Showing results by narrator "Michael Levine" in All Categories

Belle Graham hears it first from the gossip columnist for the Evening Crier, where Belle is resident crossword editor. Fire has destroyed one of the stables at King Wenstarin Farms - the multimillion-dollar corporation owned by the notorious Collins clan - and the barn manager lies in a coma. Did someone torch the place? That's what Belle's PI husband Rosco Polycrates has been hired to find out.

Belle Graham and her canine bodyguards, Kit and Gabby, are enjoying their daily outing in the local dog park with new friends Karen Tacete; her daughter, Lily; and their dog, Bear. But Karen's picture-perfect life shatters when her husband, Dan, fails to return home. He's barely been declared officially missing when Karen receives a ransom note that includes a dire warning: If she contacts the police or the FBI, Dan dies.

Playboy Thompson C. Briephs has just been found strangled in his bed. The police believe the Newcastle Herald crossword editor, a scion of a blue-blooded New England family, died from kinky sex gone wrong. But cop-turned-private investigator Rosco Polycrates thinks there's a six-letter word for what happened. Enlisting the help of Annabelle Graham, the crossword editor for a rival paper, Rosco unearths a crazy quilt of suspects who had it in for the victim - and one of them was blackmailing him.

Belle Graham is mired in New England's snowy, late-January gloom when Hollywood comes calling. Seduced by visions of relaxing poolside in sunny Los Angeles, she heads to Hollywood to create a puzzle for a TV movie based on a crime she and her husband Rosco Polycrates recently cracked. The hook is that the show is interactive - viewers get to solve the crime on air with Belle.

With Christmas approaching, Belle Graham and her husband, Rosco Polycrates, are getting into the holiday spirit. While Belle does her part creating a Noel crossword contest, Rosco dons red suit and snowy beard to collect toys for the town's annual children's drive. But his good will starts to dim when he and two Newcastle Police Department colleagues are mistaken for escaped convicts masquerading as small-town Santas.

The residents of the bucolic Massachusetts hamlet are up in arms. A developer has bought the sprawling Quigley homestead, and his construction crew is causing a ruckus digging up the land. The noise stops abruptly when a female skeleton is found buried in the garden.

The Holiday Decoration Competition is in full swing at Newcastle's historic Paul Revere Inn. As the rivalry heats up, crossword editor Belle Graham unearths an abandoned treasure: a book of dessert recipes written in the form of crosswords handed down from mother to daughter.

Crosswords get the Hollywood treatment in this mystery featuring PI Rosco Polycrates and master puzzle solver Belle Graham. Jamaica Nevisson - or Cassandra Lovett, as she's known to the adoring fans of her daytime soap - has vanished without a trace. She and her pal, Genie Pepper, went pleasure yachting off Nantucket, only to end up lost at sea. So far only the charred hull of the boat has turned up.

Although Professor Andi Cunningham knows Druidry and magick are real, her dream to recreate a twelfth century Scottish castle is destroyed when the Druid who claimed her heart wards her from the land. Now Andi's deeply hidden Druid powers have been awakened by her new husband, Liam - Ian's descendant and the son of the Master of the Bresal Etarlam, who wants her untapped power as his own.

Using the spell of time shifting, Alexander MacLachlan says good-bye to his beloved brother, his brother's wife, and his own darling Alysone--necessary sacrifices for the survival of Druidry. With his family far in the future preparing for battle, Alex must fulfill his destiny: find the Worthington heir and then kill and be killed.

The future is a dangerous place. Keeping the world stable and peaceful when competing corporate interests and nation-states battle for power, wealth, and prestige has only gotten harder over the years. But that's the United Nations' job. So the UN has changed along with the rest of the world. When the UN's "soft" diplomacy fails, it has harder options. Quiet, scalpel-like options: The Dead - biologically enhanced secret operatives created by the UN to solve the problems no one else can.

Calvin Baker, author of three award-winning novels about history and the American experience, turns his attention to Europe to examine the entangled phenomena of globalization and multiculturalism amid the current recession in Spain. His poignant, astute observations, at times personal and often funny, take listeners into the hidden, unexamined world of European race-relations and the shared history and culture of the countries on the Atlantic ocean.

Waking up next to a dead woman was a good indication that Dr. Gabhran MacLachlan was in bigger trouble than he'd realized. Recognizing this as another trap set by the dark Druid Master, Gav races from Edinburgh to New Orleans to find Alysone, a mental patient who claims to have awakened in a reality that isn't hers. Her story, so close to his own, may be the necessary key to unlock his Druid memories and prevent him from shifting realities once again.

Elena MacFarland wonders what everyone else knows about her new farm that she doesn't, and whether she'll live long enough to find out. Betrayed by her fiancé and the powerful Worthington family, Elena fights back and negotiates a comfortable settlement with one small caveat: she must live in Scotland for two years. One kidnapping and two attempts on her life later, the darkly arrogant Scot, Faolan MacGailtry declares himself her new protector and moves into her farmhouse. Major problem?

Can the couple unite the slaves to escape the evil one? "The second book in Holland's The Gods Dream Trilogy lives up to the excellent first volume in the trilogy. A captured prince tortured by an evil god finds his soul mate in an Earth woman badly wounded in body and spirit." (Jacqueline Diamond)

Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington returns to his hometown of Chaneysville, Pennsylvania—just north of the Mason-Dixon Line—to learn more about the death of his father. Washington discovers that his father was researching a mystery of his own: why 13 escaped slaves reached freedom in Chaneysville only to die there, for reasons forgotten or never known at all.

When it comes to establishing reasonable doubt in the minds of a New York jury, defense attorney Michael Roehmer is the best in the business - and no one knows this better than rape victim Lisa Altman. She sat helplessly in the courtroom as Roehmer, smoothly and without mercy, shot gaping holes in her testimony. As a result, the man who brutally assaulted her walked free. Right and wrong, guilt and innocence, mean nothing to Roehmer. For him, winning is everything. Now Altman is sitting at a different table: Her rapist has been savagely murdered and she’s accused of the heinous crime.

Who hasn't feared the math Minotaur in its labyrinth of abstractions? Now, in Out of the Labyrinth, Robert and Ellen Kaplan - the founders of The Math Circle, the popular learning program begun at Harvard in 1994 - reveal the secrets behind their highly successful approach, leading listeners out of the labyrinth and into the joyous embrace of mathematics.

After a tour of combat abroad, a young man determined to keep to himself is drawn into the dramas of his East Village neighbors. World War II veteran Richard Stone is attempting to transition back into normal life. An aspiring writer, he’s surviving off the GI Bill and the help of friends. Living free of attachments and responsibilities, he thinks, is the best way to defend himself from the world’s pain, like his unhappy upbringing or his best friend’s death in the war. But his neighborhood on Second Avenue won’t permit such seclusion.

Based on a true story: A magnificent portrayal of chaos, darkness, and adventure in Asia's Golden Triangle as the war wages in Vietnam. Adrift at the end of the Vietnam War, Paul Roberts and his girlfriend, Fay, are arrested at the Burmese-Thai border for smuggling a couple of ounces of hashish. Stranded in a small Thai prison, they become part of a grisly contest played out by opium warlords, corrupt border patrol police, and two AWOL GIs. The war echoes through their intrigues and jailbreak attempts, especially when a regiment of North Vietnamese joins the skirmish.