Showing results by narrator "Sarah Naughton" in All Categories

After a reminder goes off for the Caribbean sailing trip Anna was supposed to take with her fiancé, she impulsively goes to sea in the sailboat he left her, intending to complete the voyage alone. But after a treacherous night’s sail, she realizes she can’t do it by herself and hires Keane, a professional sailor, to help.

Danika hasn't had an easy life. Being insanely attracted to bad boys has never helped make it easier. One look at Tristan, and every brain cell she possessed went up in smoke. This man was trouble with a capital T. It was a given. She knew better. Bad boys were bad. Especially for her. Considering her history, it was crazy to think otherwise.

Laura and Casey were once inseparable: as they floated on their backs in the sunlit lake, as they dreamed about the future under starry skies, and as they teamed up for the wild scavenger hunts in their small California lakeside town. Until one summer night, when a shocking betrayal sent Laura running through the pines, down the dock, and into a new life, leaving Casey and a first love in her wake. But the past is impossible to escape, and now, after 17 years away, Laura is pulled home and into a reunion with Casey she can’t resist - one last scavenger hunt.

For her sixth birthday, Fiona Campbell’s mother, Claire, made her a peace-sign piñata filled with wishes for a better planet instead of candy. When she got her period, her mother held a womanhood ceremony at their café and invited the neighborhood. On her 16th birthday, they celebrated with a drum circle. Fiona grew up trying to keep the impulsive Claire in check and their struggling café afloat. She plans to move out, but first she must find a way to stop a big corporation from tearing down their business and destroying her mother’s livelihood.

He had done it again. Ravaged me. Burned me. Broken me. Given me air, only to leave me gasping, writhing. But then something changed. Something that terrified and excited me both. Something that utterly destroyed me. Something that made me whole again.

What if finding her means losing himself? Seventeen-year-old Bo has always had delusions that he could travel through time. When he was 10, Bo claimed to have witnessed the Titanic hit an iceberg, and at 15, he found himself on a Civil War battlefield, horrified by the bodies surrounding him. So when his concerned parents send him to a school for troubled youth, Bo assumes he knows the truth: that he's actually attending Berkshire Academy, a school for kids who, like Bo, have "superpowers".

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare: the call that comes in the middle of the night. When Kat Jenkins awakens to the police on her doorstep, her greatest fear is realized. Her nine-year-old son, Ethan, is missing - vanished from the cabin where he’d been on an overnight class trip. Shocked and distraught, Kat rushes to the campground, but she’s too late; the authorities have returned from their search empty-handed after losing Ethan’s trail in the mountain forest.

When 16-year-old Jill Whitaker's mom walks out - with a sticky note as a goodbye - only Jill knows the real reason she's gone. But how can she tell her father? Jill can hardly believe the truth herself. Suddenly, the girl who likes to fix things - cars, relationships, romances, people - is all broken up. It used to be, her best friend, tall, blond, and hot flirt Sean Addison, could make her smile in seconds. But not anymore. They don't even talk. With nothing making sense, Jill tries to pick up the pieces of her life.

When Tara Peary’s twin sister Sophie goes missing, Tara dives into New York’s underbelly to find her. Sophie is the one person who’s ever truly understood her, and Tara knows her sister isn’t the only one who needs help. Tara is also on the run emotionally from her complicated childhood. Her memories are threatening to derail the hunt for Sophie. A psychotherapist keeps her afloat, but then Tara begins dating her therapist’s young tech-millionaire neighbor. The more she uncovers about her the dark side of the rich elite, the less certain of the truth she becomes.

Amy Harney has a job as a chambermaid for the summer, but on August 25, she will take the exam to become an EMT (third time’s the charm!) and finally move on with her life. In the meantime, she doesn’t mind scrubbing toilets immaculately clean or tucking the sheet corners just so. In fact, she tells herself that her work is a noble act of service to the rich guests at the yacht club. Amy’s profound isolation colors everything: her job, her aspirations, even her interactions with the woman at the deli counter.

