Showing results by narrator "Derek Perkins" in All Categories

A dark evil threatens Morgana de Moray's Highland home. The Druid Princess is left with no choice but to strike a deadly bargain with the dangerous Berserker and risk all to unleash the beast from within the man.

Lord Geoffrey Fitzroy leads a charmed existence. As the second son of the duke of Breconridge, he has none of the responsibilities of his older brother and all of the advantages, leaving handsome Geoffrey free to enjoy his rakish pursuits. And pursue them he does, leaving hearts fluttering all over London. But one night, at a ball brimming with high society's most sought-after beauties, only one truly intrigues him: the regal, aloof, and mysterious Miss Serena Carew.

Nikolai Borodin has been assigned to the Soviet diamond export agency's London station for one purpose only: to keep in close touch with the System, the ruthless worldwide diamond cartel headquartered at 11 Harrowhouse Street. Recently, the System has been buying large quantities of one-carat diamonds mined in Siberia. But now contraband from the same source is showing up on the market, and the System wants the smugglers stopped.

Poet Kitty Clark has waited her entire life to see a total eclipse of the sun. News of an impending eclipse thrills her until she learns it will be visible only from Nantucket, where her ex-lover Joe Green recently moved with his new wife. Unable to resist the astronomical lure, she flies from Boston and makes her way to an isolated lighthouse, hoping to avoid Joe. The eclipse itself is overwhelming. When the sun returns a few minutes later, Kitty is standing over the bloodied body of Mrs. Joe Green, claiming "the moon did it."

While trying to free a lawyer friend convicted of a crime he didn't commit, New Orleans private investigator Luke Jacobs is drawn into an international web of real estate fraud, pharmaceutical corporation misdealing and murder. Mardi Gras may have to be put on hold.

Since John Lennon composed "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" in early 1967, fans and music critics alike have argued over the meaning of the song. Is it about drugs? Is it just a lyrical response to a drawing given Lennon by his 4-year-old son Julian? Is there some deeper meaning? Professor Tim Kasser goes beyond speculative explanations by applying innovative psychological methods to the song's lyrics and music. He deeply analyzes the song's linguistic structure, its basic theme, and the way its words and music had been used by Lennon in earlier songs.

The best-selling book Real Estate: The Sustainable Investment offers advice and stories to make the learning curve a bit less steep and measurably safer - with proven strategies for reaching long-term investment goals by including small income property in your asset allocation. Sustainable investing for sustainable living and a more secure financial future.

This is a short story about a young man who wants to be a wizard. Within, you will encounter one of the most powerful, life-transforming, secrets ever revealed. If you find it, you are ready for The Journey.

A short story about a mysterious man who arrives in a small 19th century Orkney Island fishing village. He has the air of an aristocrat, the clothes of a beggar and a leather pouch filled with the biggest pearls anyone has ever seen. The women can't take their lustful eyes off him, the men are jealous, but he only has one woman and one purpose on his mind.

Weather and Warfare dramatically retraces the meteorological forces during battlefield engagements that doomed or saved civilizations. In 1588 more than half of the Spanish Armada, on its way around northern Britain, was destroyed by storms in retreat back to Spain. Napoleon's attack on Russia was stopped cold by winter weather, as was Hitler's siege of Leningrad. In WWI, it was all-quiet on the western front during mud season.

Visit a world where a wild-land firefighter must use his mysterious powers to save his crew from a roaring inferno. Follow an eco-tourist's frantic efforts to escape an African quarantine zone ravaged by a deadly virus. Meet a gumshoe journalist as she tracks down a figure that'sable to predict the future with terrifying accuracy. And tune into Texas station KRAP (don't touch that dial, there's KRAP on it!) as a pair of down-home country deejays try their damnedest to stop a murder...while they're still on the air.

When Holmes gives up the adventurous life of a consulting detective and retires to the Sussex countryside to raise bees, little does he or his old friend Dr. John Watson realize that their greatest adventures lies ahead - an adventure spanning centuries and extending across the solar system.... For nothing less than human civilization lies at state as Sherlock Holmes finds himself moving inexorably toward the final and most terrible confrontation with his ancient enemy, the time-jumping Napoleon of crime, professor Moriarty!

Through a deft compilation of primary sources—letters, memoirs, and personal accounts from composers, librettists, and performers—Michael Rose re-creates for his readers the circumstances that gave rise to fifteen operatic milestones. From Monteverdi and Mozart to Puccini and Berg, each chapter focuses on a well-known opera and tells the story that lies behind its creation.

Nine-year-old Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother for reasons he does not understand, stumbles off the bus in a small Welsh town where he begins an unlikely friendship with old Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller. Through Ianto, Laddy learns of the collapse decades earlier of a coal mine called Kindly Light - a disaster whose legacy has echoed through generations, shaping lives in unexpected ways. And while Ianto spins the lively stories of so many men and women in this town, it's his own history in Kindly Light that is the story he can't tell.

In 1900 the global average life expectancy at birth was 31 years. By 2000 it was 66. Yet, alongside unprecedented improvements in longevity and material well-being, the 20th century also saw the rise of fascism and communism and a second world war followed by a cold war. This book tells the story of the battles between economic systems that defined the last century and created today's world. The 19th century was a period of rapid economic growth, but it also brought great inequality.

A blizzard savaged the mountain peaks, but at an inn called the Hunters' Haunt, travelers found safe refuge, a cozy room, and a roaring fire. All but Omar, the Trader of Tales - against whom the innkeeper had been nursing a grudge. But before he could pitch Omar out into the storm, his other guests proposed a contest: if Omar could top a roomful of their tallest tales, the storyteller could win his room and board. For Omar the stakes were life and death.

Will is football mad, but he's the shortest boy in the year, and one of the slowest. He knows his skills at passing and ball control could make up for his lack of size and strength, but the team coach is only interested in speed and strength. Will Will ever get a chance to show what he can do?

The citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, never tire of their heritage. For decades, the intellectuals of this little hamlet have continued endless debates about Concord’s favorite sons: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and their contemporaries. Concord’s latter-day transcendental scholars are a strange bunch, but none is more peculiar than Homer Kelly, an expert on Emerson and on homicide. An old-fashioned murder is about to put both skills to the test.

Well met, traveler! Since you are going in my direction, why don't we walk on together for a while? If luck is with us, perhaps we shall overtake Omar before nightfall, if that pirate of an innkeeper spoke true.

The House on Sugarbush Road, set in post-apartheid Johannesburg shortly after the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela, is the story of the intertwining lives of a once prominent liberal Afrikaner family and Beauty Mapule, their domestic servant of more than 30 years. Cook's intimately interconnected and finely drawn characters are white, black, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, old, and young; they are also hustlers, do-gooders, petty criminals, and sensualists, heading towards dramatic explosions both inevitable and unexpected.