Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media, LLC" in Family Life

At one time, Jacob MacCallum had it all: wealth, a wonderful family, and a position as one of the most respected businessmen in Chicago. For the past 20 years, he's lived in an alcohol-induced haze, riddled with guilt for his role in the untimely death of his wife. Estranged from his children and penniless, he embarks on a journey to find his family and seek their forgiveness. On his path to redemption, he encounters a young girl whose friendship might be the key to reuniting the MacCallum family just in time for Christmas.

After US Special Forces officer Bobby Luchetti discovers that the woman he loves has married his brother, he accepts the next mission he's offered - a solo assignment deep into the heart of Mexico to rescue a kidnapped doctor. Dr. Jane Harker practices medicine in places no one else will go. When the super-soldier shows up to rescue her, she points out that she doesn't need rescuing. She hasn't been kidnapped. Then, someone tries to kill her.

Stevie, a recovering alcoholic and kitchen manager of Chappy’s, a small-chain restaurant, is frantically trying to prevent the people around her from going supernova: her PTSD-suffering veteran son, her uproariously demented parents, the polyglot eccentrics who work in her kitchen, the blind geriatric dog she inherits, and a damaged 5-year-old who landed on her doorstep and might just be her granddaughter. In the tight grip of new corporate owners, Stevie battles corporate’s “restructuring” to save her kitchen.

Once upon a time, Tim Luchetti went searching for a daddy and found one in Dean Luchetti. Now it's time for Tim's Mommy Quest, and he has the perfect woman picked out: his principal, Stella O'Connell. Unfortunately, Dean and Stella have history...a lot of it. Stella left Gainsville, Illinois right after high school, never planning to come back. But an attack at her Los Angeles school has put her on mandatory leave. When the Gainsville Elementary principal is injured, Stella slides right into her chair. Why does her problem child have to be Dean's son?

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of 40, they are both working jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful; Joe is floundering; both are in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.

Dawn Vasquez never takes life too seriously. But when she rescues a golden retriever named Gigi, Dawn begins to imagine what it'd be like to settle down and let someone rely on her for a change. Unfortunately, Adam Dearborn - a handsome, hopelessly buttoned-up cattle rancher in need of a guide dog - has also fallen in love with the little ball of fluff and stubbornly insists that no other animal will do.

The scoop of Jennifer Stern's career has just landed on her doorstep. Literally. Ian Greer - the playboy millionaire - is everything the headlines claim. Charming, flirtatious, and ready for a good time. But Jennifer soon suspects he's pulling a fast one and there's a different man behind the handsome mask he shows the world. He's a puzzle she longs to unravel. Too bad she's turned her back on that part of her life. No longer a journalist, Jennifer just longs to be with her son and heal from the last few years of her life. Years that nearly killed her.

Jilly Hart has been called many things: gold digger, trophy wife, serial bride. She's led a difficult life, so she doesn't believe in love or magic - only assets. She doesn't ever plan to be poor or hungry again. However, when she finds herself a widow for the fourth time, she discovers that all she has left is a 19th-century inn in South Fork, Arkansas. She heads there with plans to sell the place and start her quest for husband number five. Unfortunately, the inn is not only a wreck but also haunted.

Set in Iran and New York City, Dalia Sofer's second novel, Man of My Time, tells the story of Hamid Mozaffarian, who is as alienated from himself as he is from the world. After decades of ambivalence about his work for the Iranian, Hamid travels to New York, where he encounters his estranged family and retrieves the ashes of his father - who was cremated despite his religion - to honor his dying wish to be buried in Iran.

After discovering that the father she'd been told was dead is, in fact, alive, 13-year-old Rayne Houston runs away. She takes along her new friend, the Timinator, aka Tim, a young boy she found hiding behind a garbage can in her hometown of Las Vegas. Tim needs a daddy, too, so the two of them hop a bus to Illinois and begin The Daddy Quest. Nicole Houston is frantic when she discovers her daughter is gone. Her lies are coming back to haunt her, but when she told them, she believed she was doing the right thing for everyone.

