Showing results by narrator "Shannon McManus" in All Categories

When her family relocated to rural China in 2003, Kay Bratt was thrust into a new world, one where boys were considered more valuable than girls and poverty and the one-child policy had created an epidemic of abandoned infants. As a volunteer at a local orphanage, Bratt witnessed conditions that were unfathomable to a middle-class mother of two from South Carolina. Based on Bratt’s diary of her four years at the orphanage, Silent Tears offers a searing account of young lives rendered disposable.

Royce Dillard doesn't remember much about the day his parents - and one hundred and twenty-three other souls - died in the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster. He was only two years old when he was ripped from his mother's arms. But now Dillard, who lives off the grid with only a passel of dogs for company, is fighting for his life one more time: He's on trial for murder. Prosecutor Bell Elkins faces her toughest challenge yet in this haunting story of vengeance, greed, and the fierce struggle for social justice.

Violet Gardner Beauregard is barely cold in her grave, but she’s still stirring up trouble. When Neely Kate Coulson accompanies her best friend, Rose, to Violet’s attorney for the reading of the will, they get the shock of their lives, one that leaves them both reeling. If that weren’t enough, special prosecutor Mason Devereaux is still calling witnesses for his grand jury, digging into the corruption in Fenton County. Neely Kate is approached by an unexpected source who reveals shocking news from the grand jury testimony - information about her wayward husband, Ronnie Coulson.

Rose Gardner collects secrets the way other people collect junk - and now she’s being asked to expose them. Special prosecutor Mason Deveraux has called a grand jury to investigate the corruption in the Sweet Branch police department, and he’s summoned Rose as a witness. Any topic is fair game, and the criminals in Fenton county are rightly scared of what she might share under oath. While trying to placate the lawless men, Rose is also caring for her dying sister, Violet.

Meet Chloe and Elizabeth Yetti: antisocial, semi-homicidal, 18-year-old twins casually surviving the AI apocalypse. Ten years ago, a powerful machine intelligence unleashed a nano-engineered superdrug on humanity. Having escaped and grown up in the forests of Northern California alongside their younger brother and brilliant scientist/survivalist mother, Clo and El stayed safe while society collapsed around them. But when a mysterious stranger and a demonic woodland creature appear and threaten their family, the twins are drawn back to a disintegrating, drug-addled San Francisco.

Becca Davis has always played it safe - denying her passion for fashion design in a dead-end job and letting her pragmatic boyfriend (mastermind of the "Kevin Bradley Ten-Year Plan") make the tough decisions in life. Stunned into saying yes when Mr. Predictable springs a surprise proposal on her, Becca realizes that she's running out of time to turn her life around. She's only got one more chance to chase her dreams and no one - not her control-freak fiancé, not her dramaholic sisters, not her overprotective parents - will talk her out of it.

When a woman is found murdered by hunting arrows in a woodland clearing, Detective Jane Harper is left to determine who is responsible. But when revelations about the victim's true identity surface, Harper soon realizes all is not as it seems - and that the killer's motivations are more complex than she could have imagined.   

Everyone thinks fourteen-year-old Violet is a murderer. After a summer-night swim with her best friend, Ainsley, Violet is found confused, wandering in the forest - and Ainsley’s never seen again. But without a body, murder charges won’t stick, so Violet is sent away. After more than a decade in a psychiatric ward, Violet returns to her broken-down hometown of Normal, Alabama, to claim her dead mother’s inheritance and help her overworked sister care for their unstable, alcoholic father.

In her grand home in Charleston, Willa Bellemore raised two girls during the tumultuous 1970s. One was her daughter, Lady. The other was Lady’s best friend, Nell - adopted after the sudden, heartbreaking death of her mother, the Bellemores’ beloved maid. Willa showered Nell with love and support, all the while ignoring the disdainful whispers of her neighbors. After all, they were family. Nell and Lady were sisters at heart - sisters who vowed to never let anything come between them. Then, on the night of Lady’s sixteenth birthday, something went terribly wrong.

A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade. In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely end. She lets a migrant group known as the Uninvited set up temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peace with her cagey neighbors and the local enforcer.

