Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Genre Fiction

In a frightening incident, Elsie's husband, Edward Travilla, narrowly survives an accidental shooting when friends tease son Edward, Jr. into firing a loaded pistol. The shot grazes Edward's head, and he survives with only minor damage. Soon life in the Travilla household returns to its calm routine.

This swashbuckling romance transports a droll young English gentleman from his comfortable life in London to a fast-moving adventure in a mythical country steeped in political intrigue. Rudolf Rassendyll, pondering his life’s purpose, sets out on a journey to the tiny European kingdom of Ruritania, where he discovers that he bears a marked physical resemblance to the king.

"I suffered much cruelty as an unmarried mother and I had no recourse when they took my boy away from me. I had no rights, no prospects, no future. Everyone believed I was ruined. But no one knew the secrets of my own childhood, nor could they ever have imagined the dangerous and heretical scheme I would devise to protect and watch over my remarkable son as he grew in to manhood. Some might call me a liar, since all I describe would be impossible for a woman of my station. But that is where my design unfolds...."

Balzac’s universally loved novel explores the great theme of money and its effect on the human character. Old Goriot is a lodger at Madame Vauquer’s Parisian boarding house. At first, his wealth inspires respect, but as his circumstances are reduced, he is gradually shunned. He moves into smaller and less desirable rooms in the house, and soon his only remaining visitors are two beautiful young women. The mystery as to who they are and what is happening to Goriot’s fortune involves several other boarders, including Rastignac, an ambitious youth who hopes to rise in society.

Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centers on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries, a new stepsister enters Molly's quiet life, the loveable, but worldly and troubling, Cynthia. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and watchful society of Hollingford.

Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple - handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful façade. With mingled anger and compassion, Lucy scrutinizes the assumptions and verities of her employers' world and compares them with the vivid realities of her native place.

Bruce Martell is a man of principle. Riding into Indio Basin in search of his kid brother, he immediately feels uneasy. Before he can encounter even a single settler, he happens upon the corpses of four poached cows. After a brief encounter with the angry owner of the slaughtered cattle, he makes his way into the town of Starlight. Here he finds a climate of hostility, the farmers and settlers pitted against the cowboys and cattlemen. He feels the settlers' hostility keenly, and after an altercation with a drunkard, he finds himself in need of rescue from the angry mob.

Every town has at least one beloved if misunderstood eccentric, and Beanie Bradsher belongs to Mayhew Junction. Some - LouWanda Crump, for example - would call Beanie a spectacle, but Beanie just marches - and dresses - to the beat of a different drum.

Stringer was just doing his job when he went to hear Teddy Roosevelt speak at a railway stop in Granger, Wyoming. But Stringer's job is to write about the speech - not get shot at! So suddenly a certain reporter has a powerful curiosity about who wants him six feet under. There's just one hitch: Stringer can't be sure if the bullet was meant for him or old Teddy. Now all MacKail has to do is dodge a pack of hired killers, swap lead with a few train robbers, match wits with a renegade Shoshoni, and bed a few lusty ladies on a trail that can end on the front page - or the obituaries….

Just as Anne had to use a male pseudonym in order to publish, Helen Graham, the novel's protagonist and a battered wife, must assume an alias in order to gain freedom from her suffering. With her young child, Helen takes up residence at Wildfell Hall, shrouding her past in secrecy, yet earning the attentions of a young, unmarried country gentlemen.

Louis L’Amour said that the West was no place for the frightened or the mean. It was a “big country needing big men and women to live in it.” This volume presents five more of L’Amour’s fine short stories about the West.

Tack Gentry has been away for a year when he returns to the familiar buildings of his uncle John Gentry's G Bar ranch. To his amazement, the ranch has a new owner, who is unimpressed when Tack explains that his uncle was a Quaker, didn't believe in violence, and never carried a gun. His advice to Tack is to make tracks. But Tack has other plans.

Kimball O'Hara is an Irish orphan, but he runs free in the streets of India. As a boy, he shows self-reliance and resourcefulness, running errands for Mahbub Ali, who works for the British Secret Service. Kim also meets a Tibetan lama who is on a quest to be freed from the Wheel of Life and becomes his disciple. Together they have wonderful adventures on the exotically colorful Grand Trunk Road through the Indian countryside.

Driftless is an unforgettable story of contemporary life in rural America. Words, Wisconsin, home to a few hundred people yet absent from state maps, comes richly to life by way of an extraordinary cast of characters.

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees her independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Lucy flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a French boarding school in the cosmopolitan capital of Villette.

When a rainmaker is bludgeoned to death in the pitch-blackness of a colossal dust storm, small-town sheriff Temple Jennings shoulders yet another burden in the hard times of the 1930s Dust Bowl. The killing only magnifies Temple's ongoing troubles: a formidable opponent in the upcoming election, the repugnant burden of enforcing farm foreclosures, and his wife's lingering grief over the loss of their eight-year-old son. As the sheriff and his young deputy investigate the murder, their suspicions focus on a teenager, Carmine, serving with the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In this tantalizing tale of Victorian ghost stories and family secrets, timid, solitary librarian Gerard Freeman lives for just two things: his elusive pen pal Alice and a story he found hidden in his mother's drawer years ago. Written by his great-grandmother Viola, it hints at his mother's role in a sinister crime. As he discovers more of Viola's chilling tales, he realizes that they might hold the key to finding Alice and unveiling his family's mystery - or will they bring about his untimely death, as they seem to foretell?

Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as “the type that loses the girl”); and in a financial mess.

Rock Bannon, wounded in an Indian attack, is rescued by a wagon train heading to Oregon. He has fully recovered when the train pulls into a fort to stock up on supplies. It is there that the leaders of the train meet Morton Harper, a smooth-talking man who persuades them to take an easier trail that will allow them to escape an attack by Indians. Bannon knows that there will be no escape from attack on that route and that it will lead the train directly onto Hardy Bishop's vast ranching domain.