Showing results by narrator "Elisabeth Rodgers" in All Categories

Nathanael West: novelist, screenwriter, playwright, devoted outdoorsman was one of the most gifted and original writers of his generation, a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood.

Black Market Billions blows the lid off the world's fastest-growing illicit industry: organized retail crime. Hitha Prabhakar reveals how criminals with ties to terrorist groups around the world are committing huge product thefts, and using the profits to fund terrorist acts. Prabhakar connects the dots and follows the money - from consumers dying for a deal to terrorist cells eager to do the killing.

When Lauren fails to pick her son up from school, a normal day turns into a nightmare - and Alice begins to realize that nothing will ever be ordinary again. The police desperately search for Lauren, who is nearly nine months pregnant. Alice, herself pregnant, realizes she's being followed and has the creeping fear that she and her unborn twins are in danger. As new life grows within her, she must fight to save her family - and herself.

Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan knows what it’s like to be haunted by the past. For years after her daughter, Bonnie, was stolen from her, she fought for closure. When her mother, Sandra, asks Eve to find a missing friend named Beth Avery, she wants to help but is sure that Sandra is hiding something. The fact that she adamantly refuses to go to the police reinforces Eve’s suspicions that something is very wrong. Eve learns that Beth has been locked away in a mental hospital for years....

Explores works that dazzle the eye and excite the imagination. The art and science objects were selected for their maximum "wow" factor. Some are big, some are not so big, but all of them are eye-filling feasts of form, pattern, color, line and texture. This tour is particularly recommended for family groups with children.

Pittsburgh police officer Kate O'Hern is on the trail of a killer targeting cops. Only problem, he's already killed her once. Trauma surgeon Joshua Lightner saved Kate's life, only to have her awaken suffering from an unexpected side effect: visions of other people's deaths. As a doctor, he refuses to believe in "psychic mumbo-jumbo", but as a man, he can't deny his feelings for Kate. When the killer targets them both, are they living on Borrowed Time?

Claire Rawlings, mother of two and medical resident, will not let the troubling signs of an allergic reaction prevent her from making it in for rounds. But when Claire's symptoms overpower her while she's driving into work, her two children in tow, she must pull over. Moments later, she wakes up on the floor of a gas station bathroom - her car and her precious girls have vanished. The police have no leads, and the weight of guilt presses down on Claire as each hour passes with no trace of her girls.

After a demon comes calling and Megan Murphy’s bar blows sky-high, she’s suddenly on the run with her klutzy day shift bartender, the exceedingly gorgeous Quinn Fitzpatrick. Quinn has been in love with Megan from the moment he saw her. Too bad he’s living a lie. He isn’t as klutzy as he makes out, nor as human as she believes. Quinn was sent to protect Megan from anything that slithers. But there’s danger afoot, and the best place for them both is one that’s far, far away.

This remarkable novel immerses us in the lives of two women in a small upstate New York town: Frances Thorn, who waits tables, despite her privileged background, and raises her twin daughters without even a memory of their father; and Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer. At the heart of the two women’s friendship is a Hans Christian Andersen tale about a prideful girl (the subject of Helle’s final opera) who is damned for using a precarious loaf of bread, intended as a gift for her parents, as a stepping stone.

Hell - part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story - is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance. Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of Antonin Careme.

It is the turn of this century. Two couples - businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife, Carole Ridingham; his partner, Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth Farr - have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now.

Labrador is the story of two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the eldest, is willful, beautiful, and wayward; to Kitty, the youngest, she is the radiant center around which everything revolves. Kitty, too, is willful, but in the brooding manner of the inveterate loner. She is the one who is visited by an angel, Rogni, who reshapes her beliefs by telling her eerie, enigmatic fables that defy time and place, parables about bears, martyrs, and imprisoned daughters that seem to contain warnings about betrayals and violence to come.

Edith Hamilton didn’t publish her first book until she was 62. But over the next three decades this former headmistress would become the twentieth century’s most famous interpreter of the classical world. Today, Hamilton’s Mythology (1942) remains the standard version of ancient tales. During the Cold War, her influence even extended to politics, as she argued that postwar America could learn from the fate of Athens after its victory in the Persian Wars. Victoria Houseman tells the fascinating life story of a remarkable classicist whose ideas were shaped by—and aspired to shape—her times.

It’s been said that at the core of every legend lies a seed of truth. For four American tourists vacationing in Greece, this is a lesson learned the hard way. When the group sets out to find a subterranean pool that’s rumored to be the one by which the demi-god Narcissus once wasted away in self-obsession, what started as a fun excursion quickly escalates into a full-blown nightmare.

With their deadly plants, razor-sharp shears, shady corners, and ready-made burial sites, gardens make an ideal scene for the perfect murder. But the outsize influence that gardens and gardening have had on the mystery genre has been underappreciated. Now, Marta McDowell, a writer and gardener with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, illuminates the many ways in which our greatest mystery writers, from Edgar Allen Poe to authors on today’s bestseller lists, have found inspiration in the sinister side of gardens.

Conn Whitman’s long-distance swims keep him centered and sane—until a terrifying underwater encounter in a woodland lake plunges him into the middle of a murder investigation. Once a superstar investigative reporter, disgraced by misconduct, Conn returned to his Vermont hometown to put his life back together. Now, after ten years on the job, he knows his community like nobody else. So, when he kicks a submerged object while swimming—something with the density and resilience of human flesh—he immediately wonders if it’s connected to an unsolved murder in a nearby town.

Susan and Alex Wendt have found their dream apartment in a gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone. Sure, the landlady is a little eccentric. And the elderly handyman drops some cryptic remarks about the basement. But the rent is so low, it’s too good to pass up. Big mistake. Susan awakens every morning with fresh bug bites, but neither Alex nor their daughter, Emma, has a single welt. An exterminator searches the property and turns up nothing. The landlady insists her building is clean. Susan fears she’s going mad—until she makes a chilling discovery in the bonus room.