For 10 years, Samantha Riggins and J. D. Kronos have convinced themselves they have the perfect relationship: no strings, no commitment, no future. All that changes when the son Sam gave up for adoption walks into her shelter - the son J.D. knows nothing about. The presence of their child breaks through all the rules they've lived by. And suddenly what Sam thought she knew about J.D. turns out to be wrong. Are the feelings they share enough to keep them together? Especially now that the biggest secret is the one Sam never saw coming?

Is there such a thing as an antisocial butterfly? If there were, Greta Oto would know about it - and totally relate. An entomologist, she far prefers the company of bugs to humans, and that's okay - people don't seem to like her all that much anyway, with the exception of her twin brother, Danny. But they've recently had a falling out, so when she lands a research gig in the rain forest, she leaves it all behind. But then Greta learns that Danny has suffered an aneurysm and is hospitalized, so she abandons her research and hurries home to be there for him.

1962. In the middle of Brooklyn Heights sits the Starlite: boutique dress shop by day, underground women's club by night. Started by the shop's proprietor after her councilman ex-husband, Fred Abbott, ruined her reputation, Madeline's social club soon becomes a safe haven for women from all walks of life. These after-hour soirées soon bring two very different women into Madeline's life - Elaine, a British ex-pat struggling to save her marriage, and Lisa, a young stewardess whose plans for the future are suddenly upended.

The summer of 1960 was the hottest ever for Summit, Wisconsin. For kids seeking relief from the heat, there was a creek to be swum in, sprinklers to run through, and ice cream at Whitcomb's Drugstore. But for Frankie, Viv, and Biz, 11-year-old best friends, it would forever be remembered as the summer that evil paid a visit to their small town - and took their young lives as they'd known them as a souvenir.

Isolated in the aftermath of tragedy, Erin Fullarton has felt barely alive since the loss of her young daughter, Korrie. Her estranged husband, Zac, a brilliant astrophysicist, seems to be coping better. Lost in his work, he's perfecting his model of a stunning cosmological phenomenon, one he predicts will occur today. But when Erin receives a phone call from her daughter's school, the same call she received 500 days earlier when Korrie was still alive, Erin realizes something is happening. Or happening again.

When opera singer Dawn Woodward has an onstage flameout, all she wants is to be left alone. She’s soon faced with other complications the day her husband announces her estranged brother-in-law, Tariq, is undergoing cancer treatment and moving in, his temperamental parrot in tow. To make matters worse, though she can’t whistle herself, she has been tasked with teaching arias to an outspoken group of devoted siffleurs who call themselves the Warblers.

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.

Susan Napier's family once lived on the success of the high-end restaurants founded by her late grandfather. But bad luck and worse management has brought the business to the edge of financial ruin. Now it's up to Susan to save the last remaining restaurant: Elliot's, the flagship in Edinburgh. But what awaits Susan in the charming city of Auld Reekie is more than she bargained for. Chris Baker, her grandfather's former protégé - and her ex-boyfriend - is also heading to the Scottish capital.

When Evie Mead’s husband, Robert, suddenly drops dead of a heart attack, a mysterious note is found among his possessions. It indicates that Evie may own the rights to a crumbling Art Deco hotel on Tregarrick Rock, one of the Isles of Scilly, off the coast of Cornwall. Still grieving, Evie is inclined to leave the matter to the accountant to sort out. Her sister, Margot, however, flown in from her glamorous career in LA, has other plans. Envisioning a luxurious weekend getaway, she goes ahead and buys two tickets to Tregarrick.

A French teacher on the verge of retirement is invited to a glittering opening that showcases the artwork of his former student, who has since become a celebrated painter. This unexpected encounter leads to the older man posing for his portrait, possibly in the nude. Such personal exposure at close range entails a strange and troubling pact between artist and sitter that prompts both to reevaluate their lives.