Showing results by narrator "Ryder Smith" in All Categories

Your Believers is a powerful, cathartic story of casual evil and of how the worst things can be faced so that we might not only survive, but grow. A young woman goes missing, and her mother uproots her life to find her daughter. But it is not just the heartbreak or the deep mystery of the hunt for lost loved ones that Bradley so convincingly explores. Rather, with the help of an amazingly dedicated searcher, family and friends somehow learn to move past unspeakable horror and celebrate the tenacity of the human spirit.

In The Bible Salesman, Preston Clearwater is scoring cash working a car-theft ring in post-World War II North Carolina. When he picks up 19-year-old Bible salesman Henry Dampier, Preston convinces the kid that he's an FBI spy. And before Henry knows what's up, he finds himself in way over his head with no apparent way out.

"America's best novelist" ( The Denver Post), two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke is renowned for his lush, suspense-charged portrayals of the Deep South – the people, the crime, the hope and despair infused in the bayou landscape. This stunning anthology takes us back to where Burke's heart and soul beat -- the steamy, seamy Gulf Coast -- in complex and fascinating tales that crackle with violence and menace, meshing his flair for gripping storytelling with his urbane writing style.

With several acclaimed novels under her belt, Nanci Kincaid is praised for her raw, edgy Southern tales. Leaving their sleepy Mississippi home behind, brother and sister Truely and Courtney Noonan head west. There they drift apart, only to reunite, as they lay down new roots in Southern California.

Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross is adrift in the wake of the sudden disappearance of his mother more than a year ago, and is struggling to find his way out of the small Texas border town of Murfee. Chris Cherry is a newly minted sheriff's deputy, a high school football hero who has reluctantly returned to his hometown.

Celebrating Failure is the definitive how-to manual for leaders seeking to embrace the power of failure as a learning tool to improve their organizations and achieve ever-greater goals. The business world (and, lately, the political arena) is convinced that the number one topic is change. Heath posits that it might well be failure, because if you do it right, failure can become a launching pad for change.

For Patterson Wells, disaster is the norm. Working alongside dangerous, desperate, itinerant men as a tree clearer in disaster zones, he’s still dealing with the loss of his young son. Writing letters to the boy offers some solace. The bottle gives more. Upon a return trip to Colorado, Patterson stops to go fishing with an old acquaintance, only to find him in a meth-induced delirium and keeping a woman tied up in the bathtub. In the ensuing chain of events, which will test not only his future but his past, Patterson tries to do the right thing.

In Middle Men, Stegner Fellow and New Yorker contributor Jim Gavin delivers a hilarious and panoramic vision of California, portraying a group of men, from young dreamers to old vets, as they make valiant forays into middle-class respectability. In "Play the Man", a high-school basketball player aspires to a college scholarship; in "Elephant Doors", a production assistant on a game show moonlights as a stand-up comedian; and in the collection's last story, the immensely moving "Costello", a middle-aged plumbing-supplies salesman comes to terms with the death of his wife.

Multiple Edgar Award nominee Thomas H. Cook is the author of dark, terrifying thrillers like Places in the Darkand Red Leaves. In Master of the Delta, it's 1954 down in Mississippi and Jack Branch has finally come home, taking a job as a high school teacher. He soon learns that one of his students is the son of a notorious local murderer, the Coed Killer. And as they say, like father, like son.

A breathtaking audiobook by award-winning author Ari Berk about a young bat setting off into the world using only his good sense! Sense is the song you sing out into the world, and the song the world sings back to you. With these words, Chiro's mother sends him off into the night for the first time alone. It's an adventure, but how will he find his way? And how will he find his way home? As the young bat discovers, navigating the world around him is easy as long as he uses his good sense.

This is the true story of a six-year-old girl named Elena and her battle against brain cancer. In her last days she showed a community how to love and how to live. Written through the eyes of her parents, Brooke and Keith Desserich, as a remembrance to Elena's younger sister, Elena's story is one of humility and inspiration as she lives each day, one day at a time.

Nine physicists are dead. The medical examiner has determined that the victims died from drinking coffee laced with rat poison. The owner of the house, Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner, isn't suspected, but his claim that a piece of the debris from Roswell's 1947 UFO crash was hidden in Flagler might be true. Enter Luther "Luke" Stephens McWhorter, a Yale Divinity School-educated West Texas sheriff with all the right questions. Is the fragment real? If so, who's trying to locate it? And what has fueled the byzantine activities of Abbot County's two secret societies for the past 70 years?

Mr. Coats is freezing cold. No matter how many heaters he turns on, how many blankets he sleeps under at night, or how many layers he wears, he can simply never get warm. Being this cold all the time is lonely. And loneliness is a chilly feeling. Mr. Coats thinks he'll be alone in the cold forever, but he's wrong. There's someone out there just like him.

The Lost Country centers on Edgewater, who's recently been discharged from the navy, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish who takes him under his wing as they both search desperately for a forgotten past and a future that may never come. The Lost Country cements Gay as one of the strongest voices in Southern literature, alongside Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, and William Faulkner.

Hailed as a "clever, chilling novel that takes crime writing to a new level" by London's Sunday Times, this psychological thriller from Guillermo Martínez will captivate mystery lovers and literature buffs alike. An extremely successful author named Kloster and an unnamed, up-andcoming writer have one thing in common - they've both employed a typist named Luciana. Now Luciana claims Kloster is killing off her family, and she desperately needs help.

Cent and Torres have been trapped with evil before but this isn’t quite the same thing. Stuck on Harold Campbell’s island with nowhere to go and surrounded by a growing number of obayifo, they will have to find allies if they want to make it out. But not everyone can be trusted, and even those you think you can trust have ulterior motives. As the long night drags on, and with morning—and the promise of safety—still hours away, shadowy forces make their move, further complicating Cent and Torres’s plans.

In the middle of a raging storm in Alaska, Bess stops to tie her shoes. And just like that, the boy is lost, gone in a flash, swallowed up by the snow. Bess is a California girl, while Benedict, with whom she and the boy live, is the last in his family’s long line of rugged Alaskans. Benedict knows better than to venture out in such weather. But he has no choice. He must find Bess and the boy before it’s too late.

After surviving one brutal night against a creature they call the obayifo, Cent and Torres are unexpectedly reunited when both are recruited by the mysterious billionaire Harold Campbell to join his fight against the creatures that lurk in the shadows. For Cent, it’s an easy decision: Find and kill the obayifo and rid the world of their scourge. For Torres, it’s a little more complicated. There are forces turning her against people she trusts, with her future—and those of the people she loves—in the balance.

Hurricane Matthew is a force to be reckoned with. It has been forecasted to drown the city of Houston in an unrelenting torrent of rain. In the days before its arrival, the city was evacuated, leaving behind only a skeleton police force and civilians unable to flee its destructive path. It’s the perfect time and the perfect place for the perfect crime.