Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

Jessica Fletcher’s favorite gin-rummy partner, Mimi Van Dorn, checks into the brand-new Clifton Care Partners, a private hospital that’s just opened up shop in town, for a simple procedure - one that leads tragically, and inexplicably, to her death. Seeking justice in her inimitable fashion, Jessica decides to pursue her own investigation of the hospital and its shadowy business dealings. On the trail of what initially appears to be medical malpractice, Jessica digs deeper and learns her friend was actually a victim of something far more sinister.

The Heroine’s Journey describes contemporary woman’s search for wholeness in a society where she has been defined according to masculine values. Drawing on cultural myths and fairy tales, ancient symbols and goddesses, and the dreams of contemporary women, Murdock illustrates the need for — and the reality of — feminine values in Western culture.

The in-crowd wears Gucci, but one girl wears her heart on her sleeve. When a chance meeting propels Bette into a new role as a party planner, she can hardly believe her luck. A job that pays you to party! Running with the cool Manhattan pack, gaining VIP access to the city's hottest spots, and meeting "everyone worth knowing" is a million miles away from the number-crunching and paper-pushing of her old banking job. Overnight, the greatest city in the world has become her sexy, late-night playground.

A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is trapped in a corporate nightmare. She struggles to reconcile the promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of houseless people bathing in the bay. Startup burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains. When her CEO's demands become illegal and she ends up unexpectedly pregnant, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are worth the pain, or succumb to the black hole.

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioral design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts.

It's never too late to change how you think, feel, and look. As we get older, our bodies go through a lot of changes. Most are out of our control. But for those that aren't, sometimes all we need is some guidance on how to make specific, sustainable, and successful modifications that can alter the course of how our lives go from that point forward. This is where you can benefit from exercise and eating plans from Joan MacDonald.

When the world was supposed to end everyone did things they never normally would…none more so than Siobhan, who wakes up on her floor, hungover, dumped by her no-good boyfriend and with a strange man in her bed…who turns out to be more than a little bit dead.

Written for audio format, this collection of six science fiction stories draw on themes of arrival, discovery and destination. Commissioned especially for Audible, and narrated by outstanding performers, these stories evoke the traditional storytelling of West African Jali as the unknown and distant are brought to life for audiences.

The last word anyone would use to describe Stella St. Vincent is adventurous. She's perfectly comfortable with the familiar, strict routines of her life as a copyeditor in New York. That is until she receives a mysterious note from her late mother and a one-way plane ticket to Paris. Alone and overwhelmed in a foreign city, Stella avoids new people and ventures out as little as possible. But then she meets Jules, an octogenarian art collector with very different ideas about how she should spend her time.

The ultimate summertime story for fans of Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult. Nantucket is only two and a half hours away from Martha's Vineyard by ferry. But the two islands might as well be worlds apart for a set of identical twin sisters who have been at odds for years. Just because twins look exactly the same doesn't mean they're anything alike - and Tabitha and Harper Frost have spent their whole lives trying to prove this point.

In her memoirs, Wallis Simpson described her time in China as her ‘Lotus Year’, referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. That year, however, was also used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment. Determined to ‘save’ the monarchy, the British government’s ‘China Dossier’ of Wallis’s rumoured amorous and immoral activities in the Far East portrayed her as debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king. But little was known about how she spent that mysterious period in her life – until now.

Published in 1915 and set in the 1890s, The Song of the Lark tells the story of Thea Kronberg, a gifted young singer who blazes her way into the world’s greatest opera houses. Thea’s arduous journey begins in Moonstone, Colorado, a burgeoning Western town, where she is one of seven children. Following an artistic awakening at an Arizona canyon, she eventually finds fame as an acclaimed opera singer, performing in Germany and at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

In 12 years, Michelle Lyons witnessed nearly 300 executions. First as a reporter and then as a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Michelle was a frequent visitor to Huntsville's Walls Unit, where she recorded and relayed the final moments of death row inmates' lives before they were put to death by the state. Michelle was in the death chamber as some of the United States' most notorious criminals, including serial killers, child murderers and rapists, spoke their last words on earth, while a cocktail of lethal drugs surged through their veins.

Summer 1941. War rages in Europe. The Germans march towards Ukraine. Halya, Liliya and Vika are no strangers to sorrow. They lost family during the Holodomor, loved ones in Stalin's purges, and war looms once more on the horizon. These daughters of Ukraine will face devastation and loss as they fight to survive and protect the ones they love.

This is a novel about what happens when - just occasionally - we can live happily ever after. Vincent is pretty certain he will win a Nobel Prize for physics. When he meets Holly, he loves her on sight. Guido plans to write poetry, and when Misty - bored and misanthropic - steps into his office, he finds himself desperate to know her. Through courtship, jealousy, estrangement and other perils, we watch as the two couples manage to find love in spite of themselves.

Rory Morris isn't thrilled to be moving back to her hometown, even if it is temporary. There are bad memories there. But her twin sister, Scarlett, is pregnant, estranged from the baby's father, and needs support, so Rory returns to the place she thought she'd put in her rearview. After a night out at a bar where she runs into an old almost-flame, she hits a large animal with her car. And when she gets out to investigate, she's attacked. Rory survives, miraculously, but life begins to look and feel different.

An unknown vessel, not of this world, materialises in London. A colossal figure towering over the city, it makes no move. Is this a peaceful first contact or the prelude to an invasion? Every child has nightmares. But the only thing scarier than little Eva Reyes' dreams - apocalyptic visions of death and destruction - is the habit they have of coming true. Scientist Dr Rose Franklin has no memory of the last few years. The strangers she works with say she died, and was brought back to life. The question is not just how...but why?

Minimalism is for rich people who live in big, empty, white homes, right? Wrong. Minimalism isn't just about displaying your food staples in glass jars or having chic Scandi furniture. It can be a beautiful, enriching, and life-transforming practice that, at its core, is all about re-establishing what holds value in your life and letting go of what does not.

Biographer Alexandra Popoff traces the life and creative achievement of Ayn Rand (1905–1982), one of America’s most provocative writers and whose best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have enjoyed impressive longevity. Born into a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Rand (then Alisa Rosenbaum) lived through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, and the onset of Soviet totalitarian dictatorships––experiences that made her profoundly anticommunist.

Elizabeth's eyes have failed. She can no longer read the books she loves or see the paintings that move her, but her mind remains sharp, and music fills the vacancy left by her blindness. When her father's journals are discovered on a shipwrecked boat, she enlists the help of a delinquent teen, Morgan, to read to her. As an unlikely friendship grows between them, Elizabeth is carried back to her childhood home - the lighthouse on Porphyry Island, Lake Superior - and to the memory of her enigmatic twin sister, Emily.