Showing results by narrator "Pete Simonelli" in All Categories

For the past 20 years, Liv and Eliot Goldenhorn have run In Love in New York, Brooklyn’s beloved wedding-planning business. When Eliot dies unexpectedly, he even more unexpectedly leaves half of the business to his younger, blonder girlfriend, Savannah. Liv and Savannah are not a match made in heaven, to say the least. But what starts as a personal and professional nightmare transforms into something even savvy, cynical Liv Goldenhorn couldn’t begin to imagine.

As soon as Gail and Jon Durbin bring home their adopted baby Maya, she becomes the glue that mends their fractured marriage. But the Durbin’s social worker, Paige, can’t find the teenage birth mother to sign the consent forms. By law, Carli has seventy-two hours to change her mind. Without her signature, the adoption will unravel.

Hunted for more than 20 years by a mysterious terrorist known as the Benefactor, former Navy Seabee Tom Sexton is done running. Working with his girlfriend, Stella, for a private-sector spec ops team, Tom has a plan to eliminate the elusive stranger who murdered his family. But Tom didn’t just emerge from deep cover. He might have been lured. A former colleague gone rogue has warned Tom of a shadow agent hiding in plain sight. If Tom trusts the intel, that means he can’t trust anyone else.

Five years after his life was saved in Afghanistan by Marine Force Recon Leader Charlie Cahill, former Navy Seabee Tom Sexton lives a bleak, nomadic existence, haunted by the debt he can never repay. Salvation appears in Stella - a woman as damaged, and resourceful, as he. But when a coded distress call from his former CO leads him to a shadowy NSA operative, Tom is recruited for a "black op" to bring back the now-rogue man who saved his life.

In the tradition of The Wire, the “utterly absorbing” (The New York Times) story of the cinematic transformation of Miami, one of America’s bustling cities - rife with a drug epidemic, a burgeoning refugee crisis, and police brutality - from journalist and award-winning author Nicholas Griffin.

Former covert ops agent Tom Sexton is living quietly in rural Vermont. Running a diner with his girlfriend, Stella, he thinks that the worst he's seen, done, and suffered is finally behind him. But when a long-hidden specter from his troubled past emerges, Tom is shaken out of his safe, furtive life. With no choice but to lock and load, Tom falls back into a world where valor and violence collide...and his isn't the only life in danger.

In the eclectic Brooklyn neighbourhood of Cobble Hill, the lives of four married couples and their children are about to flip from complicated to combustible. Mandy is so underwhelmed by motherhood that she's faking a debilitating disease to get the attention of her ex-boyband celebrity husband, Stuart. There's the unconventional new school nurse, Peaches, who Stuart secretly has a crush on, and her disappointing husband, Greg, who wears noise-cancelling headphones - everywhere.

Robert Holton has just returned from the torment and strife of war in Europe and settled in a solitary existence working for a New York stockbroking business. The haunting memories of nights of love spent in Florence are suppressed as he struggles to succeed in an arid city. And when Carla turns up unexpectedly from his more passionate past, Robert finds he must choose between the fixed path of money-making and dull conventionality, and the fraught, uncertain path of love and freedom.

A captivating and fast-paced account of the rise of Ruffhouse Records’ founder Chris Schwartz, the coming of age of hip-hop, and the trials and tribulations of some of its greatest artists. As a homeless musician struggling to catch a break in 1980s Philadelphia, Schwartz navigates the criminally infested, morally bankrupt independent record business to build one of the most successful hip-hop record companies in the world, which dominated the charts and generated global revenues of over one billion dollars.

In less than half a minute, a home-security camera captures the hidden resolve in 14-year-old Carly Liddell as she fends off a vicious attack just inside her own front door. The video of her heroic escape appears Online and goes viral. As the view count climbs, the lives of four desperate people will be forever changed by what’s just barely visible in the corner of the shot. Carly’s stepfather is spurred to protect his darkest secret: how a stolen painting - 400 years old, by a master of the Dutch Golden Age - has come to hang in his suburban foyer.

If there’s one kind of person Tank Rizzo hates most in this world, it’s a dirty cop. Criminals are at least honest about being dishonest; dirty cops are a disgrace to the badge they carry. Detective Eddie Kenwood is one such disgrace. He’s got the highest signed-confession rate in the NYPD and a distinguished career built on putting men behind bars - whether they’re guilty or not doesn’t matter much to him. When Tank’s partner, Pearl, tells him about an old family friend Kenwood put in jail for a murder he didn’t commit, Tank and Pearl vow to take Kenwood down. 

In the predawn hours, a woman's marriage crumbles with a single confession. Across town, an immigrant family struggles to fit in and get by in the land of opportunity. Three thousand miles away, a soldier wakes up in Walter Reed hospital with the vague feeling that he’s done something awful. In a single moment, these disparate lives intersect. Faced with seemingly insurmountable loss, each person must decide whether to give in to despair, or to find the courage and resilience to rise.

Cherry, Nebraska, population 312, is just off the highway between the sticks and the boonies. It’s where Dave Rhodes and his friends have lived all their lives. They own businesses, raise families, pay taxes, deal with odd neighbors, and, once or twice a month - just like their fathers before them - transform into wolves. 

Peace on Earth isn’t everyone’s cup of tea in Charlotte MacLeod’s “A Cozy for Christmas”. Peter Lovesey’s “The Haunted Crescent” delivers a holiday ghost story with a twist. A training session for department-store Santas turns up Saint Nicks who are anything but angels in Isaac Asimov’s “Ho, Ho, Ho”. Marcia Muller’s “Silent Night” finds a tough private investigator searching San Francisco’s Tenderloin district - and discovering something unexpected.

Cate is a stage designer in her early 40s, embroiled in theatre projects and the lives of her unconventional Chicago friends and lovers, when her life is suddenly overturned. Walking into her best friend's kitchen one day, she witnesses an act of violence that forces her to do something she would never have thought she could do. The bubble of her safe, bohemian world is shattered. Right After the Weather explores what happens when two worlds collide and a group of friends are confronted with their worst fears.

It was in Brooklyn, New York, in 1883 that William F. Cody - known across the land as Buffalo Bill - conceived of his Wild West show, an "equestrian extravaganza" featuring cowboys and Indians. The idea took off. For four months in 1885, the Lakota chief Sitting Bull appeared in the show. Blood Brothers tells the story of these two iconic figures through their brief but important collaboration.

In Curtis Dawkins' first short story collection, he offers a window into prison life through the eyes of his narrators and their cellmates. Dawkins reveals the idiosyncrasies, tedium, and desperation of long-term incarceration - he describes men who struggle to keep their souls alive despite the challenges they face.

President Thomas Jefferson wrote America's Declaration of Independence, but he also was an anthropologist, an architect, an astronomer, a botanist, a diplomat, a farmer, an inventor, a lawyer, a mathematician, and a musician. He spoke French, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish. He founded the University of Virginia and today's Democratic Party. During his eight years in office, he doubled the country's size.

As she searches for new meaning in her life, Miranda finds quiet refuge with her family's handyman, Dix, in his cabin in the dark forests of the Adirondack Mountains. Dix is kind, dependable, and good with an ax - the right man to help the sheltered Miranda heal - but ultimately, her sadness creates a void even Dix can't fill.

In this gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, and their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in Southwest Montana. The Sun's 20,000 acres of rangeland occupy a still-wild corner of Southwest Montana - a high valley surrounded by mountain ranges and steep creeks with portentous names like Grizzly, Dead Man, and Bad Luck.