Showing results by narrator "Sarah Naughton" in All Categories

Ella is flat broke: wasting away on bodega coffee, barely making rent, seducing the occasional strange man who might buy her dinner. Unexpectedly, an Upper East Side couple named Lonnie and James rescue her from her empty bank account, offering her a job as a nanny and ushering her into their moneyed world. Ella’s days are now spent tending to the baby in their elegant brownstone or on extravagant excursions with the family. Both women are just 26 - but unlike Ella, Lonnie has a doting husband and son, unmistakable artistic talent, and old family money.

Trinity Academy’s gold-plated secret society is about to be turned upside down. Seventeen-year-old Sam Evans plots revenge on her ex-bestie, Jessica, who happens to perch at the top of the Society’s social ladder - and helped put Sam’s dad in jail. Sam may no longer be cool enough to be invited to rush the Society, but she’s tech-savvy enough to know how to use it in her plan.

After nine months as a cigarette girl at the Third Door, one of Chicago’s premier moonshine parlors, Gina Ricci feels like she's finally getting into the swing of things. The year is 1929, the Chicago Cubs are almost in the World Series, neighborhood gangs are all-powerful, and though Prohibition is the law of the land, the Third Door can't serve the cocktails fast enough. Two women in particular are throwing drinks back with abandon while chatting up a couple of bankers, and Gina can't help but notice the levels of inebriation and the tension at their table.

On the eve of her wedding, Emily, a top Hollywood agent, is devastated to learn that her CEO fiancé is a serial cheater. Refusing to follow her instincts, she goes ahead with the marriage in order to preserve her hard-earned membership in the one percent. A master maneuverer, Emily is confident that she can outsmart her husband, clean up his messes, while enjoying the fabulous fruits of high-powered coupledom. When her husband embarks on an audacious affair with his volatile young receptionist, Emily’s savvy is put to the test.

When a body is found half-submerged in a molten mud pot in one of Rotorua's famous geothermal wonderlands, forensics expert Alexa Glock spots a way to prolong her stay in New Zealand, which she has been visiting for work. Teeth are her expertise, and the investigation needs her help, as other ways of identifying the body may have...melted away. Joining Detective Inspector Bruce Horne and his team, Alexa discovers that the murder victim, a city councilman, had trespassed on an island sacred to the Maori.

At first, Alexa Glock's initial case as a traveling forensic investigator seems straightforward - her expertise in teeth helps her identify the skeletal remains of a hunter found on the remote Stewart Island of New Zealand. But when she realizes the bullet lodged in his skull was not self-inflicted, and then a second shark-ravaged body washes up on Ringaringa Beach, it's clear that something dangerous is lurking in the beautiful waters surrounding the island. The disturbing sight seems to confirm what locals have hashed out in the pub.

Despite her world of privilege, Hélène is inspired early on by the radical ideas of her progressive governess. Though her family tries to intervene, the seeds of revolution have already been planted in Hélène’s heart, as are the seeds of love from an unlikely friendship with a young jeweler’s apprentice. Hélène’s determination to find true love is as revolutionary as her attempt to unravel the truth behind the concealed murder that tore her family apart.

England 1922. It’s been four years since Rudy’s brother Edgar went missing in war-torn France. Still deep in mourning and grappling with unanswered questions, Rudy and his mother struggle to move on. When the enigmatic Mariette arrives unexpectedly at the family’s manor claiming to be Edgar’s widow, and the mother of his child, Rudy urges her to stay, hoping she’ll shed light on the missing pieces.

It begins with a drowning. One day Mr. Arcilla, the romance language teacher at Briarfield, an all-girls boarding school, is found dead at the bottom of Reed Pond. Young and handsome, the object of much fantasy and fascination, he was adored by his students. For Lilith and Romy, Evie and Claire, Nellie and Grace, he was their first love and their first true loss.

Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s 19-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny's play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses" - all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously - to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives. Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. Even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken.

Jess Taylor and Derek Daley were in the throes of first love in a small Vermont town when they were kidnapped by a serial killer. They escaped his clutches—but not the trauma of the unsolved crime. With their lives changed forever and their romance cut short, they went their separate ways to exorcise their fears.

A former Navy SEAL, Cole Makani Hunter has returned home from a disastrous black ops mission without his best friend, his hearing, or the use of his right arm. So when his ex - commanding officer assigns him to an undercover mission at a rehab center for vets to discover who leaked sensitive military information to an enemy, he'd rather be anywhere but there. Almost immediately, Cole finds himself at odds with Annie Murray - a peace-loving ecotherapist.

Maggie vowed to never marry a man who can't laugh or dance, but when she and the dull new doctor in town, Everett Dulanis, wind up spending the night together in an abandoned dugout house, all that changes. Her father is the best man and his shotgun is the bridesmaid at the wedding where a union has been made, but there's certainly no unity.

When eight-year-old Greer Donner falls off his horse in the Washington wilderness, he braces himself to face the long hike home alone. But screams pierce the darkness, and he stumbles upon a dead-end road where a man is beating a woman - nearly to death. In a moment of courage, he stops the assault, but he's left to face the man, who turns his wrath into an ominous threat: if the boy ever reveals what he has seen, his family will pay the ultimate price. The secret Greer now carries begins his emotional unraveling.

Meet Riley Ellison, a smart, quirky, young library assistant who's become known in her hometown of Tuttle Corner, Virginia, as Riley Bless-Her-Heart. Ever since her beloved granddaddy died and her longtime boyfriend broke up with her, Riley has been withdrawing from life. In an effort to rejoin the living, she signs up for an online dating service and tries to reconnect with her childhood best friend, Jordan James, a reporter at the Tuttle Times.

For most of her adult life, Cecily Ross has compared herself to other women - and come up short. After a painful divorce from her emotionally abusive husband, Cecily returns to her hometown of Canyon, Texas, looking to heal. But coming home isn't what she expects. In a town as small as Canyon, her pain is difficult to escape - especially with her model-perfect ex - sister-in-law working at the town's popular coffee-shop hangout.

Gina Ricci takes on a job as a cigarette girl to earn money for her ailing father. She’s enchanted by the harsh, glamorous world she discovers at Chicago’s most notorious 1920s speakeasy - all overseen by the club’s imposing owner, Signora Castallazzo. But the staff buzzes with whispers about Gina’s predecessor, who died mysteriously, and the brooding photographer, Marty, warns her to be careful. When Marty is brutally murdered, with Gina as the only witness, she’s determined to track down his killer.

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly 500 stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap.

New Zealand's remote Milford Track seems the perfect place for forensic investigator Alexa Glock to reconnect with her brother Charlie, with whom she hasn't spent much time since they were kids. But their backpacking trip seems ill-fated from the start: She must stop on the way to examine nine skeletons—most likely Māori tribespeople—whose graves have been unearthed by highway construction. Before she opens the first casket, a Māori elder gives her a dire warning: The viewing of bones can unleash misfortune to the living. Or worse.

Alexa Glock is at a crossroads—personally and professionally. As an American working and living in New Zealand, she's come to love the place with its rugged beauty and warm, friendly people. But there's still so much she wants to learn in her field of forensic odontology, and her professional crush in Scotland has just interviewed her for a position at the University of Edinburgh. To complicate matters, she learns that the man who professes to love her had been unfaithful to his ex-wife.