Showing results by narrator "Peter Berkrot" in All Categories

The world was desperate. Since the empire had fallen a hundred years ago, Gwin and her people had nearly given up hope that the Renewer would come. Gwin had lost everything. Her husband was killed in one of the wars. Her children died of Star Sickness. Even her work at the hostel was in jeopardy because the politicians had it out for her. The cursed Gwin, therefore, had nothing to lose. When she took in the girl, a survivor of the Star Sickness, it was a dreadful crime.

FBI Agent Andy Fisher has little respect for authority and even less love for paperwork. Fisher is in the Big Apple when he learns that an old girlfriend, Kathy Feder, has been shot dead. Armed with a pack of Camels and enough caffeine to kill an elephant, Fisher is determined to find out who killed Kathy and why. Kathy was a key employee of Icarus Sun Works, and her death threatens to delay the launch of a satellite that will harvest solar energy and beam it to Earth as electricity.

It happens every spring. Yankees pitching great Ron Guidry arrives at the Tampa airport to pick up Hall of Fame catcher and national treasure Yogi Berra. Guidry drives him to the ballpark. They watch the young players. They talk shop. They eat dinner together and tease each other mercilessly. They trade stories about the greats they have met along the way. And the next day they do the same thing all over again. As every former ballplayer can appreciate, in that routine, every spring, there emerges a certain magic.

The train robbery was bad. It cost Stringer 30 dollars. But when the Wild Bunch gives MacKail a .45 caliber invite to hear their side of what a nice bunch of boys they really are, it's an offer he can't refuse. After all, they're all mothers' sons, even if they would cut a man's throat for his boots. Even so, when Stringer decides to ride along, it has less to do with an exclusive than the gun pointed at his back. And when the shooting starts, MacKail's caught between the crossfire of a rabid posse and the meanest bunch of murdering, lying, cheating hombres to ever draw breath.…

They say Judge Roy Bean's been up to some legal tomfoolery again. And it's MacKail's job to get the scoop on the infamous "hanging judge." But someone is out to stop Stringer…dead.

Cheyenne, Wyoming. A town that's leaping into the 20th century spurs first. Pretty soon Cheyenne will be just as newfangled fancy as any Eastern city-but the folks there still know how to have fun. First the rodeo…and then the hanging. It's the rodeo that Stringer's been sent out to write about. However, before he knows it, he's up to his neck in the West's most notorious murder case. They're fixin' to hang Tom Horn…but something in town smells worse than a stableboy's boots, and Stringer aims to find out what.

Everyone knows that Salton's Sink is the driest patch of greasewood in the whole damned Colorado Desert. So when a slick land syndicate promises cheap water to a pack of greenhorn settlers, Stringer is more than a mite suspicious.

When the body of Jacob Kieler Junior is discovered in a stately old house in Reykjavik on a cold January morning in 1973, Jóhann Pálsson, an expert in the emerging field of forensics, is called to the scene. He soon discovers something even more unsettling than the killing itself: The victim’s father, Jacob Senior, was shot to death in the same living room nearly 30 years earlier. Through diaries Jacob Senior kept throughout his lifetime Pálsson and his colleagues try to link Jacob Junior’s shooting and the death of Jacob Senior, an ambitious man dedicated to bringing the railroad to Iceland at any cost.

Dr. Phillip Madison has everything: wealth, power, and an impeccable reputation. But in the pre-dawn hours of a quiet California suburb, the revered orthopedic surgeon is charged with double homicide - a cold blooded hit-and-run that has left an innocent young couple dead. Blood evidence has brought the police to his door. An eyewitness has placed him at the crime scene…and Madison has no alibi. With his family torn apart, his career forever damaged, and facing life in prison, Madison hires an investigator.

O. Henry, the pseudonym of the American writer William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), is best known for writing stories full of wit, wordplay, and warm characterizations, and particularly for their clever twist endings. This volume contains 20 of O. Henry's best and best-loved stories. They are marked by coincidence and surprise endings as well as the compassion and high humor that have made O. Henry's stories popular for the last century.

Every schoolchild is taught the great turning points in American history, such as Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11. But other, equally significant events have altered our destiny without being understood---or even widely noticed. Acclaimed conservative historian Larry Schweikart now takes an in-depth look at seven such episodes and reveals the profound ways they have shaped America.

A loving couple - each hiding under an assumed identity unbeknownst to the other - finds their peaceful Southern California life shattered by their secret pasts as they dodge pursuers on both sides of the law.

More than half a millennium in the future, in the shadow of the looming Cydonian Pyramid, a pampered girl named Lah Lia has been raised for one purpose: to be sacrificed through one of the mysterious diskos that hover over the pyramid’s top. But just as she is about to be killed, a strange boy appears from the diskos, providing a cover of chaos that allows her to escape and launching her on a time-spinning journey in which her fate is irreversibly linked to his.The second book in the Klaatu Diskos trilogy, The Cydonian Pyramid continues the story of the enigmatic girl who changed Tucker Feye’s life.

In remote pockets of the Third World, a deadly virus is quietly sweeping through impoverished farming villages with frightening speed and potency. Meanwhile, in Washington, a three-word message left in a safe-deposit box may be the key to stopping the crisis - if, that is, Charles Mallory, a private intelligence contractor and former CIA operative, can decipher the puzzle before time runs out. What Mallory begins to discover are the traces of a secret war with a bold objective - to create a new, technologically advanced society.

Secrets trail an American soldier from his Depression upbringing to the cold winter battles in the Ardennes Forest in the last months of World War II, and through the postwar decades, as he struggles to keep his family from being torn apart while keeping the truth buried close to his heart. Clay Brock, proprietor of Jake's Tavern, has endured terrible losses throughout his life. In 1964, he is working to build a life for his wife and son, only to see everything he's worked for threatened by forces beyond his control.

A missing person case brings private eye Roy Markham to the remote winter-bound college town of Cliff's End, New Hampshire. But what began as a routine investigation quickly becomes dark and dangerous. Six pornographic photos and a tidy little blackmail scheme result in a brutal and baffling murder, and no one is safe - especially Markham himself.

1937. The gears of world war have begun to grind, but Inky Lautman, star point guard for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, America’s greatest basketball team, is dealing with his own problems. His coach has unwittingly incurred a massive gambling debt to the Bund, a group of American Nazis. His main basketball rival is self-righteously leading public protests against homegrown American fascism. It’s more than Inky can deliver.

Lieutenant Billy Boyle could have used a rest after his last case, but when his girlfriend, Diana Seaton, a British spy, goes missing in the Vatican, where she was working undercover, he insists on being assigned to a murder investigation there so he can try to help her.

All fire escapes lead back to the same block in Sugar Hill, Harlem - where kids run through hydrants and music blares from stereos plugged into lampposts. When a new resident (the story’s unnamed narrator) notices the trash polluting the picturesque streets and tainting his block’s beauty, he is spurred to action. However, his best intentions go awry when the cleanup brings media coverage that, in turn, sets off a rash of evictions and an influx of affluent tenants.

Ed London is the type of private investigator that you call to clean up the mess when your mistress turns up dead. But after he dumps a body in Central Park, it appears this case is still alive and kicking. Seems that the dead girl was in possession of something special that some very shady characters want back. Now Ed, along with his pretty actress friend Maddy, will have to crack the case before he ends up dead himself. But there's more than a murder here; there's missing jewels, Israeli intelligence, Nazi spies, and a host of double-dealing, backstabbing thieves.