Showing results by narrator "Scott Richards" in All Categories

This is the story of a drug deal gone bad. Having committed the crime of selling a potent poison to a desperate youth, a destitute apothecary must decide how to spend his ill-gained fortune. Resolving to start his career afresh, he flees to the city of Verona to set up a new shop of medicinal healing and alchemical discovery. Plans go awry when he finds himself in the middle of a woeful tragedy he had unwittingly helped to cause.

Taya has risen from humble roots to become a fire seer in the Coalition of Mages. Eager to prove herself, she arrives in the town of Hrappa to locate a "jackal" - a mage operating outside the Coalition's authority - who has murdered three people.

A Rocky Start feels like a potential classic: an authentic treatise on the state of America's mental health establishment and the help or damage it metes out to people who desperately need its services, written by someone who knows that world intimately, from inside both its real and perceived walls. Fisher describes A Rocky Start as "a candid and rare look into one particularly complex life." It is that and more. Fisher's natural intelligence drives the narrative.

Carolyn Stoddard is lost. Widowed at an early age, she's the lonely rich girl, drinking her life away as her friends grow up and move on. But Carolyn's life is about to change. Because Carolyn is about to be given a set of choices. And those choices will determine whether she is allowed to live or die. It's closing time at the Blue Whale, but for Carolyn Stoddard the night is far from over. It's time to face the music....Dreams that are becoming nightmares for them both.

What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle's break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut's remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting Earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor's buried longing.

Some stories are all about the crime. These stories are about the maelstrom of what happens afterward. A hard-bitten crew of professional thieves pull of the score of their lives, coming away with millions in cash, enough to change their lives, make new identities, start fresh. But that's when the real trouble begins. In this linked anthology, we follow each member of the crew of culprits after the heist and watch as this perfect score ends up a perfect nightmare.