Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Contemporary Fiction

It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why, before the police do.

As Avi Goldberg, the son of a Jewish pioneer, sits in a military prison in the Negev desert, he fills his nights writing about his friend Saleem, an Israeli Arab, and Saleem’s family, whose loss of their ancestral home in 1948 cast a shadow over their lives. Avi and Saleem believe the past can be buried, reduced to nothing. But then September 2000 comes and war breaks out - endless, unforgiving, filled with loss. As the Intifada rips their peoples apart, they learn that war devours everything....

The Bottom of the Sky is an aching rags to riches family saga that surges from rural squalor into the opulent power chambers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The story contrasts the 30-year struggles of an abused sister and brother who seek to reclaim themselves from their abhorrent past. One is abandoned to a life of sexual desecration and addiction. The other escapes with his demons to wield fragile, uncanny genius and unrelenting ambition to amass staggering wealth.

From one coast to the other, to the far side of the globe, three diverse characters follow paths that will mysteriously connect: Tina Lopez, endowed with a special gift from God; Ethan Kelly, a young Irish-American priest-in-training; and K.C. Littleton, who will prove that old adage, "Be careful what you wish for." All will discover a new appreciation for faith, forgiveness, and family.

Hootenville, Pennsylvania: It looks like any conventional company town, but beneath its placid surface throbs a network of violence, blackmail, and murder. It takes an ex-Army spy to coolly fit together the puzzle and expose the game of terror, intrigue, and cunning known as industrial espionage. Someone at Hooten Plastics Corporation has been selling its manufacturing secrets.

This latest plunge in to the psyche of the lone American male by author Lysa Williams brings us three men struggling in the war against dysfunction: a high-school student who rides the NYC subway each night in search of that perfect moment of beauty; a narcoleptic painter, the erotic Vermeer, who falls asleep on contact; and a psychic male prostitute who spends his off hours creating miniature models of the seven wonders of the world.

From dark and humble beginnings, a master musician rises to take the world by storm. Nick Raze, a violin virtuoso, exists at the height of popularity, while his life remains a well-protected mystery. A year of artist-in-residency in Chicago introduces him to a man who offers him his first friendship and a woman who offers him his first taste of love. Now Nick must make a choice to fight against the bonds of his past in order to escape the isolation of his heart.

When Jenny, a graduate student in ornithology, is assigned to a birding project in a remote area of Panama, she is given one directive by her superior: Don't piss anyone off. Almost immediately, this proves difficult, for the study site is located near an indigenous village. At first, Jenny finds the Kuna people to be a prickly lot, quick to take offense. But as the weeks pass, she becomes better acquainted with the natives, including Pedro, a man cynical and detached from his own culture.

To Tim Anderson, playing the guitar is as natural - and just about as important - as breathing. He’s already decided he’s going to be a musician. But his father has other career plans for him - all involving college. And now, because Tim is on the verge of flunking math, he’s been forbidden even to touch his guitar. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. A top record company has just announced a nationwide contest for teenage rock groups - with a recording contract as first prize. Tim is sure his group, The Silver Sunshine, has a good chance of winning.

It is the morning of Pacote's last fight, the finale of a great career. The city of Sevilla waits, heavy with anticipation. But Pacote finds he is afraid and fears disgrace in the ring. Time, once his friend, now presses him on to the moment when the gate opens and the first bull enters the ring.

The men she recruited to run her Amazon empire of drugs and death called her the White Angel. The ultra-secret US agency known as the Committee called her the most dangerous woman in the world. The blonde had skin of peaches and cream, cornflower-blue eyes, and legs that went all the way to heaven. She looked like an angel, but no man or woman ever killed more ruthlessly - or enjoyed it more. Killing her was Sam Borne’s next assignment.

Small, almost imperceptible changes are rippling through the New England village of Grandville, altering it in ways its inhabitants cannot yet imagine. Laced through a narrative of one recent year in Grandville's history are stories that reach back to a 17th century family in Rotterdam, and 18th century migration by a farmer's lonely son in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a 19th century underground railway journey by a gifted runaway slave.

Ben Riller is the most successful producer on Broadway, but his newest production is in danger of closing before it opens. In his stressed-out condition, Ben is hearing the voice of his long-dead father, and they're having a running argument about life, love, and other people's money.

Auchincloss' tale of a New York family dynasty opens with the suicide of Geraldine Brevoort, a woman whose pride and envy fed her alcoholism and kept her alone, and leads the listener through an odyssey of love, marriage, and adultery.

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.