Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Literature & Fiction

Lucy Resnick's nerves are as tight as a tea cozy. Her new goats, Hot Lips and Gidget, keep making a break for the town square, her truck is dying, and her boyfriend's gorgeous ex-wife is in town for the holidays. Worse, someone's digging holes on her land...and uprooting her peach orchard and dewberry patch in the process. Lucy needs additional holiday stress like she needs a blow to the head - which she receives one night, courtesy of the mystery digger.

Amid the cactus wilds some two hundred miles from Hollywood lies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place for starlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and the well-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by Norman Mailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Or is a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what they really want - and how far they are willing to go to get it.

As assistant buyer for the world's second-largest Christmas store, Kelsey Parker feels like a holiday harlot. She's contractually obligated to promote the yuletide season. All. Year. Long. And it's taking a toll on her spirit. But when her clueless, self-absorbed boyfriend goes on their long-anticipated romantic vacation - without her! - Kelsey is beyond disappointed to find herself tromping through the Bell Harbor snow instead of lounging on a tropical beach.

Little is what it seems to be in a leafy Savannah neighborhood as members of an afternoon cocktail and dog walking club mourn a neighbor’s death. Jealousies surface when friends vie for the widower running for mayor. An old woman with an infamous uncle plots to avenge a wrong. Memories haunt a once successful children’s writer. And a model has won the trip of a lifetime. But a killer lurks and secrets unfold, as does a web of deceit. Is anyone really who he or she seems to be?

With a dissolving marriage, strained finances, and her life in flux, Ally Anderson longs for normal. Her greatest concerns, though, are the health problems of her young daughter, Kylie. Symptoms point to a compromised immune system, but every doctor they’ve seen has a different theory. Then comes hope for some clarity. It’s possible that Kylie’s illness is genetic, but Ally is adopted. A DNA test opens up an entirely new path.

See Jane smile. Thirty-nine-year-old Jane Osborne appears to the world like she has a charmed life. Her daughter attends private school. Jane chairs the PTA. Even her marriage to Dan, the handsome, prominent surgeon, is blissfully happy. Her universe is stable, and her future is fixed...just like that smile. Because it’s all a ruse. Unbeknownst to anyone, after eighteen years of marriage, Dan’s revealed that he’s been living a double life and is in love with a man. But for the sake of his career, Jane must keep that secret, secret.

When Rita McCall discovers her husband’s affair, there isn’t a lick of surprise—not a single tear or broken heart. Just a wife and mother who’s over it and ready to watch her twenty-three-year marriage go up in flames. Sticking close, thick as thieves since childhood, Rita’s unfailingly loyal cousins Jemel and Sharae become her lifeline. They stand beside her as she contemplates a new career and navigates the murky waters of being a preacher’s daughter disgraced by scandal.

Courting Death finds Melanie Wilkerson (from Cotton, book two of the Clarkeston Chronicles) and Arthur Hughes working uncomfortably together in the chambers of a famous federal judge. While Melanie neglects her duties as a law clerk to investigate the mysterious death of a young woman in the courthouse five years earlier, Arthur wades through the horrific habeas corpus appeals of two prisoners: an infamous serial killer and a pathetic child murderer.

After her divorce, librarian Annie Reynolds thought she'd closed the book on love for good - it just wasn't part of her safe, comfortable routine. But if there's anyplace she can relax and have a little fun, it's Dune Road, where she and her closest girlfriends return for their annual getaway in the Hamptons. She knows it's just what she needs to escape her empty nest (and empty bed).

At 11:46:01, California time, on a foggy Monday in January 1986, the universe - suddenly, inexplicably, without warning - bifurcated. Fast-forward to 35 years later: Felix Sayers is a culinary writer living in San Francisco of Universe A who spends his days lunching at Coconut Café and dreaming of a successful career penning Agatha Christie-style mysteries. But everything changes when his Aunt Henrietta dies, leaving Felix a photograph of his father and himself - dated 10 days before Felix was born. It can only mean one thing: Felix has an "alter" in Universe B.

