Showing results by narrator "Stephen Hoye" in All Categories

This collection features a selection of classic short stories and poems by legendary Western authors Stephen Crane, Bret Harte, and Jack London.

After nearly a decade in the minors, Dirk Hayhurst defied the odds to climb onto the pitcher's mound for the Toronto Blue Jays. Newly married, with a big league paycheck and a brand new house, Hayhurst was ready for a great season in the Bigs. Then fate delivered a crushing hit. Hayhurst blew out his pitching shoulder in an insane off-season workout program. After surgery, rehab, and more rehab, his major-league dreams seemed more distant than ever.

January 2, 1972: Men in tuxedos rob the Pierre, a New York hotel. They get away with $11 million worth of cash and jewelry. The police are baffled by how large-scale a heist could go off so smoothly. The answer was in the leader of the thieves, a man by the name of Bobby Comfort. Comfort took to crime from a young age, card sharping, petty theft, and eventually robbery. Taking money from the rich, though, was where he excelled.

John Thinnes, a detective on the Chicago police force, and Jack Caleb, a well-known psychiatrist, were friends - unlikely friends, maybe, with very different lives, but men who liked and respected each other. And they had one significant experience in common: Both had been "in country" in Vietnam during the war.

Jack Caleb is a Gold Coast psychiatrist, wealthy, cultured - and gay. John Thinnes is a burned out Chicago detective. When one of Caleb's clients is found dead in his locked apartment - apparently of a self-inflicted head wound, Thinnes doesn't believe it was suicide. And Caleb is inclined to agree. But Thinnes regards a shrink who makes house calls suspicious and starts his investigation of the murder with the doctor himself.

"Thinnes specialized in homicide. He hated working rapes. Rape was more like a drive-by shooting than anything else because it was often a matter of the victim being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But drive-bys usually happened in the killer's neighborhood and were perpetrated against known enemies or at least innocent neighbors... With rape it was different. Rape hurt the victim when it went down, and again when the cops investigated - no matter how careful they were - Thinnes hated the whole thing.

Native American artist Blue Mountain Cat has a style described as "Andy Warhol meets Jonathan Swift in Indian country." When he's murdered at an exclusive showing in a posh art museum, Detective John Thinnes has no shortage of suspects. Targets of the artist's satire included a greedy developer, a beautiful Navajo woman, and black-market antiquities dealers. And some of the museum's patrons were outraged by his work.

Jogging through Chicago's Lincoln Park, Dr. John Caleb comes upon a group of fanatics setting a police car on fire - with the officer inside. Caleb rescues the man but as Chicago heats up in the most brutal summer on record, it becomes clear that this is the first of a series of deadly arsons. As Detective John Thinnes races to find the culprit and Dr. Caleb sets a trap for a murderer, both men are nearly incinerated in the killer's final act.

For more than 60 years, Southern Californians entrusted the bodies of their loved ones to the Sconce family's Lamb Funeral Home. But the heirs to the fourth-generation funeral empire betrayed that trust with a series of gruesome crimes against the dead. Featured on ABC-TV's Nightline.

In keeping with the Akashic Noir series tradition, each story in Boston Noir is set in a different neighborhood of the city - the impressively diverse collection extends from Roxbury to Cambridge, from Southie to the Boston Harbor, and all stops in between. Lehane's own contribution - the longest story in the volume - is set in his beloved home neighborhood of Dorchester and showcases his phenomenal ability to grip the heart, soul, and throat of the reader.

From the introduction by David L. Ulin: "For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began."

Connected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature". More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered 21 children between them. More than a biography of the twins, this is a study of 19th-century American culture and society that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this audiobook from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly readable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe.

The Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, has been called "a night that changed the course of American culture". More than 70 million television viewers - the largest-ever audience for an entertainment show - watched the Beatles' performance that February 9, 1964. It was only the beginning. Had the Beatles been simply the most successful musical group of all time, their place in history would be secure. But they were much, much more. The Beatles changed popular culture forever.

A classic novel by John D. MacDonald with an exclusive introduction written and read by Dean Koontz. When Mike Rodenska, a former journalist still grieving the loss of his wife, pays his old war buddy Troy Jamison a long overdue visit in Florida, he’s shocked at what he finds. Behind the indulgent exterior of Troy’s lush beach life - the parties, the year-round suntans, the shapely women, the infectious devil-may-care attitude of Troy and his friends - Mike senses inevitable disaster. Troy surrendered his life to drink once before.

Six-time Hugo Award winner Bova likes to tell big stories in a small way. This approach both helps and hurts in this collection of stories, excerpts and outtakes from his "Grand Tour" novels (Saturn, etc.), which explore the colonization of the solar system. Despite his vast subject, Bova focuses tightly on the heroes and villains whose striving makes up his future history. While some characters are standards of the SF genre (megalomaniac capitalist, lone-wolf entrepreneur, love object caught between them), Bova imbues each with Homeric virtues and flaws.

Combining short fiction with speculative history, this entertaining book invites listeners to look at what didn't happen to gain a richer understanding of what did. What if Napoleon had become emperor of the United States? Could one faulty screw have altered America's atomic-bomb policy? If Lincoln had been assassinated during the Gettysburg Address, would the Confederate States have remained a separate country?

In a postapocalyptic America, Timothy Carpenter is a teacher in a farming community. When he discovers the farm foreman and other men are stealing food, he reports them to the authorities - an action that could cost him his life.

Calvin Bryson has hidden himself away from the world, losing himself in his work and his collection of rare and quirky books. He never meant to let so much time go by without visiting his aunt and uncle in the tiny town of New Cyprus, California. When he gets there, he'll discover the town's strange secrets and a mysterious group dedicated to preserving and protecting holy relics - a modern-day incarnation of the legendary Knights Templar.

Mass is humanoid, but genetically evolved to cope with greater pressures, stronger gravity, and heavier densities than those of an ancient planet he never knew, nor probably ever would. For Mass, Earth is millennia in the past. His companions are equally diverse, differently evolved, and most unsuitable to him and to one another. Each live on a separate plane they had grown on separate worlds. Yet survival might depend on communication.