Showing results by narrator "Will Patton" in All Categories

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fuelled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Master storyteller Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter.

Clete Purcel—private investigator, ex-member of the New Orleans Police Department, and war veteran with a hard shell and just a few soft spots—is Dave Robicheaux's longtime friend and partner in detective work. But he has a troubled past. When Clete leaves his car at the local car wash, only to return to find it ransacked by a group of thugs tied to the drug trade from Mexican cartels to Louisiana, it feels personal—his grandniece died of a fentanyl overdose, and his fists curl when he thinks of the dealers who sold it.

1978: Meet Morris Bellamy ,the man who robs the safe of America's most famous reclusive writer, John Rothstein. But it isn't just the money he is interested in. Morrie is obsessed by the author's notebooks and is prepared to kill the author for them. 2009: Meet young Pete Saubers, whose father was knocked down by an out-of-control Mercedes in a job line-up. When he discovers a buried trunk of money and notebooks of a famous writer, he has the means to rescue his family from poverty.

To Have and Have Not is the dramatic story of Harry Morgan, an honest man who is forced into running contraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping his crumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him into the world of wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who throng the region, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair.

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive. Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them - not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her. His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble. But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can't entirely explain.

The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker.

This collection of Buk's grimmest diaries gives an insight into the noir and brutal Los Angeles that Bukowski observed and lived so well. He was a legend in his time: a madman, a recluse, a lover...tender, vicious...never the same. These are exceptional stories that came pounding out of his violent and depraved life - horrible and holy. You cannot listen to them and come away the same again.

House of the Rising Sun is an epic tale of love, loss, betrayal, vengeance and retribution that follows Texas Ranger Hackberry Holland on his journey to reunite with his estranged son, Ishmael. After a violent encounter that leaves four Mexican soldiers dead, Hackberry escapes the country in possession of a stolen artifact, earning the ire of a bloodthirsty Austrian arms dealer who will do anything to recapture his prize, believed to be the mythic cup of Christ.

Born from Bukowski's columns, the LA underground press of the 1960s, Bukowski defined his early alter ego, Hank Chinaski, as a self-described dirty old man who eyes his defeatist attitude about himself with his clarity to see humor and holiness in others. Addictive and instructive listening, Bukowski delivers the humanity and intelligence of all the unseen. Filled with his usual obsessions - sex, booze, gambling - Notes features Bukowski's offbeat insights into politics and literature, and his tortured, violent relationships.

Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs. The trick with found things, though, is how easily they can be lost. Friends can betray. Mothers can disappear. Visions can mislead. Certainties can unravel.

Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.

Never Love a Stranger, still considered one of Robbins' most powerful books, tells the story of Francis "Frankie" Kane, an orphan growing up in the dirty world of New York's Hell's Kitchen. After being kicked out of a Catholic orphanage when it is discovered that he is of Jewish descent, a confused and deeply distraught Frankie turns to a life of crime, the only life he knows, and he's good at it.

Dave Robicheaux is a haunted man. Between his recurrent nightmares, his thoughts drift from one irreconcilable memory to the next. During a murder investigation, Dave Robicheaux discovers he may have committed the homicide he's investigating, one which involved the death of the man who took the life of Dave's beloved wife. As he works to clear his name, Robicheaux encounters a cast of characters and a resurgence of dark social forces that threaten to destroy all of those whom he loves.

The American West in the early 1960s appears to be a pastoral paradise: golden wheat fields, mist-filled canyons, frolicking animals. Aspiring novelist Aaron Holland Broussard has observed it from the open door of a boxcar, riding the rails for both inspiration and odd jobs. Jumping off in Denver, he finds work on a farm and meets Joanne McDuffy, an articulate and fierce college student and gifted painter. Their soul connection is immediate, but their romance is complicated by Joanne's involvement with a shady professor who is mixed up with a drug-addled cult.

Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town with a deep and abiding respect for the citizens in his care. Still mourning the loss of his cherished wife and locked in a perilous almost-romance with his deputy, Pam Tibbs, a woman many decades his junior, Hackberry feeds off the deeds of evil men to keep his own demons at bay.

On its surface life in Houston is as you would expect: drive-in restaurants, souped-up cars, jukeboxes, teenagers discovering their sexuality. Against this backdrop Aaron Holland Broussard discovers the poignancy of first love and a world of violence he did not know existed. When Aaron spots the beautiful Valerie Epstein fighting with her boyfriend, he inadvertently challenges the power of the Mob. He also discovers he must find the courage his father had found as an American soldier in the Great War

When Dave Robicheaux gets the call saying his ex-partner Clete Purcel is in jail for felony assault and resisting arrest, bailing him out is instinctive. After all, Clete is the man who saved Dave's life. But Clete's latest escapade isn't just worrying because it shows his demons are gaining the upper hand; it also brings some of those demons into Dave's life, in the most personal way possible...

The forty-year-old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has never been forgotten in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Flynn's daughter Megan, a photojournalist drawn to controversial subjects, returns to the site of her father's murder, it quickly becomes clear that her family's bloodstained past will not stay buried. Megan gives her old friend Dave Robicheaux a tip about a small-time criminal named Cool Breeze Broussard, scarcely suspecting that the seemingly innocuous case will lead Robicheaux and his partner into the midst of deadly conspiracy. Combining brilliant prose, crackling suspense, and an exquisite sense of character and place, Sunset Limited is a wrenching tale of historic violence and soiled redemption that reveals America's finest novelist at his masterful best.

Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honour and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the 20th-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death and emerged as one of the greatest leaders in history.

"The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not." Bukowski's alter ego finds himself in a slow dance with the most beautiful girl in town, who also happens to be its saddest; a tale of loss and what might have been.