A vast caravan of RVs roams the United States. A girl grows a unicorn horn, complicating her small-town friendships and big city ambitions. A young lady on a spaceship bonds with her AI warden while trying to avoid an arranged marriage. In Allegra Hyde’s universe nothing is as it seems, yet the challenges encountered in these pages mirror those we face in our modern age.

Rachel Vinson is a bridesmaid for hire: part confidante, part wedding planner, and one hundred percent pretend BFF. Discretion guaranteed. Her next gig is a destination wedding - livestreamed and sponsored - for an Instagram influencer. That means a paradise of new contacts, which could be a boon to her already booming business. If Rachel can keep the very handsome and slightly too interested best man at bay, that is.

Psychic-medium Sylvie Young starts every show with her origin story, telling the audience how she discovered her abilities. But she leaves out a lot—the plane crash that killed her parents, an estranged adoptive family, and the fact that her agent insists she research some clients to ensure success. Thomas Holmes’s next story at the L.A. Times may be his last, but he’s got a great personal pitch: “grief vampires” like Sylvie who prey upon the loved ones of the deceased have bankrupted his mother. He’s dead set on using his last article to expose Sylvie as a fraud.

Kat Grant and Alice Campbell have a friendship forged in shared confidences and long lunches lubricated by expensive wine. Though they're very different women - the artsy socialite and the struggling suburbanite - they're each other's rocks. But even rocks crumble under pressure. Like when Kat's financier husband, Howard, plunges to his death from the second-floor balcony of their South Florida mansion. Howard was a jerk, a drunk, a bully, and, police say, a murder victim. The questions begin piling up.

Gaby Cane was always a bit afraid of her attraction to Bowie McCayde. Even when she was fifteen and Bowie's family took her in, she had sensed his simmering resentment. Now ten years later, she's an aspiring journalist who can hold her own with any man professionally, the dark shadows of years gone by far behind her. Then Bowie strides back into her life - only this time, he needs her, and the pull of loyalty to his family is too strong to ignore.

Florida journalism undergrad Rebecca Sorley is like any other college student. She tries to keep up with her studies, her friends, and her hot-tempered roommate, Ellie, who regularly courts trouble with the law. When a male student's remains are found in alligator-infested waters, the university warns students to stay away from the reptiles. But then a second body shows up, and the link is undeniable. Both men belonged to the same fraternity and had a reputation for preying on and hurting women.

Celia Fairchild, known as advice columnist "Dear Calpurnia", has insight into everybody’s problems—except her own. Still bruised by the end of a marriage she thought was her last chance to create a family, Celia receives an unexpected answer to a “Dear Birthmother” letter. Celia throws herself into proving she’s a perfect adoptive mother material—with a stable home and income—only to lose her job. Her one option: sell the Charleston house left to her by her recently departed, estranged Aunt Calpurnia.

Laid off, cheated on, mugged: what else can go wrong in Maeve Stephens’ life? So when she learns her birth mother has left her a house, a vintage VW Beetle, and a marauding cat in the small town of Timber Creek, Washington, she packs up to discover the truth about her past. She arrives to the sight of a cheerful bulldog abandoned on her front porch, a reclusive but tempting author living next door, and a set of ready-made friends at the St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets, where women knit colorful sweaters for the dogs and cats in their care.

The award-winning master of psychological suspense is in top form in this collection of diverse and diabolically clever stories. In the never-before-published “Just One More,” a married couple—longing for that old romantic spark—creates a playful diversion that comes with unexpected consequences.

Something odd in the deceased's mouth sets Alexa and the team on a new track—to find Quinn's murderer. As they work to narrow the suspect field, a second homicide—and a stolen cache of weapons from a locked room in the bunker—ramp up the investigation and the risk to Alexa's life. Will she be able to solve this particular riddle before she becomes victim #3?