Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Urban

Epi Dalmau is a desperate man. Early one morning, he carries a duffle bag into a dingy bar in a rough neighborhood of Barcelona. Four other people are in the bar: his brother Alex, his good friend Tanveer, the bartender, and a Pakistani man who wandered in to use the restroom. Epi grabs a hammer out of his duffle bag and attacks Tanveer. After a brief struggle and a couple of blows, Tanveer lies dead on the floor and Epi flees the bar. Alex and the bartender plan to find and protect Epi, while blaming the murder on the unfortunate Pakistani man, who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It's not the dead body - Jack Leightner has seen hundred of bodies in his tour with the NYPD. It's not the dank setting - the narrow banks along Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal. So why does the sight of the fatally stabbed young man make the detective almost faint in the canal's tangled weeds? Jack doesn't understand why he becomes obsessed with this low-priority case, why he allows it to jeopardize his career and even his life. Especially since the investigation draws him exactly where he doesn't want to go: into the heart of Red Hook.

In this third novel in Gabriel Cohen’s Edgar Award-nominated Jack Leightner crime series, the Brooklyn homicide detective investigates the serial killing of prostitutes in Crown Heights and the murder of a friend who ran afoul of Russian gangsters in Brighton Beach.

A floating coffin draws Brooklyn homicide detective Jack Leightner into a murder investigation in hidden parts of New York Harbor and the old Brooklyn Navy Yard in this second novel in Edgar Award nominee Gabriel Cohen’s acclaimed crime series.

Being a teenage literary prodigy is hard. Richard Goodman may have a book contract at 17, but his parents don’t respect his opinions, he can’t lose his virginity, and his ego inflates and deflates with every breath. Even when Richard receives the attention he craves, he finds that fame and fortune can’t deliver him from his own flaws. The Work Is Innocent is Yglesias’s fictional take on his own freakishly precocious literary coming-out as a teen.

Rafael Yglesias completed this novel, his first, at the age of sixteen. The largely autobiographical story follows a New York prep school dropout yearning for freedom and authenticity. On its release the book was hailed as a next-generation Catcher in the Rye. But protagonist Raul Sabas comes of age in a very different New York than Holden Caulfield - a tumultuous and radicalized city following the student takeover of Columbia University and assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

A year after the AIDS-related death of filmmaker Clarence Laird, known to friends as Angel Clare, his young boyfriend, Michael, is still in deep mourning. Clarence’s older, sophisticated friends—male and female, gay and straight—find themselves the custodians of Michael, a callow kid they never liked much to begin with. What follows is a dark, intimate comedy about real grief and false grief, misunderstanding, friendship, love, and forgiveness.

Wooed away from a top job at a competing firm by Ed Roth with promises of breaking the glass ceiling when she succeeds him as the head of the investment bank Drake Carlson, Kate learns that she has real potential for the top spot. First, she must prove her worth by unconventionally putting together an IPO for a small games maker whose most valuable but unknown asset may be a painting stolen from a Jewish family as they fled Austria after the Nazi invasion. Kate’s professional challenges play out amid a family crisis: Her husband’s company is imploding and he may have to relocate to a remote part of China to save even a small portion of his business.

Back in 1964, tragedy struck when Peter Redburn and his friends were playing together. Now an adult, Peter has never been able to escape his feelings of guilt. A funeral forces him to confront the rivalries and secrets of the past.

Quiet As They Come is a beautiful and at times brutal portrait of a people caught between two cultures. Set in San Francisco from the 1980s to the present day, this debut collection explores the lives of several families of Vietnamese immigrants as they struggle to adjust to life in their new country, often haunted by the memories and customs of their old lives in Vietnam. While some are able to survive and assimilate, others are crushed by the promise of the "American Dream."

Perfectly evoking the sights and sounds of the summer of 1978 in Brooklyn, Suzanne Corso makes an acclaimed fiction debut with this powerful coming-of-age tale, told from an adult perspective, of family, best friends, first loves, and big dreams waiting to come true. Samantha Bonti is fifteen years old, half Jewish and half Italian, and hesitantly edging toward pure Brooklyn.

Glorette Picard is dead. Her body was found in the alley behind a taqueria, half-hidden by wild tobacco trees, but no one—not Sidney, who knew she worked that alley, not her son Victor who memorizes SAT words to avoid the guys selling rock out of dryers in the Launderland, not her uncle Enrique, who everyone knows will be the one to hunt down her killer—saw her die.

A photographer descends into New York City’s chaotic and brutal underground in this sweeping story of the Big Apple at its seediest. It’s 1982, and Clarence Dmitri Larkin is working as a photographer at Bellevue hospital in Manhattan. The job offers a painfully clear perspective on a city sick with madness, fraught with crime, and coming apart at the seams. Larkin’s curiosity soon leads to a subterranean world of all the city’s secret dangers, including domestic terrorists with a nuclear device, a serial killer inspired by an occult past, and a disfigured arsonist who just might be the one to burn the whole city down.

A New York story, a dark comedy, Balls tells of the thirty-year-old Henry Schiller, a songwriter and lounge-player, in love with a woman far younger and more musically gifted than himself, one with her eye on other men and the rise of her own career, whose crisis deepens when he discovers he has testicular cancer.

The second novel in the Roth trilogy is the story of David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past and a darker future. Set in 1970 in a commuter village near London, the novel explores the consequences of Byfield's second marriage.

Dr Malcolm Goldblatt has one last chance in the NHS. As the temporary senior registrar of a London hospital, he needs to prove to the medical establishment he can toe the corporate line. But this new hospital is all rather depressingly familiar - from Dr Madic's ferocious aversion to work, Dr Burton's knife-in-the-back ambition, right up to the pathologically insecure yet monstrously vain Professor Small, it is an environment of short tempers, back-biting and office politics - a place in which caring for patients seems secondary to caring for professional reputations.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Samantha Bonti knew the writer's life she was meant to live waited across the bridge in Manhattan. Summoning the courage to break free from an abusive mobster boyfriend, Sam finally leaves Bensonhurst and begins her new life, working as a temp in a Wall Street brokerage firm. Quickly, she's swept off her feet by Wall Street player Alec DeMarco, a man of boundless energy, appetites, desires, and the wealth to indulge it all.

Over one busy weekend, small-time heroin dealer Johnny B. Goode and his alliance of fellow pushers work their trade amidst students, businessmen, and assorted sewer rats while avoiding the law. Narrated from the separate perspectives of each member of the gang, The Washington Square Ensemble follows the twisted paths that have led the seven men through the gritty New York underworld and toward a fragile alliance at Washington Square. With humor, compassion, and an uncanny ear for voices of the streets, Madison Smartt Bell delivers a stunning indictment and occasional celebration of a blighted New York landscape.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is the center of the hipster universe, and the members of the Whole Sick Crew are its shining stars. The gang includes Wolfgang, a heavy metal musician and high school guidance counselor who supplies coke to his charges; Rad, a doctor obsessed with obscure new wave songs who has a bad habit of cutting himself when he's stressed; Beth Ann, the neighborhood's queen knitter who's slowly going blind and Harrison, a museum curator moonlighting as a writer of highly prized porn.

It is 1970. David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past, brings home a new wife to Roth. Soon the murders and blasphemies begin. But does the responsibility lie in the present or the past? And can Byfield, a prisoner of his own passion, break through to the truth before the final tragedy destroys what he most cherishes?