Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Literature & Fiction

In big stakes bass fishing tournaments, contestants will do anything to win. Maybe that's why there is a corpse floating in Coon Bog. Now it's up to R J Decker, novice private investigator, to find out who was dying to get the biggest fish. Help comes in the unlikely form of Skink, a half-mad hermit with a taste for road kill.

As Constantinople is being pillaged and burned in April 1204, a young man, Baudolino, manages to save a historian and a high court official from certain death at the hands of crusading warriors. Born a simple peasant, Baudolino has two gifts: his ability to learn languages and to lie. A young man, he is adopted by a foreign commander who sends him to university in Paris. After he allies with a group of fearless and adventurous fellow students, they go in search of a vast kingdom to the East.

Waking up in a tacky coffin and wearing off-brand shoes, Betsy Taylor can't believe the horrible turn her life has taken; then she discovers she's a vampire. Soon, Betsy becomes a participant in a power struggle between the forces of darkness. With only her friend Jessica and the hunky vampire Sinclair to help her, this new "Queen of Vampires" will have a tough time getting her afterlife straight.

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.

She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you’ll ever want to look.

Ex-reporter Joe Winder had been working in the public relations department of a sleazy family entertainment park, The Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, when he chanced upon a news-breaking story inspired by the disappearance of two blue-tongued voles and the bizarre death of Orky, the killer whale.

Tender Branson - last surviving member of the so-called "Creedish Death Cult" - is dictating his incredible life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the plane, which will shortly reach terminal velocity and crash into the vast Australian outback.

You've lost your job as a department store lingerie buyer, your car's been repossessed, and most of your furniture and small appliances have been sold off to pay last month's rent. Now the rent is due again. And you live in New Jersey. What do you do? If you're Stephanie Plum, you become a bounty hunter. But not just a nickel-and-dime bounty hunter - you go after the big money. That means a cop gone bad.

Private investigator Verona Montero hikes fifteen kilometers to a cliff-top lodge in the Canadian Badlands to dodge cheating dirtbags and a crush with better abs than boundaries. She expects R&R. Instead, a sex-bomb named Harper turns up planted in the front garden—daisies and all—and a storm turns the only road out into a mud smoothie. With the cops days away, Verona gets promoted to PI-in-residence with a complimentary bar tab and a house full of alibis that smell like last night’s tequila.

Spencer Quinn's Heart of Barkness is the latest in the New York Times best-selling series that the Los Angeles Times called "nothing short of masterful".

In 1964, Little Big Man gave us the reminiscences of Jack Crabb - a white orphan raised among the Cheyenne - who returns to "civilized" society, where (among other things) he tangles with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, and ends up as the only white survivor of Custer's Last Stand. At the end of Little Big Man, Jack's supposed death at age 111 cut short his tale.

Maybe ninety percent of the population of Dade County, Florida, have emerged unscathed from the devastating hurricane. It's the other ten percent that are causing the trouble. It seems that all the petty crooks and ne'er-do-wells in the south have converged on Dade to reap their ill-gotten gains from the chaos. Honeymooners, Max and Bonnie Lamb attempt to record the goings-on with their video camera—but they soon wish they'd gone to Disney World instead...

Tourist season is swinging into high gear in Miami. So are the activities of a bizarre terrorist group determined to keep the hapless "snowbirds" away. Armed with bombs, weed, and jumbled credos, they move toward their grand target, the Orange Bowl Parade, with plans to bring Miami and its tourist trade to a halt.

Isabel Walker has flown to Paris to offer moral support for Roxy, her pregnant stepsister. Roxy's husband, Charles-Henri, favorite son of a powerful French family, is having a love affair. Divorce seems imminent. When her entire family arrives to help with legal issues, Isabel feels intense pressure to keep everything from falling apart. And in the background, the unstable husband of Charles-Henri's lover lurks menacingly.

As Vampire Queen Betsy Taylor approaches the big 3-1 (in human years, that is), she has a lot on her plate. There are wedding plans to finalize, with no help from her fiancé Eric. And Betsy’s decided to stop drinking blood, something Eric, the vampire king, may not understand … So when some guests show up uninvited, and they happen to be the powerful European vampires who have finally come to pay their respects the week before her birthday, Betsy gets really cranky …

Lamar Jimmerson is the leader of the Gnomon Society, the international fraternal order dedicated to preserving the arcane wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. Stationed in France in 1917, Jimmerson comes across a little book crammed with Atlantean puzzles, Egyptian riddles, and extended alchemical metaphors. It's the Codex Pappus—the sacred Gnomon text. Soon he is basking in the lore of lost Atlantis, convinced that his mission on earth is to administer to and extend the ranks of the noble brotherhood.

Serge and sidekick Coleman head out west to take on Hollywood bigwigs and L.A. lowlifes in Dorsey's most outrageous novel yet. Before Tinseltown knows what's hit it, Serge has made an unforgettable foray to the Playboy Mansion and come up against Japanese Yakuza and a host of wacky characters.

Seth Grahame-Smith delivers the definitive, essential guide to making it through a horror movie in one piece. As hilarious as it is useful (if you’re trapped in a scary flick, that is), How to Survive a Horror Movie covers all the bases. Trapped in a haunted house? Check. Stalked by an evil doll? Check. Wandering aimlessly through the remains of the old world as a plague of zombies sweeps over the planet? Check.

Betsy Taylor, Queen of the Undead, has snagged a dream job in a shoe store (just like a normal person!). But when vampires start getting killed off, Betsy enlists the help of the sexy vampire Sinclair. Now she’s really treading dangerous ground—but this time in brand-new high heels.

Skeeve is a magician’s apprentice (and a wanna-be thief) until an assassin’s bolt kills his master, Garkin. Along with Aahz, the green-scaled, purple-tongued demon and master magician summoned by Garkin, he sets out on a quest to get even. The road to vengeance is bound to prove rocky, however, because Skeeve can barely light a candle with his beginning magic, and Aahz has lost his own considerable magical abilities as a consequence of Garkin’s summoning spell.