Showing results by narrator "Peter Berkrot" in All Categories

David Sparrow is an awesome stay-at-home dad. He gets his kids ready for school while his wife, Amy, commutes to New York City, where she was recently promoted to deputy district attorney. In fact she just inherited a major case: prosecuting crime lord Dante Payne. Meanwhile David is content chatting with the moms at school drop-off, making dinner at night, and doing housework.

"I’m being followed,” she said. “I think he wants to kill me.” When a panicked young woman slips her hand into his in 1960s Chinatown, just before a knife-wielding stalker attacks, private eye Alex Novalis finds his cherished hard-boiled persona threatened by a romantic streak that has a habit of getting him into trouble. Sandy Smollett is triple trouble - a stripper who comes on like the girl next door and has a way of bending the truth to suit any occasion. Novalis finds her irresistible.

With his father’s mysterious disappearance and his brother Ronnie enlisting in the Vietnam War, 13-year-old TJ Crowley is left alone with his racist, unstable mother, Kate. The newly enforced Fair Housing Act results in the unthinkable for the Crowleys when a Black family, headed by the eminent Dr. Washington, crosses the racial red line and moves in next door. Kate is quick to warn TJ that their new neighbors are strictly off-limits and makes a panicked call to beg Ray, her old flame, to travel to their home in Wichita Kansas to help deal with “the problem next door.”

What started as a military coup in Pakistan has ignited South Asia and threatens to spread to the world's largest democracy in India. American and British allies struggle to rescue Western civilians who have been cut off in Islamabad. What starts as a desperate race turns into a grim siege. But the fate of a few innocents pales in comparison to one inescapable fact: Pakistan is a nuclear power and some of those weapons are unaccounted for.

Universities play an indispensable role within modern democracies. But this role is often overlooked or too narrowly conceived, even by universities themselves. In What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, argues that—at a moment when liberal democracy is endangered and more countries are heading toward autocracy than at any time in generations—it is critical for today's colleges and universities to reestablish their place in democracy. For those committed to democracy's future prospects, this book is a vital resource.

Being a University of Michigan football fan should be joyful. Michigan is an elite academic institution whose football team boasts 43 Big Ten championships. But these days, college football is complicated. The NCAA is corrupt and exploitative, and Michigan keeps losing to Ohio State. It’s hard not to wonder, as Ben Mathis-Lilley does in this book: why are we doing this? The Hot Seat is a chronicle of one of the wildest years in Michigan football history, but also a search for the truth about fandom, from the pages of history books to the wilderness of online forums.

Benjamin Wilder grew up with sparse shelter, infested provisions, and constant abuse dealt to him by his stepfather: Jessup — a.k.a. the Rabid Dog. Without a sober mother to defend him from the Rabid Dog’s wrath, Ben finds reprieve and adventure in a club of misfit boys called the Black Machetes. But the world as Ben knows it comes to an end when he witnesses an act so psychologically appalling that it forces him to run for his life.

Paralyzed by writer's block, Scott Atwood (the award-winning, psychological thriller author) realizes his career is over. He decides to end his life in a way that will thrill fans with his typical mind-blowing finale. But just as Scott resolves to jump in front of a train, he comes up with a plot for his next bestseller—a thriller-suspense writer who wreaks havoc in other people's lives to help create new ideas.

Where do writers go when they die? The forgotten ones, at least, go to the Café of Minor Authors where they drink endless cups of cappuccino, self-obsess, and nurse their shattered dreams. Some authors, it’s rumored, can escape Oblivion if they try hard enough to write something the universe can’t ignore, even after death. This is the story of one ambitious writer stuck in Oblivion who not only risks upturning his own fate but also the fate of his literary hero and that of his great grandmother, Hanna, an aspiring actor in the Yiddish theater in the Prague of 1911.

What leads one person to collect stamps and another coins, one fine art and another butterflies? Who can say? But one thing is certain: those who've got the collecting bug care passionately - sometimes violently - about the objects of their obsession.

By July 1, 1942, the United States has been fighting in the Pacific for nearly seven months. The Japanese advance halted west of Australia at the island of Timor, and from Timor the Japanese stage bombing raids on Darwin. In the north, the Japanese hold the former Australian possessions of New Ireland and New Britain, including the town of Rabaul in the north of New Britain. Holding Rabaul gives the Japanese possession of Simpson Harbor, a deep-water port that the Japanese turn into a formidable forward base, swarming with Zeros and antiaircraft weapons.

Jack and Charlie Davis, along with a new companion, Jimmy Ardana, are part of the Allied effort to stop the Japanese at Port Moresby in May 1942. But the Allies have received little in the way of reinforcements, and the only fighter available to face the Japanese Zero is the difficult to handle Bell P-39. Charlie flies dangerous reconnaissance missions to determine the location of the Japanese Navy. Jack, supposedly on his way home to the States, is diverted to be a flight commander in the 8th Fighter Group at Port Moresby.

As the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy rolls south to the oil-rich Netherlands East Indies, a handful of Allied airmen and sailors stand in their way. Two brothers, Jack and Charlie Davis, pilots in the US Army Air Forces, are among that handful who face overwhelming odds to buy time for America to gear up to fight the war in the Pacific.

A CIA field officer monitoring chemical weapon smuggling in Jordan is missing and with him, the trail for those deadly weapons. Skilled Vector operatives Alex Wolfe and Skylar Cruz are deployed to find them before they fall into the wrong hands. But they’re not the only ones on the chase. When Vector is ambushed, they find themselves at the mercy of the strange chemical weapon they were sent to track. A weapon based on technology far more insidious and dangerous than they ever could have imagined...one that affects their very perception of reality.

When a controversial religious leader is immolated in the Mission District of San Francisco, the local police chalk it up to a bizarre suicide. Yet witnesses claim a mysterious robed figure set fire to the priest. When a cult leader in Paris dies under similar circumstances, Interpol asks Grey and Viktor for help. Convinced the culprit is a charismatic New Age prophet who has become an Internet sensation, Grey and Viktor undergo a perilous journey into the world of the occult as they try to penetrate the prophet’s inner circle.

The General. A name whispered in hushed tones among the criminal underworld, from Miami to Buenos Aires. A name even the drug cartels fear. Yet the General is a man without a face. There are no fingerprints on file, no known base of operations, not even a biographical sketch.

This full-cast audiobook, featuring 11 different voice actors, and narrated by Hillary Huber, take on the roles of the Tandem Players, a group of community theater actors that love their community theater almost as much as they love the sweet old landlady who gave them a home to perform their plays in over the years. But when she passes away, and the will that was to leave the Broadtown Theater to the acting troupe disappears, they don’t even have time to mourn their loss. Her son comes in like a wrecking ball....

Alexa and Francis were wealthy executives who had everything, except for kids. When he tragically passed away, she gave up hope for being a mother...until she met Vick Miller, a simple family man and a nearly perfect doppelganger of her husband. She pays him handsomely for his donations to produce a child who resembles her beloved husband. The offers grow more enticing, and Vick’s marriage begins to strain.

Set over the course of one Sunday, The Slow Midnight on Cypress Avenue is a collection of interconnected vignettes that takes the listener through the streets and across the sidewalks of Cypress Avenue - an unkempt afterthought, just a place that sits at the neighborhood border edge of Ridgewood Queens, New York.

The crime fiction canopy's a broad one, with room to give shelter to writing of all sorts, as editor Lawrence Block shows with At Home in the Dark.