Showing results by narrator "Rebecca Stern" in All Categories

On the evening of July 13, 1863, two men, Samuel White from Washington and Lemuel Phillips from Buffalo, each received a mysterious letter marked 'personal', which he destroyed after reading. The letters are a summons to visit New York to attend to some unknown business. The two men, now living lives of privilege and respectability, are linked by a nefarious deed committed twelve years earlier when they were prospectors struggling to survive. Has the moment arrived when the heavy hand of retribution will finally fall upon them?

Burdened by the pressing weight of survivor’s guilt, Sean McPherson, an ex-cop, is desperate for redemption. At Pines & Quill, a writer’s retreat in the Pacific Northwest, he and his fiancée, Emma Benton, are planning their lives together. He wants to go back into law enforcement. She plans to walk again. Georgio “The Bull” Gambino, head of a Seattle-based crime family, has a long reach. Like cockroaches, his minions infiltrate even the most inaccessible of places to do his bidding.

In the village of Fairhaven—nestled between Washington state’s Bellingham Bay and the Cascade Mountains, home to writers’ retreat Pines & Quill—friends and family have gathered for the union of Sean McPherson and Emma Benton. Sean has been working with the FBI and local police to help solve crimes, particularly murders bearing the mark of crime boss Georgio “The Bull” Gambino. Emma, who has just learned to walk again, has begun to feel at home and hopes to one day raise a family.

Benno Neuburger, a modest land investor from Munich, and Anna Einstein, daughter of a cattle dealer from Laupheim, marry in 1907. They begin their lives together with great hope. It is a relatively prosperous time and a very optimistic one for German Jews who are enjoying a social renaissance in the industrializing, urbanizing rising star that is Germany. It’s not clear that this good fortune might begin to unravel.

When a sniper killed his partner, Sean McPherson was injured in the ambush. Now an ex-cop, he takes a job at a writing retreat in the Pacific Northwest. At Pines & Quill, he hopes to heal and put his life back together in the Zen-like capacity of groundskeeper and all-around handyman. Sniper, Jason Hughes, blames McPherson for the loss of more than 10 million dollars’ worth of heroinand he wants revenge.

In 1660, Amsterdam is the trading and map-printing capital of the world. Anneke van Brug is one of the colorists paid to enhance black-and-white maps for a growing number of collectors. Her artistic talent brings her to the attention of the Blaeu printing house, and she begins to color for a rich merchant, Willem de Groot. But Anneke is not content to simply embellish the work of others; she longs to create maps of her own. Cartography, however, is the domain of men - so it is in secret that she borrows the notes her father made on a trip to Africa in 1642 and sets about designing a new map.

Crime boss Georgio Gambino abducts Sean “Mick” McPherson’s pregnant wife, Emma, and his friend’s two daughters and contracts to sell them and another group of women—some into forced labor, others as sex slaves, and a few for their organs. Gambino confines three best friends—Mick, a PI; Joe, a homicide detective; and Rafferty, an FBI special agent—to Pines & Quill writing retreat and pits them against each other with a warning: “Mick, if you try to save Emma, I’ll kill Joe’s daughters.