Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Psychological

Oral History, the lyrical saga of a Virginia mountain family, follows four generations of Cantrells over more than a century. With each chapter, Lee Smith, a master of regional voices, adds another branch to a family tree that sings with secrets and sadness, beauty and joy. Researching an assignment for an Oral History course, Jennifer drives to the Virginia hills where her mother and father grew up. Raised by a stepmother, the young college student wonders why her father never talks of her real mother or relatives. 

A consummate storyteller in the Southern tradition, Lee Smith tugs at her listeners' heartstrings with this haunting narrative that reads like a country ballad. Touching, funny, and sad, its down-to-earth characters are somehow familiar and endearing as they do their best to meet the demands of daily life.

Internationally best-selling author Umberto Eco is a master stylist whose books, including The Name of the Rose and Baudolino, have been savored by millions around the world. Now, with The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco crafts another of the ambitious and breathtaking novels that are his trademark.

Five years ago, when Detective Jena Campbell put the Leviticus Killer behind bars, she locked her darkest secret away with him. Something never meant to surface. Something better left to rot with the madman who had destroyed so many lives. When a strange man calling himself Azrael appears on social media with threats to unleash ten plagues, ten deaths, in ten days, unless Leviticus is released, Jena is forced to reopen that door and face her past.

As a 14-year-old girl in London, Alice survived a horrific stabbing attack by two classmates obsessed with Mister Tender, a graphic novel character created by Alice's own father. Now, a decade later and an ocean away, Alice is trying to focus on the present - but the past won't leave her alone. Someone knows far more than they should - not just about the night she's tried so hard to forget, but also deeply private details about Alice's life.  

Philip Roth, one of the best-known and award winning literary masters of our time, engages his readership with insightful and challenging novels of the human condition. With The Dying Animal, he revisits the character David Kepesh. At age 60, Kapesh is drawn out of his carefully ordered existence and into an obsessive affair with one of his students.

From best-selling author Kay Hooper comes a thrilling tale with a paranormal bent and a touch of romance. Cassie Neill has a powerful but troubling gift. She can see inside the minds of serial killers as they are planning their crimes. Tormented by her ability, she takes refuge in a secluded North Carolina town. But there’s no escaping her visions, and when a body surfaces just where she predicted, Cassie is suddenly a suspect.

Henry Farber, a well-meaning psychiatrist, is forced into hiding when the nation’s chief executive—a narcissistic autocrat in his disastrous second term—is found dead on the consulting room couch. From an isolated bungalow, Farber sets out to clear his name while offering an intimate view of a flawed populist leader. 

The butchered body of a cross-dresser is found in a dumpster in Chinatown, New York. Nothing out of the ordinary for the NYPD, except, this time, the victim is Detective Phee Freeman’s brother. At first the slaying looks like the random act of a vicious killer, but when it is discovered that there are similar ritualistic murders throughout the city, Phee and his partner Quincy Cavanaugh, along with FBI Agent Janet Maclin, have no choice but to join forces with Dr. Daria Zibik, a brilliant but deranged Satanic cult leader serving time at a maximum security prison.

Mary Russell is used to dark secrets - her own and those of her famous partner and husband, Sherlock Holmes. Trust is a thing slowly given, but over the course of a decade together, the two have forged an indissoluble bond. And what of the other person to whom Mary Russell has opened her heart: the couple's longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson?

For Nikki and Sadie, life at Loch Raven College was supposed to be filled with poetry and days spent trying on thrifted clothes. But there's a dark story that plagues the school halls—that of the Sylvia Club, a campus legend surrounding the death of multiple Sylvia Plath-adoring girls, all written off as suicides. Aspiring writer Nikki finds herself drawn to the stories, so much so that dead girls begin to haunt her dark imagination. To satiate her obsession, Nikki begins to dig into the deaths, and she soon suspects there's more to the story than just a tragic group of sad girls.

Jake knows the woman sitting next to him on his business flight to Denver - he just can't figure out how he knows her. Clara Stowe isn't in Jake's line of work. They have nearly nothing in common apart from a deep and shared certainty that they've met before. As their airplane conversation deepens, both struggle to figure out what circumstances could have possibly brought them together. Then, in a revelation that sends Jake reeling, Clara admits she's traveling to the Colorado mountains to kill herself, and she disappears into the crowded airport immediately after landing.  

It's summer in New York City, and a sweltering heat wave stifles the area. The entire city is on edge. Tensions between the Hasidic and Black communities of New York have been steadily escalating since a tragic incident a few weeks ago left a Black teenager dead. Then, two rabbis are killed in a gruesome attack at their synagogue. Meanwhile, FBI agent Janet Maclin has dreams of finally being appointed the FBI's first female director, when she is diagnosed with stage IV cancer and given four months to live.

Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O. Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork.

Her only daughter has just gone away to college, and Maggie O'Farrell knows she's turning into one of those helicopter parents she used to mock. But Maggie can't shake the feeling that something terrible is about to happen to Emma. And then, just as Maggie starts to relax, her daughter disappears. The clues are disturbing. An empty dorm room where Emma was supposedly living. A mysterious boy described as Future Husband in her phone. Dormmates who seem more sinister than friendly.

Gold Medallion and Christy Award nominee Steven James crafts pulse-pounding psychological thrillers that hold listeners spellbound. This fourth in his CBA bestselling series pushes FBI Special Agent Patrick Bowers’ cutting-edge skills to the limit when a woman is found brutally murdered near Washington, D.C. While her killers continue a spree of perfect crimes, Bowers struggles to discover a pattern and crack his most difficult case yet

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Devil's Dream is an animated, lyrical novel that is meant to be savored as spoken word. Consummate storyteller Lee Smith's creation will delight anyone who enjoys the sound of language and a good story.

With My Annihilation, Fuminori Nakamura, master of literary noir, has constructed a puzzle box of a narrative in the form of a confessional diary that implicates its reader in a heinous crime. Delving relentlessly into the darkest corners of human consciousness, My Annihilation interrogates the unspeakable thoughts all humans share that can be monstrous when brought to life, revealing with disturbing honesty the psychological motives of a killer.

In South Africa, the controversial topic of botched traditional circumcisions has been very much in the news of late. A Man Who Is Not a Man recounts the personal trauma of a young Xhosa initiate after a rite-of-passage circumcision has gone wrong. With frankness and courage, author Thando Mgqolozana's powerful novel details the pain and lifelong shame that is experienced as a result of not just the physical trauma, but the social ostracism of being labeled "a failed man".

The term war porn refers to videos and images brought back from combat zones - IED explosions, air strikes, firefights, images of death and gore largely shorn of context, at times even evidence of potential war crimes (most famously, the photos of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib). War porn is also, in Scranton's searing debut, a metaphor for the fragmentation and confusion of modern combat, the broken shards of experience that form the wartime experiences of soldiers and civilians alike.