Showing results by narrator "Michael Paul" in All Categories

Spreading democracy takes more than cutting-edge military hardware. Winning the hearts and minds of a troubled nation is a special mission we give to bewildered young soldiers who can't speak the native language, don't know the customs, can't tell friends from enemies, and, in this wonderfully outrageous Iraq-era novel about Vietnam, wonder why they have to risk their lives spraying peanut plants, inoculating pigs, and hauling miracle rice seed for Ho Chi Minh.

A singularly effervescent novel pivoting around the disappearance of an American businessman in the Philippines and the long-suffering son, jilted lover, slick police commissioner, misguided villain, and supernatural saviors who all want a piece of him.

When a boat drifts into a New England port with all its crew dead, only a shipboard statue knows what took place. Can a boy carved from wood reveal the secret? Can a love-struck apprentice find the girl of his dreams by following a weathervane with a figure of Saint Crispin, patron saint of shoemakers? After a lifetime of making statues of the wealthy and powerful, what will the Italian sculptor Zorelli do when he is hired not by a human, but a ghost?

ShadowStrike poisoned the water of Trinity Falls two months ago. Now the Trinity Four, the teens most affected by the poison, have been isolated in a remote mansion under 24-hour medical care while scientists on four continents rush to discover a cure. Meanwhile, US operatives scour the world for the bioterrorists responsible for this heinous crime as two teen virtual spies, also infected, hunt for the criminals on the Internet.

Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of the small town of Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible loss and their place in it. In this brilliantly written novel, one girl's story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her.

It's 1959. Sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his 14th car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working-class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy plant in Detroit and looks forward to the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan, home. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called "one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction."

It's 1978 and the whole country, exhausted from the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, is suffering from a massive hangover. Chucky O'Malley knows how the country feels; approaching fifty, he finds himself in the grip of a debilitating midlife crisis. As he travels the world, from the Vatican, where a new pope is to be selected, to Jimmy Carter's White House, where an overwhelmed president struggles to find a cure for his nation's malaise, Chucky searches for a way to renew his weary spirit.

In his eighth book, Dean takes the broadest and deepest view yet of the dysfunctional chaos and institutional damage that the Republican Party and its core conservatives have inflicted on the federal government. He assesses the state of all three branches of government, tracing their decline through the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.

Meet Michael Seeley, defender of artists' rights, take-no-prisoners intellectual property litigator, and a man on the brink of personal and career collapse. So when United Pictures virtually demands that he fly out to Hollywood to confirm legally that they own the rights to their corporate cash-cow franchise of Spykiller films, he has little choice but to comply.

In The Edge of Darkness, LaHaye reveals the meaning behind some of the most carefully guarded Biblical prophecies to expose a conspiracy with terrifying consequences for our modern world.

Activists Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove show how prayer and action must go together. Their exposition of key Bible passages provides concrete examples of how a life of prayer fuels social engagement and the work of justice. Phrases like "give us this day our daily bread" and "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" take on new meaning when applied to feeding the hungry or advocating for international debt relief.

Walter Rothschild is an American Egyptologist living in London and charged by the British Museum with the task of unlocking the riddle of the Stela of Paser, a centuries-old funerary stone. In the final hours of his quest, with six days left before his contract is up with the British Museum, Walter meets a young woman who expresses an interest in him and his work.

Pliny is the newly appointed governor of a turbulent and corrupt frontier province seething with hatred of Rome. When a high Roman official is found murdered on a desolate hillside, Pliny must investigate the devotees of a barbarian god whose ranks may include a murderer, an unscrupulous faith healer who knows everyone’s secrets, and a boy who struggles toward manhood though stricken with the "sacred disease." As Pliny pursues one lead after another, he is betrayed where he least expects it.

In this gripping debut thriller from James M. Tabor, a brilliant and beautiful scientist and a mysterious special ops soldier must lead a team deep into the Earth on a desperate hunt for the cure to a deadly epidemic.

When a South Pole scientist dies mysteriously, CDC microbiologist Hallie Leland arrives to complete crucial research. Before she can begin, three more women inexplicably die. As failing communications and plunging temperatures cut the station off from the outside world, terror rises and tensions soar. Amidst it all, Hallie must crack the mystery of her predecessor’s death.

A classic satire in which we find that those who can...do.... And those who can’t criticize and have higher stature in our society.

In the last days of pre-World War II China and the rise of Communism, Jim Dahlgren, representative of the Amalgamated Aeronautical Company, has had enough of the fatalistic brand of diplomacy from other nations that claim to want a united China, one that can resist invasion from without and treason within - but which refuses to intervene and prevent it's demise. When Dahlgren disappears - purportedly to find a mysterious aviator, the man called "Wind-Gone-Mad" - he ignites a series of actions which just may spell disaster.

Alfred Kropp was just trying to survive high school when his guardian uncle gets him roped into a suspicious get-rich-quick scheme that changes his life forever: stealing Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur. But after Alfred unwittingly delivers the sword into the hands of a man with enormously evil intentions, he sets off on an unlikely quest to try to right his wrong and save the world from imminent destruction.

In The Edge of Darkness, LaHaye reveals the meaning behind some of the most carefully guarded Biblical prophecies to expose a conspiracy with terrifying consequences for our modern world.

Alternating between nineteenth-century Europe and present-day New England, this tale follows the great British painter J. M. W. Turner - and his scene of artists, intellectuals, and lovers - and Henry, a middle-aged family man whose otherwise mundane existence is disrupted by the discovery of The Center of the World, Turner’s controversial painting of Helen of Troy that had been thought lost forever.