Showing results by narrator "Xe Sands" in All Categories

When Treat Byrnes walks into her bookstore café, Eve Alexander wants to eat him up. Bad boy isn't her usual flavor, but for the sexy contractor, she's willing to take a walk on the wild side. Treat has a history of falling for damsels in distress, but Eve doesn't need rescuing. Not even when her café is sabotaged. Only when Treat finds out the saboteur is his own mother, he knows he has to do something before things go too far.

“Second place is the first loser” according to Sarah Matell, a heroine who wants nothing more than to wrench on cars and race with the guys. As a talented technician in her father’s automotive speed shop, she’s a whiz at tuning race engines. Winning races also comes easily to her. What isn’t easy is winning Craig Keller, local drag race hero.

Bounty hunter Trinity Smith had one goal in life: to track down criminals and bring them to justice. And he was going after one of the most infamous of them all: Victoria Davidge, a cold-blooded seductress accused of murdering her husband. Trinity took up as a hired hand at her Arizona ranch, never expecting to find himself attracted to the fiery-haired fugitive, but the passionate beauty ignited his senses and tempted the hard-bitten loner to forget his lawful duty.

For her previous novels (Things We Didn’t Say, The Life You’ve Imagined, Real Life & Liars), author Kristina Riggle has garnered fabulous reviews and established herself as a rapidly rising star of contemporary women’s fiction. In Keepsake, she explores that most complicated of relationships, as two sisters raised by a hoarder deal with old hurts and resentments, and the very different paths their lives have taken. As always, Riggle approaches important topics poignantly and honestly—including hoarding and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in her remarkable Keepsake—while writing with real emotional power and compassion about families and their baggage. For readers of Katrina Kittle and Elin Hildenbrand, Kristina Riggle’s Keepsake is a treasure.

Lil and Frank married young, launched into courtship when they bonded over how they both - suddenly, tragically - lost a parent when they were children. Over time, their marriage grew and strengthened, with each still wishing for so much more understanding of the parents they’d lost prematurely. Now, after many years in Boston, they have retired in North Carolina. There, Lil, determined to leave a history for their children, sifts through letters and notes and diary entries - perhaps revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know.

Join Rachel Anne Ridge, author of the beloved memoir Flash, in a journey back to the pasture. As she adopts a second rescue donkey as a little brother for Flash - a miniature named Henry - she finds that walking with donkeys has surprising lessons to teach us about prayer, renewing our faith, and connecting to God in fresh ways.

In this award-winning collection, listeners will find spellbinding stories of loss, absence, and the devastating effects of chance - of what happens when the unthinkable bad luck of other people, of other towns, becomes our bad luck, our town. Taut, lucid, and engrossing, provocative and dark - and often darkly funny - these stories have much to offer the lover of literary fiction as well as the listener who just loves a great story.

Claire McIntyre tried to ignore the murders - the headlines of women stabbed to death, the city’s mounting fear. She tried to forget, too, the painful past she’d left behind in Massachusetts...and concentrate on her entrancing new life with Marc Bonnard. He was a man of wealth and sophistication, who wrapped her in a spell of erotic desire. Claire could almost believe that she loved him. But as the brutal deaths continued, Claire discovered a terrifying secret, a nightmare that became her own, and fled into the proud, indifferent city, searching for help.

A perfect blend of provocative beauty and fighting skills kept her safe in the most dangerous situations. But Maggie Bennett had no protection against her feelings for the handsome, mysterious Randall Carter. Torn by memories of past hurts, hopes for new love tossed her back into his arms and onto the bloody trail of a notorious terrorist. Maggie and Randall are swept on a wild roller-coaster ride of violence and betrayal…targets for an assassin's bullet and a passion that will strike without warning from the dark depths of the heart.

Maggie Bennett possesses stunning beauty that acts as a disguise for the lethal skills that truly come together to make her tough, icy, and cool. She thought she was ready for anything until she was assigned to protect ex-rock star Mack Pulaski. He aimed his sensual appeal with deadly accuracy - right into Maggie’s heart. Love is full of traps, but it could be a fatal distraction on the sizzling journey that sweeps them from Central America to Zurich, where multi-million-dollar drug deals provide the kind of stakes men kill for.

Consider this glowing debut from Paige Lewis a menagerie of near-extinction. Space Struck explores the wonders and cruelties occurring within the realms of nature, science, and religion, with the acuity of a sage, the deftness of a hunter, and a hilarious sensibility for the absurd. The universe is seen as an endless arrow “...and it asks only one question: How dare you?” The poems are physically and psychologically tied to the animal world.

The Voucher Promise examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as "Section 8", and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing.

Joyce Carol Oates, a queenpin of the noir genre, has brought her keen and discerning eye to the curation of an outstanding anthology of brand-new top-shelf short stories (and poems by Margaret Atwood!). While bad men are not always the victims in these tales, they get their due often enough to satisfy listeners who are sick of the gendered status quo, or who just want to have a little bit of fun at the expense of a crumbling patriarchal society. This stylistically diverse collection will make you squirm in your seat, stay up at night, laugh out loud, and inevitably wish for more.

The Marvel of Martyrdom takes a broad perspective on self-sacrifice and martyrdom, bringing together religion, popular culture, history, psychology, and mythology. Stories of individuals both famous (Gandhi) and obscure (Rodrigo Rosenberg) intertwine with research on altruism, happiness, and radicalization to terrorism. The changing landscape of the book's setting - from The Roman Empire to 19th-century Russia to Nazi Germany to post-World War II India to present day Ukraine - makes the power of self-sacrifice and martyrdom come alive.

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a 500-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar" - or, as some say in Belize, "traveling with sugar". A decade in the making, this audiobook unfolds as a series of cronicas - a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease.

Rabies enjoys a fearsome and lurid reputation. Throughout the decades of spiraling growth that defined New York City from the 1840s to the 1910s, the bone-chilling cry of "Mad dog!" possessed the power to upend the ordinary routines and rhythms of urban life. In Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, Jessica Wang examines the history of this rare but dreaded affliction during a time of rapid urbanization.

In today's fast-paced, competitive business environment, everyone needs to communicate clearly and use time productively. E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide is a user-friendly audiobook that is filled with guidelines, tips, and tools. Discover how to write professional email that gets results, makes better use of email time, and avoids problems that can be costly. The updated version includes a section on using instant messaging and handheld devices. Used by individuals, corporations, and trainers, this is a must-have for anyone who writes emails at work.

In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy’s most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. Within this book, you’ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakable and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime.

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s 14th collection of short fiction, comprising 28 uncollected and impossible-to-find stories. Here are 28 tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.