Showing results by narrator "Peter Berkrot" in All Categories

When struggling painter Nicholas Gray first sees Margaretha Zelle, it is in a poor photograph. But something draws him to her. All men are drawn to Margaretha - her mysterious eyes, her effortless sensuality. In another life she will become known as Mata Hari. As a dancer she becomes famous. As a seductress she becomes legendary. Soon Mata Hari is crisscrossing Europe, collecting generals, aristocrats, and businessmen as her lovers.

The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed (metamorphosed) into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. The cause of Gregor's transformation is never revealed, and Kafka himself never gave an explanation. The rest of Kafka's novella deals with Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repulsed by the horrible, verminous creature Gregor has become.

A satirical tall tale presented as the drug and alcohol fuelled conversation of two old friends getting reacquainted over one night. It's also a boy-meets-girl story of the worst kind and a time-travel story about a future where the world is ruled by robots and humans are vermin. When timelines cross, the world as we know it bends.

From a daring Confederate raid that nearly seized Washington, DC, to a stunning reversal on the bloody fields of Cedar Creek, the summer and autumn of 1864 witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of our Civil War, in mighty battles now all but forgotten.

Between the end of his marriage and the excessive force complaints against him, Detective Sergeant Mickey Dolan is running out of chances. When a powerful and connected city councilman reports that his wife and two daughters have disappeared, Dolan is assigned the case - knowing full well that his career is riding on the outcome.

Noreen McAuliffe's Come Down in the World, a story about a nineteenth-century logging camp, wears a style so seamless and perfectly matched it feels tailor-made. From the first few lines to the quietly explosive finale, the listener is surrounded with instant authenticity that transports us to a time, place, and situation with stakes so high that most of us need a daring writer to imagine them for us.

In Against Football Steve Almond details why, after 40 years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions: Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood--run, leap, throw, tackle--into a billion-dollar industry?

In the summer of 2012, in the dead of night, three peace activists penetrated the exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. A drifter, an 82-year-old nun, and a house painter. And if they had been terrorists armed with explosives, intent on mass destruction? That nightmare scenario underlies the government’s response to the intrusion.

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

When an unidentified corpse washes ashore at Slapton Sandson England's southern coast, US army captain Billy Boyle and his partner, Lieutenant Piotr "Kaz" Kazimierz, are assigned to investigate. The Devonshirebeach is the home to Operation Tiger, the top-secret rehearsal for theapproaching D-day invasion of Normandy, and the area is restricted; no one seems to know where the corpse could have come from.

It's everyday business when Wattles, the San Fernando Valley's top "executive crook", sets up a hit. He establishes a chain of criminals to pass along the instructions and the money, thereby ensuring that the hitter doesn't know who hired him. Then one day Wattles finds his office safe open and a single item missing: the piece of paper listing the crooks in the chain. When people associated with the chain begin to pop up dead, the only person Wattles can turn to for help is Junior Bender, professional burglar and begrudging private eye for crooks.

Kosh did not feel courageous. Looking at the disko, it was all he could do not to collapse into a quaking, blubbering puddle of terror. He was half certain he was going to die. But the alternative — leaving Emma in the hands of Gheen without even trying to rescue her — was unthinkable. He would not want to live if he had to live with that. In present-day Hopewell, an adult Kosh Feye discovers a sweet and painful piece of his past when he’s rescued by the Lamb Emma.

Former Wall Street whiz and current convict Mickey Steinberg is nearing the end of his three-year sentence at Yankton - the cushy country club prison where he's enjoyed celebrity status - and he's ready to get out and get back on top. He doesn't have the resources he once did, but he's already hatched a new plan to sell a forgery of a stolen Van Gogh painting through the shady underground art market. He and his new partner, the smooth-talking Paul Reece, have a mark in mind: The sleazy con-man art dealer who swooped in on Mickey's beloved ex-wife after he was locked up. But with his old partner, Jack Grass, hell-bent on revenge and his pre-prison life closed to him, it won't be easy.

March, 1944: US Army Lieutenant Billy Boyle, back in England after a dangerous mission in Italy, is due for a little R&R, and also a promotion. But the now-Captain Boyle doesn't get to kick back and enjoy his leisure time because two upsetting cases fall into his lap at once.

John T. Unger is a young southerner who goes to Montana for summer vacation with a wealthy college classmate. But the classmate's family proves to be much more than simply wealthy - they own a mountain made entirely of one solid diamond. And they've gone to dreadful lengths to conceal their secret, which means that John could be in danger.

He's making news with his fists, his gun…and the ladies. The San Francisco Sun's freelance field stringer Stuart "Stringer" MacKail needs a new story to sell to pay the bills. His editor sends him back to MacKail's home town in Calaveras County for an update on an old legend about a stagecoach robbery by "Sulky Jack" and its missing treasure. Stringer's feet barely hit the ground when the bullets begin flying and it quickly becomes clear that folks are still trying to find the treasure and will stop anyone who gets in their way.

It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why, before the police do.

Stringer was just doing his job when he went to hear Teddy Roosevelt speak at a railway stop in Granger, Wyoming. But Stringer's job is to write about the speech - not get shot at! So suddenly a certain reporter has a powerful curiosity about who wants him six feet under. There's just one hitch: Stringer can't be sure if the bullet was meant for him or old Teddy. Now all MacKail has to do is dodge a pack of hired killers, swap lead with a few train robbers, match wits with a renegade Shoshoni, and bed a few lusty ladies on a trail that can end on the front page - or the obituaries….

Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens just lost his first election in 17 years. Maybe folks in the Arizona Territory were ready for a change…and then again, maybe Stringer ought to go have a look-see. The trouble is, Perry's vanished and everyone who knew him is either dead or vanished too. But when hot lead and hard knuckles start flying, Stringer's belt-buckle deep in ghostly mystery and willing women. And even if the ghosts may be hokum, the women are flesh-and-blood beauties!

Shortly after the abduction and brutal murder of legendary FBI agent John Coyle by a Russian hit squad, information surfaced that he was corrupt and his reputation was destroyed. But anyone who knew John Coyle knows that he had been framed, and by all accounts the only man who could have set him up was Big Dickey McVicker, a New York City underworld boss with ties to the Russian Mafia. For decades McVicker had been John Coyle’s chief informant - but he was also Coyle’s oldest and closest friend.