Showing results by narrator "Bronson Pinchot" in All Categories

From the pulpy pages of Black Mask Magazine in the 1920s and '30s, through the film noir era of the 1940s, to today, noir fiction has lured many a reader and movie-goer away from the light and into the dark underbelly of society. Names such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain; titles like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Postman Always Rings Twice...these have inhabited our collective consciousness for decades. Humanity, it seems, loves the dark. And within the dark, one figure stands out: that of the femme fatale.

The setting is Seattle's Lake City neighborhood during the 2001 holiday season. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and at the peak of Seattle's first wave of tech-boom gentrification - a wave that never quite made it to his neighborhood - Lane Bueche schemes how to win back his wife (and her trust fund). In his childhood bedroom in his mother's decrepit old house, the idealistic but self-serving striver Lane licks his wounds and hatches a plot.

Jimmie Aussapile, Lovina Marcou, and Heck Sinclair are members of a secret society dedicated to protecting those who travel America's highways from the monsters, both supernatural and mundane, that lurk in the darkness just beyond your headlights. They are the Brotherhood of the Wheel. At home in Lenoir, North Carolina, Jimmie and his squire Heck find themselves drawn into an all-out war between two competing biker gangs. One is led by a rival biker in possession of new found supernatural allies, and the other is an all-female werewolf pack.

While the title novella of Dubus' Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone.

Their ambitious TV-movie needs to be made fast and cheap, but a brutal murder grinds production to a halt. An approaching forest fire forces everyone to evacuate. In the confusion not everyone gets out. Eddie is the alcoholic director, Sheila the vulnerable camera assistant, Tom the self-centered actor, and Sondra the spurned sheriff's deputy. Death comes sudden and silent. The camouflaged killer's weapon of choice is a high-tech hunting bow. The mysterious assassin has an agenda.

Unlike other branches of the armed services, the Navy draws its police force from the ranks as temporary duty - Shore Patrol. In this funny, bawdy, moving audiobook set during the height of the Vietnam War, two career sailors in transit in Norfolk, Virginia - Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky and Mule Mulhall - are assigned to escort 18-year-old Larry Meadows from Norfolk to the brig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve an eight-year sentence for petty theft. It's good duty, until the two old salts realize the injustice of the sentence and are oddly affected by the naive innocence of their young prisoner.

Now middle-aged, Meadows seeks out his former captors in their civilian lives to help him bury his son, a Marine killed in Iraq, in Arlington National Cemetery. When he learns that the authorities have told him a lie about the circumstances of his son's death, he decides, with the help of the two others, to transport him home to Portsmouth. And so begins the journey, centered around a solemn mission, but, as in the first book, a protest against injustice and celebration of life, too, at once irreverent, funny, profane, and deeply moving.

The year is 1973, and Alan Eastman, a public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, washed-up war journalist, husband, and philanderer finds himself alone on the floor of his study in an existential crisis. His wife has taken their kids and left him to live with her mother in New Jersey, and his best work feels as though it is years behind him. In the depths of despair, he receives an unexpected and unwelcome phone call from his old rival, offering him the chance to go to Vietnam to write the definitive account of the end of America's longest war.

In 1953, Esref Armagan was born completely blind to a poor family in Istanbul, Turkey. He received no formal education, and spent his childhood days in his father's shop where he developed the curiosity to create and draw. He experienced the world through touch, and learned to visually reproduce his surroundings, including color, shadows, and perspective, with his hands. The blind artist's story will be an inspiration to young artists of all abilities.

Hamilton Speke is a successful playwright and composer - an extraordinary creative force. He lives and works on an estate south of San Francisco, secure in a woodland sanctuary where, to his surprise, he receives a visitor from his past, an old friend and former partner. Then everything changes. Speke's life of celebrity and vision is ruptured by bloodshed and insanity in a world where it's revealed that no one, and no career, is far from danger.

The 1849 Gold Rush in California brought to a boiling point the new state's wild and unruly politics. Before long, there was mob rule in the muddy streets of San Francisco. This decline of constitutional authority on the West Coast mirrored the fumbling actions of Congress and the federal government in Washington as a nation deeply divided over the slavery issue struggled to find a way to preserve the Union.

At a remote farm, a group of old friends gather to catch up, sit by the fire, and forget about their overworked lives. But a long weekend in the country is not Joseph's idea of a good time - not when he's promised his ex-wife he'll use the occasion to talk to their troubled 14-year-old daughter, and not when the farm belongs to his former lover and her husband, Alex. Once best friends, Joseph and Alex are now estranged, with much left unspoken between them.

Justis Fearsson is a weremyste and a private detective. He wields potent magic, but every month, on the full moon, he loses his mind. His battles with insanity have already cost him his job as a cop; he can't afford to let them interfere with his latest case. Phoenix has become ground zero in a magical war, and an army of werecreatures, blood sorcerers, and necromancers has made Jay its number one target.

San Francisco architect Stratton Fields has just discovered that a contest was rigged against him and that the man who engineered the cheat, Ty DeVere, is determined to keep Stratton from success. But when Stratton's enemies, including Ty, start dying mysteriously - and Stratton encounters several apparitions - he wonders if he unknowingly made a deal with a supernatural force. Or maybe he murdered these people himself and has no memory of his deeds.

"Pin", a story by Robert McCammon, was first published in his short fiction collection Blue World and was selected for inclusion in Best New Horror.

In the near future, America is crumbling, bankrupt, and teetering on the edge of chaos. Following the Great Bailout, the multinational Lee-Pi corporation is the only institution that can hold the country together, providing basic services, security, and order. Leonard Cheung is Lee-Pi's most reliable field operative: a negotiator, assassin, and clean-up expert who does the behind-the-scenes dirty work to keep the corporation running.

Justis Fearsson is a weremyste. He wields potent magic, but every month, on the full moon, he loses his mind. He's also a private detective who can't afford to take time off from his latest investigation while his sanity goes AWOL. A legion of dark sorcerers has descended on Phoenix, wreaking havoc in the blistering desert heat. With the next moon phasing approaching, Jay has to figure out what connects a billionaire financier and a vicious drug kingpin to an attempted terrorist attack, a spate of ritual killings, and the murder of a powerful runemyste.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane - the credited artist of the weepy waifs - for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992, he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a conman than an artist and that he forced his wife, Margaret, to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.

Alan Lightman's grandfather, M. A. Lightman, was the family's undisputed patriarch: it was his movie-theater empire that catapulted the family to prominence in the South, his fearless success that both galvanized and paralyzed his descendants, haunting them for a half century after his death. In this lyrical and impressionistic memoir, Lightman writes about returning to Memphis in an attempt to understand the people he so eagerly left behind forty years earlier.

Justis Fearsson is a private investigator on the trail of a serial killer in Phoenix, Arizona. Justis is also a weremyste - a person with a wizard’s gifts and the ability to see into the paranormal world. Unfortunately, weremystes also tend to go crazy on the full moon - which is why Justis is no longer a cop. Hard to explain those absences as anything but mental breakdown. But now an old case from his police detective days has come back to haunt him, literally, as a serial killer known as the Blind Angel strikes again.