Showing results by narrator "Nicole Poole" in All Categories

Since the age of 12, McKenzie Arnold has spent every summer at Albany Beach, Delaware, with her best friends, Aurora, Janine, and Lilly. The seaside house teems with 30 years of memories - some wonderful, others painful - and secrets never divulged beyond its walls. This summer may be the last they spend together, as Janine contemplates selling her family cottage.

Lost in Montana.

When Rachel Everly dumps her cheating boyfriend, he dumps her in a one-horse Montana town with only her suitcase and beloved camera. Then a deep, whisky-rough voice offers her a way out… Rescued by the rancher. Shane Merritt plans to sell his parents' ranch. Originally he merely hires Rachel as his photographer, but slowly he begins to see the woman who's putting the home back into his homestead in a whole new light.

Christine Snow, a Chicago therapist, wakes one morning to find her live-in lover gone. At first Chris thinks that Taylor has left in a funk because they fought the night before over a minor flirtation. But too many clues point to another explanation: Either Taylor has left for Morocco and a mysterious woman there, or she has come to harm. Running the emotional gamut from anger to alarm, Christine anxiously tracks the course of Taylor's disappearance, only to discover that her trust in her lover may have been misplaced.

This first novel takes us on a journey through the centre of an explosive, illicit relationship that drives into the fragile heart of a family. A young girl and an older man succumb to an incendiary love affair at an unpayable price. As lies are revealed, the characters must pick up the fragments of whom they thought they were and turn towards an awareness of whom they have now become. They must explore the truth of love and the cost of passion.

The Emperor's daughter Mercedes is the first woman ever admitted to The High Ground, the elite training academy of the Solar League's Star Command, and she must graduate if she is to have any hope of taking the throne. Her classmate Thracius has more modest goals - to defy his humble beginnings and rise to the rank of captain. But in a system rocked by political division, where women are governed by their husbands and fathers, the poor are kept in their place by a rigid class system, and the alien races have been conquered and subjugated, there are many who want them to fail.

This collection includes four book-centered mystery novellas from four masters of the craft: The Scroll, Reconciliation Day, The Compendium of Srem, and The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy.

Abbey Mei Otis's short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, and more. Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the 12 stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

The residents of the small town of Artemis are suspicious when a community called The Drummers moves into a local abandoned church. Their leader, Gideon, claims their aim is simple: to live peacefully off the grid without government interference. But when local power substations are sabotaged and the whole of West Texas loses electricity, all fingers point to them. Forced to intervene, Police Chief Josie Gray and her team try to enter the church only for gunshots to be exchanged. Inside the church, one young girl is killed, with Gideon claiming Josie's stray bullet hit her.

Police Chief Josie Gray is living every cop's worst nightmare: a murder suspect who she knows personally. Even worse, it's her longtime boyfriend, Dillon Reese. Dillon's secretary has been murdered, and now Dillon's disappeared. Josie has no choice but to relinquish the investigation, giving up control of a case that matters more than any other. As suspicions split the department, Josie struggles with her choices on the night she last saw Dillon.

Nobody in the family talks about Ellen's grandmother Lola, who was swallowed up by the circus and emerged as a woman who tamed tigers and got away scot-free for killing her husband. When Ellen's husband Wayne beats her nearly to death, she runs to the only place she knows where a woman can completely disappear - the same Big Top that once sheltered her grandmother. Though the circus moves from one town to the next, Wayne tracks it, and Ellen, relentlessly.