Showing results by narrator "Jim Swartwout" in All Categories

Ned Russo thought he had it all. Lovely home in Pasadena, a beautiful ex-wife who didn’t hate him, a charming daughter at UCLA who adored him, and a cushy job with a fat salary he earned as the administrator of one of the premier nursing homes in Los Angeles. He even had a giant office that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. But, as a wise man once said, “Things change.”

Gabriel Rackett stands at the threshold of middle age. He lives north of Chicago and teaches at a small community college. He has written one novel and has no prospects of writing another, his powers stagnated by drink and loss. Into his possession comes a manuscript, written by a childhood friend and neighbor, which ignites his memory and takes him back to his mysterious mentor and the ghosts that haunted his own coming of age.

Along the dusky wandering streets of an ancient city in the North Lowland, a young man walks alone. Lucas carries light for the citizens of the City of Dreams, but in his heart questions burn. How did his beloved mother die, and who is his father? Compelled by his own vicious nightmares, along with the urging of his benefactor, Mrs. Kempel, and odd advice from a fortuneteller, he travels to Arcana, his childhood home.

When a body washes ashore downstream from the city, the discovery saddens the small neighborhood south of Broadway. A homeless man, T. Tommy Briscoe, whose life had intertwined with a bookstore, a bar, and the city’s outdoor theater had touched many lives at an angle. One was that of Mickey Walsh, a fly-by-night academic and historian, who becomes fascinated with the circumstances surrounding the drowning.

Returning to the home town of his missing father on a search for his own origins, Dominic Rackett is swept up in a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival. As those around him fall prey to rising fear and shrill fanaticism, he follows the branching trails of cinema monsters and figures from a very real past, as phantoms invade the streets of his once-familiar city and one of them, glimpsed in distorted shadows of alleys and urban parks, begins to look uncannily familiar.

In the gripping sequel to City of Dreams, Lucas and Alina begin their new life together with an idyllic ceremony and a joyful celebration surrounded by friends and well-wishers. But not everyone shares their happiness.