Showing results by narrator "Kate Reading" in All Categories

The aliens appeared one day, built a base on the moon, and put an ad on the Internet: “We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request 21 volunteers to visit seven planets to witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to witness@atoners.com.”

A wedding on the edge of a Hawaiian volcano sounds risky to Dinah Pelerin, the bride’s best friend and maid of honor. The bride, Claude Ann Kemper, has bet her heart that she’s found the right man at last. The groom has gone all in on a real estate deal that he believes will set him and his new wife up for life. But Hawaii is a tinderbox of ancient myths and modern conflicts over who should control the land so cherished by its native people. A group of native Hawaiians claims that the sacred bones of an ancestral king are buried on the land that the groom plans to sell, and one of them has vowed do whatever it takes to stop him.

Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, known to her friends as Henrie O, is America's favorite ex-journalist turned sleuth. These days she's looking forward to a quiet holiday at a wealthy friend's mountain cabin in Tennessee. Instead, Henrie O finds herself in the middle of another murder mystery - this time in the well-heeled neighborhood of Fair Haven. Married to the daughter of a prominent citizen, her friend's nephew appears one morning covered in his wife's blood - but he swears he didn't kill her.

In her people-smart way, Kimberly Willis Holt introduces us to a Louisiana family: touching, lyrical, and always intriguing, their stories reveal the powerful connections between four generations. The journey begins in 1939 with Rose, who moves with her mother and siblings from rural Texas to live with their estranged grandfather in the Louisiana bayou.

Dr. Steven J. Fisher is a young and brilliant biochemist (special subject: the female orgasm). He's invented a Viagra-like pill for women - now he just needs his results to be perfect. Annie is an orgasmically-challenged arts student (special subject: Victorian semicolons) and for some reason his miracle treatment isn't working. As scientist and subject bond over Bunsen Burner-lit meals, Dr. Fisher is surprised to find his feelings taking a most unscientifc turn...

Brokenhearted and still mourning the loss of her husband, Heidi travels with Abbott, her obsessive-compulsive eight-year-old son, and Charlotte, her intolerably jaded 16-year-old niece, to spend the summer repairing their family home in a small village in the south of France. There, thousands of miles from home, Charlotte makes a shocking confession, and Heidi learns the truth about her mother’s “lost summer” when she was a child.

In the park, the coffee shops, and the playgrounds of Park Slope, four women's lives collide one long, hot Brooklyn summer. From the perennially hot author and columnist Amy Sohn comes a smart, sexy, satirical peek into the bedrooms and hearts of Prospect Park West.

A 30-year-old death haunts Alan Nesbitt, former Chief Constable in Cornwall. Back in 1968, a beautiful 20-year-old girl was found dead on the rocks, presumably having jumped from the cliffs. All that was known about her was her age, that she had had a child six months earlier, and that she weighed about ninety pounds. Nesbitt got nowhere with the investigation, and he regrets it.

Retired newspaper reporter Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins - Henrie O to her friends - receives a call for help from a former lover, who is now entangled with a wealthy and troubled family. He asks Henrie O to come along with the family on a Baltic cruise. On the voyage, she soon realizes this dysfunctional family is plunging toward destruction, and that one of the travelers has murder in mind.

Margaret Mayfield is nearly an old maid at twenty-seven in post–Civil War Missouri when she marries Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early. He’s the most famous man their small town has ever produced: a naval officer and a brilliant astronomer—a genius who, according to the local paper, has changed the universe. Margaret’s mother calls the match “a piece of luck.”

India Palmer, living the cash-strapped existence of the writer, is visiting wealthy friends in Maine when a yellow biplane swoops down from the clear blue sky to bring a stranger into her life who will change everything. The stranger is Win Johns, a swaggering and intellectually bored trader of mortgage-backed securities.

Published in 1884, Sarah Orne Jewet's first novel, A Country Doctor, is a luminous portrayal of rural Maine and a semiautobiographical look at her world. In it, Nan's struggle to choose between marriage and a career as a doctor, between the confining life of a small town and a self-directed one as a professional, mirrors Jewett's own conflicts as well as eloquently giving voice to the leading women's issues of her time.

The Studebaker household is in turmoil; the news that President McKinley has been assassinated is more than anyone can stand. South Bend, Indiana is not a hotbed of anarchist activity, but something is clearly going on. When McKinley's death is blamed on foreign-born anarchists, Hilda Johansson, a recent immigrant, is concerned that fellow immigrants might be swept up in a wave of xenophobia.

Military working dogs gained widespread attention after Cairo participated in the SEAL Team 6 mission that led to Osama bin Laden's death. Before that, few civilians realized that dogs served in combat, let alone that they could parachute from thirty thousand feet up. The Dogs of War reveals the amazing range of jobs that our four-legged soldiers now perform, examines the dogs' training and equipment, and sets the record straight on those rumors of titanium teeth.

In 1973, on a remote beach on the Greek island of Samos, a movie star named Marilita Stephan murdered her boyfriend, his mother, and a powerful colonel in the military junta, a crime for which she was executed. Forty years later, Dinah Pelerin arrives on Samos to spend the summer with her Norwegian boyfriend, Thor, before she joins an archaeological dig nearby. Thor, a policeman on sabbatical, seems unduly fascinated by the 1973 murders, and Dinah soon discovers that he had more in mind than romance when he chose the island of Samos as their holiday destination.

"The good old days" aren't all they're cracked up to be...at least in Jeanne M. Dams's turn-of-the-century novels. Her woman on the spot, Hilda Johansson, a maid in the Studebaker household in South Bend, sees what's going on among the rich, suffers what's going on among the less fortunate...and has no trouble telling it like it is.

A study of the many different legacies left by Martin Luther, including several articles on his life and theology.

Thomas Aquinas was one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Christianity and in Western Civilization. Yet his theological views can seem complex and presume acquaintance with technical philosophical language. Now Renick has produced an attractive and accessible account of Aquinas's thought and life that will make his views clear to non-specialists.

For the Goddess of Wisdom, what Athena didn't know could fill a book. That's what Ares said. So she was wrong about some things. So the assault on Olympus left them beaten and scattered and possibly dead. So they have to fight the Fates themselves, who, it turns out, are the source of the gods' illness. And sure, Athena is stuck in the underworld, holding the body of the only hero she has ever loved.

In late-18th-century London, a young girl takes her first singing lessons with a mysterious castrato in exile. Her life is forever changed. Having learned everything he can teach her, Anna leaves behind all the security and familiarity of home and journeys to Naples and Venice to struggle and triumph in Italy’s greatest opera houses. Only 16, she finds herself in an intoxicating world of theaters, nobility, and vice, overwhelmed by her newfound freedom and fame.