Rose Gardner feels responsible for the death of a woman she tried - and failed - to save with her visions, and though she intends to do the “right” thing and tell James Malcolm she can’t possibly accept his offer of a relationship, she hasn’t yet mustered the strength. Worst of all, her sister is terminally ill, and there isn’t a thing she can do to save her. When a new case falls into Rose’s lap, she eagerly shifts her attention to someone else’s problems - except it’s Henryetta, and every person, and problem, is somehow connected.

She is Kendall Moore - a spirited southern belle as proud as she is beautiful, driven by a cruel marriage-bed betrayal to risk her life in a dangerous gamble for freedom. He is Brent McClain - the Confederate agent who meets Kendall aboard the warship Jenni-Lyn, and loses his heart in a single, searing night of passion. But war and treachery soon tear them apart - Brent into raging battle, Kendall into desperate flight from a scorned husband's white-hot vengeance. They live only for the promise of tomorrow - and a love that will burn forever in both their hearts.

In the midst of an internal investigation, the police department is thrown into chaos when Captain Frank Morelli is gunned down on his own front lawn. Detective Jane Harper suspects that someone is tying up loose ends - a conviction that only grows stronger when she witnesses the execution of another officer in broad daylight. With no one else to turn to, Jane seeks the help of psychic Ida Lane.

As America plunges into the Great Depression, Marthanne Hendrix finds herself in rural Vidalia, Georgia, with no memory of how she got there.

Bewildered when the neighbors call her Oma, Marthanne is haunted by memories of another life—and another self. With the help of Comfort, a domestic worker living with her own tremendous loss, Marthanne discovers that Oma is another distinct personality inhabiting her body. In a time when mental illness is taboo, Marthanne and Oma’s simple, small-town life is fraught with complexity and danger.

With gossip running rampant, Marthanne and Oma will do anything to avoid their greatest fear: commitment to an insane asylum. Only by relying on Comfort’s kindness can they navigate their uncertain future. Friendship becomes sanctuary, and the quest for an ordinary life leads to an extraordinary bond.

Deeply moving and exquisitely wrought, Show Me a Kindness is a haunting novel of love, survival, and hiding in plain sight.

Angela's Diner has the reputation of a safe haven where patrons find a moment of peace as they linger over coffee and tears. For one young runaway, Angela's is more than a place to tell your tale - it's a place where with the magic of chicken and waffles, and a little bit of trust, may just save your life.

Drew's a bit of a loner. She has a pet rat, her dead dad's Book of Lists, an encyclopedic knowledge of cheese from working at her mom's cheese shop, and a crush on Nick, the surf bum who works behind the counter. It's the summer before eighth grade and Drew's days seem like business as usual, until one night after closing time, when she meets a strange boy in the alley named Emmett Crane. Who he is, why he's there, where the cut on his cheek came from, and his bottomless knowledge of rats are all mysteries Drew will untangle as they are drawn closer together....

Facing a personal crisis, ambitious and driven Gabriella Castle retreats to the welcoming arms of her family. Everything she's worked for has been yanked out from under her, and she seeks the serenity of her grandmother's home on the North Carolina coast. With difficult decisions to make about her future, the last thing she wants is an unexpected love. Wade Johnson fell for Gabi the first time he saw her. It's not the only time he's found himself in the role of knight in shining armor, but Gabi isn't looking for a rescuer. To get her to stay, Wade will need a whole lot of patience and gentle persuasion.

Both exhilarating and wrenching, Hilary T. Smith's debut novel captures the messy glory of being alive, as seventeen-year-old Kiri Byrd discovers love, loss, chaos, and murder woven into a summer of music, madness, piercing heartbreak, and intoxicating joy.

Zoe and her best friend, Olivia, have always had Big Plans: They'll tour the world as prima ballerinas and live in a swanky Manhattan apartment (where they'll hang out with their fabulous boyfriends, of course). But when they're cut from the ballet company, their plans for the future evaporate. Suddenly, Zoe's dodging cheerleaders who want her and Olivia to go out for the squad, and Olivia's got a crush on Calvin Taylor, who Zoe can't stand. Zoe can't imagine anything worse happening…until Olivia gets sick. Suddenly, not being able to dance is the least of their problems.

Samantha Crawford has a storybook life: she’s happily married, lives on a ranch where she keeps her beloved horse, and the stories she has written and illustrated since childhood have become popular books. When her husband Billy is killed in a senseless act of violence, Sam loses her faith and the will to live. But a sudden death-defying encounter with two children leads to a reunion with her old friend Papa Joe Bradford.