Showing results by narrator "Christa Lewis" in All Categories

Set against the backdrop of the construction of the Berlin Wall, The Last Secret Kept explores the beauty of individualism while demolishing the invisible walls built between ourselves and our loved ones.

Franz Kafka scholars know Felice Bauer, his onetime fiancee, through his Letters to Felice, as little more than a woman with a raucous laugh and a taste for bourgeois comforts. Life After Kafka is her story. The novel begins in 1935 as Felice flees with her children from Hitler's Berlin, following her family and members of Kafka's entourage—including Grete Bloch, Max Brod, and Salman Schocken-as they try to escape the horrors of the Holocaust. Years later, a man claiming to be Kafka's son approaches Felice's son in Manhattan and the drama surrounding Kafka's letters to Felice begins.

When Stefan Jochum returns from England to Berlin in August 1945, it is to find a city counting the cost of the Second World War. The Hotel Quadriga is in ruins, his father is dead and his sister, Monika, is living in the Soviet-occupied zone. Determined to survive despite unconquerable odds, his mother Viktoria ekes out an existence from the cellar of the Cafe Jochum.

In 1790 the United States has a new Constitution. George Washington presides as the first elected president. Abroad, France and Britain are at war. And by 1795 seafaring Americans are accosted on the high seas by French privateers and British naval ships. Tensions rise as American merchants continue to trade. Among them, Hasket Derby and Captain George Crowninshield busily build maritime empires while their sons seek a new way forward.

When a five-year-old girl reports being saved by a mysterious being in the middle of a tornado, her story is readily dismissed. But less so the computer-assisted discovery of a pattern in a series of deaths that suggests they are no accident. Special agent Ilona Farris of the FBI puzzles over how a killer could predict the storm events so accurately, yet stops short at believing they are dealing with the thunder beings of Native American legend.

FBI Special Agent Ilona Farris has barely recovered from her first escapade with the newly formed Unsolvable Crimes Unit when a bizarre case lands on her desk. A man has been chained to a sack of stones and pushed into the water at Seattle Marina. However, the victim supposedly died in a plane crash over twenty years ago. Witnesses report seeing a man in a straw hat and long coat at the scene. There one moment, then disappearing without a trace.

American Alana Eastwood is researching her family tree. Remarkably, Alana traces her Eastwood lineage to an African child, living at Wortley Hall Manor on England's 1801 census. The boy is known as Otobong. Alana believes Otobong to be her earliest traceable ancestor and plans to visit her distant relatives still living in Nottingham. Discovering he was connected to a homicide in 1835 sets Alana on a mission to prove his innocence. Then the body of a man turns up on a beach in Mississippi, eerily close to where Alana's father was born.

In the wake of Pennsylvania’s iconic Circle Center Mall’s collapse, fueled by greed, a community dies. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helena, caused by rising temperatures, southern Florida reverts to a swampy bog. In upstate New York, a tourist community is under a covert attack, as a private equity company seeks to enrich its coffers at the expense of local business owners and town residents. In the shadow of institutional abuses resulting in major disasters, people deal with abuse and trauma on a very personal level where their only option is a life reset.