. Mary is drawn to Marcos, though she fears his violent past. And Andy tempts Kate with more than romance....

Four years ago, Emily Locke's life was shattered when her infant daughter and husband were lost in an inexplicable accident. She has nearly rebuilt her fragile mental health when a disgraced former police detective, now working as a private investigator, resurfaces to ask for help in reconnaissance at a Texas skydiving establishment. Emily hesitates to work with Richard Cole again, but she finds she can't refuse when she learns that the case involves a missing boy.

In 2031 mankind's survival instinct is put to the test when a civil war in China spirals into a global conflict. Nations are torn apart. Millions are killed. And for many, like Air Force pilot Alec Killian, survival will mean shedding some of their flesh in exchange for biotech and machine.

Two never before published novellas from some of our very best crime writers, compiled and edited by Ed McBain.

Wild horses, wildhearts - and a diapered lamb under the Christmas tree…

Could life get any more hectic at the Lazy Windmill? With the holidays reminding Casie of every mistake she's ever made, and her assistant Emily struggling to be a single mom, it's anyone's guess what the New Year will bring. Then bad boy Colt Dickenson shows up with a ring. No one has ever gotten under her skin like he has, but Casie can't believe a rough stock cowboy will stick around for the long haul.

Twenty years ago, Ellie Enderlin's sister, Lila, a brilliant mathematician, was murdered in a crime that was never solved. In the aftermath of her sister's death, Ellie entrusted her most intimate feelings to a man who turned the story into a best-selling true crime book - a book that both devastated her family and identified one of Lila's professors as the killer. Decades later, Ellie receives a piece of evidence never found with her sister's body: Lila's notebook.

One thousand years ago, chaos loosed itself upon Japan, upending an era in which the arts flourished. At the dawn of 250 years of civil war, in the opulent court of Lord Norimasa, the beautiful but cruel poet Lady Utsu wages war with men's hearts and holds the fearsome lord and his devoted samurai Matsuhito in her thrall. As the two men raze Japan's landscape in futile battles for unity, Utsu falls for Matsuhito even as Lord Norimasa continues to love her.

Everyone around Prudence Whistler, 36, seems to be settling down. Her once single girlfriends have lately married and had babies. Her gay best friend is discussing marriage with his partner. Even her irresponsible sister is the single mother of a two-year-old. Setting about redesigning her life, Pru finds herself accumulating an unusal ad hoc family around her, both within her crowded apartment and in the broader community of Adams-Morgan of Washington, D.C.

A Young Wife follows the unforgettable journey of Minke Van Aisma across three continents - from a life of opulence in Amsterdam during the 1900s, to rough living on the Argentine coast, to fighting poverty as an immigrant in New York City. She is forced to leave behind a kidnapped son in Argentina, but sets upon the arduous task of struggling to find the child and taking revenge on the people who orchestrated his abduction.

Oh no, I'm turning into my mother! Every woman is familiar with the poignant, funny, baffling, or horrifying echoes that resonate at that moment when she first hears her own mother's voice coming out of her mouth. But this moment of recognition is more than ironic: It's at the root of how we see ourselves, and how we plot and follow the arc that goes from childhood to motherhood.

Unable to approach her own long-buried history of loss and displacement, Historian Joan Severance takes refuge in the cool library rooms and the crumbling probate lists from Renaissance times. As Joan's disturbed, hyperintuitive mind falls increasingly under the spell of Valparuta and the charismatic resident archivist, Chiesa, a beautifully dressed heroin addict, she is forced to confront her long-submerged past.

Sam and Lori had only just met and now they are dead, the result of a car accident. Accident? No. Dead? Not exactly. In life, Sam was a successful playwright, Lori a secretary for Ben Carnahan, a scheming movie producer who wants Sam's new script and whose negligence on a movie set twenty years earlier killed Lori's father. Now Sam and Lori are ghosts out of sequence with the real world yet fully aware of their existence. As they work together to find out what happened to them, a plot to murder Ben is revealed.

This haunting first novel follows the relationship between a hospital patient known as "the tall man" and a nurse. The victim of a gunshot wound who was discovered on a remote beach northwest of Seattle, the tall man lies motionless and nearly mute as Sara Black vigilantly tends his health. As Sara struggles to recover from a loss of her own, the death of her four-year-old son in a car accident, she finds herself spending more and more time with her patient.

A respected surgeon and rare book collector is brutally murdered in his elegant Manhattan home, just hours after showing a book dealer the fifteenth-century manual of black magic - a grimoire - he'd received from a grateful patient. Now the healer's blood is everywhere - and only the priceless grimoire is missing. The horrific death of her beloved father has shattered Beatrice O'Connell's quiet, sane, and orderly world.

Former police chief Katherine Sullivan has been called brilliant, brave, compassionate, and quirky, but after decades of crime fighting, this resilient grandmother with an artist's soul is discovering that retirement can be just as deadly as being on the job. When Katherine returned to her hometown, her only thought was to comfort her recently divorced daughter. That was before a young woman was found murdered on the estate of the town's richest family.

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.