Somewhere in Arizona’s Chocolate Mountains lie the Big Maria Mine and a wealth of gold lost for 100 years. There’s only one problem: Those mountains are now the home of the US Army Proving Ground, the world’s largest active artillery range. But for Harry, Ricky, and Frank, three down-at-the-heels guys with few dollars but plenty of dreams, the gold offers each of them a chance for a new life. Are scuba diving through an underwater ghost town; facing down a hungry mountain lion; doing the hesitation waltz across a minefield; matching wits with potheads, pit bulls, and bikers; and braving the might of Uncle Sam’s full arsenal worth it?

Maggie Mayfield, an elementary school principal in the upscale suburbs of San Diego, likes to do the right thing - for her students and, after her marriage takes a hit, for herself as well. To keep her cash-strapped school afloat, Maggie says yes to a sweet deal from Silicon Valley’s hottest for-profit education company. They’ll provide enough funding so that Maggie can keep her science, art, and PE teachers in exchange for some dopey beta-test program backed by handsome CEO Danny Z. But as the school year continues, Maggie senses that she might have been duped.

Andrej is a postman in complete denial of his existence. He yearns for respect and fame but commits petty crimes for reasons he doesn’t fully comprehend. Josip is an increasingly irrelevant cable car operator and unfaithfully married. Life was so much simpler when neither one knew the other’s secrets. Now that they do - discovered quite by accident - each man has resorted to blackmailing the other. As their anonymous misdeeds escalate, a farce of mutual dependency begins. So does the unlikeliest of friendships when Andrej and Josip finally meet face-to-face.

Life is about to get complicated for Amelia Montgomery, a prominent litigator in Chicago. She’s been fired for not compromising her principles in a high-profile case and then punching her partner in the nose for the misogynistic comment he made in retort (not her finest moment). Leaving a career that gave her purpose, Amelia can only ask, What next? Let it be better than her epic failure of a fortieth birthday party: an open bar full of no-shows except for John Ellis, a total stranger and the new associate at her ex-firm.

Perhaps Vidal’s most outrageous novel, this is an indescribable fantasy purportedly set in the city of Duluth (which, however, is near the Mexican border) and involving a TV show also named Duluth (a parody of Dallas), a spaceship that has landed nearby, the antics of a policewoman, Darlene Ecks, and much else.

Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ's story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressing it, "as if I were a man enclosing another man within."

Following the best-selling success of Dave's novel, Big Trouble, here is a hilarious new collection of columns from the writer critics have called "the funniest man in America."

Available to listeners for the first time, Sucker’s Portfolio showcases a collection of seven never-before-published works from Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Short, sardonic, and dark, these six brief fiction stories and one non-fiction piece are consummate Vonnegut with piercing satire and an eye for life’s obscene inanity. Also available for the first time is an unfinished science-fiction short story, included in the appendix.

Forty-one years old, the last of her friends to marry, and down to a size 12, Lauren Leo is in her gown and about to tie the knot. There’s just one thing missing: the groom. With one blindsiding text, Lauren is unceremoniously dumped at the altar. In the aftermath, her mother is an endless well of unsolicited advice (Stay on your diet and freeze your eggs). Her sisters only add to the Great Humiliation: one is planted on Lauren’s couch while the other is too perfect.

Coupon-clipping police superintendent Jonah Merlin thinks he has an open-and-shut case on his hands after the body of a beautiful woman is found discarded in a run-down building in Tel Aviv. All evidence points to two suspects, but finding them will require unorthodox methods to decode the cryptic words sprayed at every crime scene. As the body count rises, graffiti expert Rai Zitrin and precocious 17-year-old Zoe Navon agree to help Merlin uncover the connection between the killing spree and the words of Polish writer Bruno Schulz.