Showing results by narrator "Cassandra Campbell" in All Categories

"Wendy Darling, I have your brothers. You'll never see them again. They're in Neverland now." Isobel "Bel" Emerson finds her life disrupted once again when Eamon Stone receives a disturbing phone call from an old friend's daughter. Her family is in danger, but she can't call the police. Eamon is the only person she can turn to, and he agrees to help under one condition: Bel comes with him. Working undercover with only Eamon for backup, Bel arrives at Wendy Darling's expansive estate where she learns that both of Wendy's younger brothers have been kidnapped.

As the war begins, Hanna Rombauer, a young German woman, is sent to live with her aunt and uncle after her mother’s death. Thrown into a life of luxury she never expected, Hanna soon finds herself unwillingly matched with an SS officer twenty years her senior. The independence that her mother lovingly fostered in her is considered highly inappropriate as the future wife of an up-and-coming officer and she is sent to a “bride school.” There, in a posh villa on the outskirts of town, Hanna is taught how to be a “proper” German wife.

In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, known now as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall.

Hannah longs for the days when she used to be free, but now, she is a Jewish prisoner at Theresienstadt, a model ghetto where the Nazis plan to make a propaganda film to convince the world that the Jewish people are living well in the camps. But Hannah will do anything to show the world the truth. Along with other young resistance members, they vow to disrupt the filming and derail the increasingly frequent deportations to death camps in the east.

From childhood, Katherine knows she is different and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she faces the most human of problems - who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? On her quest to conquer the Riemann Hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity and to secrets long buried during World War II.

1926: Charlotte Crowninshield was born into one of the finest Boston society families. Now she’s on the run from a brutal husband, desperate to disappear into the wilds of the Southwest. Billie MacTavish is the oldest of nine children born to Scottish immigrants in Nebraska. She quit school in the sixth grade to help with her mother’s washing and mending business, but even that isn’t enough to keep the family afloat. Desperate, both women join the ranks of the Harvey Girls, waitresses who serve in America’s first hospitality chain on the Santa Fe railroad.

Ghosts don't exist in our world of today. Life is too pragmatic, too consuming, too busy for past lives to linger on longer than their allotted time, or so Halcyon had believed, until she received a letter from a lawyer claiming that her mother, whom she had thought long dead, had actually been living in another part of the country since Halcyon's early childhood. She had only recently passed away, leaving Halcyon heir to an unexpected fortune and an estate on an isolated island in the middle of the Great Lakes.

The world fell, the invaders won, and demons now ruled what had once been man's domain. The great works of a once powerful civilization lie in ruins, its people having forgotten the wonders of their forefathers as they now live in the yoke. Not everyone is willing to go quietly into the endless night, however. Human pests still infest occasional parts of the conquered world. In one nearly uninhabitable part of that world, a very young such pest has come of age and, without understanding what it means, she walks in the shadow of destiny.

Gloria Burtzlaff feared for her life one day back in April of 1991 when her abusive husband, Larry, drunk and violent, slapped her, hit her, and began pelting her with glasses. After he tried to drown her in a tub, she got the family shotgun and confronted him in his underwear. “Larry, I’m going to kill you,” she declared. Defense lawyers would later claim he lifted a glass as if to say, “Have at it, sister.” Have at It, Sister is a true-crime tale about Gloria, a South Dakota woman who shot her abusive husband and was put on trial in a precedent-setting case.

The Spymaster of Baghdad is the gripping story of the top-secret Iraqi intelligence unit that infiltrated the Islamic State. More so than that of any foreign power, the information they gathered turned the tide against the insurgency, paving the way to the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.

In the two weeks CIA assassin Fortune Redding has been hiding in Sinful, Louisiana, she's been harassed, poisoned, and shot at...and that was the easy part. But now she's about to face her biggest challenge since setting foot in the tiny bayou town. When mayoral candidate Ted Williams is murdered, everyone is surprised. Ted was a blowhole and a Yankee, but those usually weren't good reasons to kill someone.

When she moved to Stoneham, city slicker Tricia Miles met nothing but friendly faces. And when she opened her mystery bookstore, she met friendly competition. But when she finds Doris Gleason dead in her own cookbook store, killed by a carving knife, the atmosphere seems more cutthroat than cordial. Someone wanted to get their hands on the rare cookbook that Doris had recently purchased-and the locals think that someone is Tricia.

Since her brother took his life after WWI, Ruth Emeraldine has had one goal: to help those suffering from mental illness. Then she falls in love with charismatic Robert Apter - a brilliant doctor championing a radical new treatment, the lobotomy. Ruth believes in it as a miracle treatment and in Robert as its genius pioneer. But as her husband spirals into deluded megalomania, Ruth can’t ignore her growing suspicions. Robert is operating on patients recklessly, often with horrific results. And a vulnerable young mother, Margaret Baxter, is poised to be his next victim.

Tayla Mancuso is a demon-slayer who hungers for sensual pleasure - but fears it will always be denied her. Until she lands in a hospital run by demons in disguise, and the head doctor, Eidolon, makes her body burn with unshakable desire. But to prove her ultimate loyalty to her peers, she must betray the surgeon who saved her life. Eidolon cannot resist this fiery, dangerous woman who fills him with both rage and passion.

The world was shocked by playwright Sarah Lingate’s death thirty years ago at an opulent, white-washed villa on the island of Capri. Absolved of the crime, the Lingate family maintains that what happened that night was a tragic accident. And every July they return to Capri to prove it’s true. This time, Helen Lingate - sole heir to the family fortune - has a plan. Tightly controlled by her father, she enlists the help of the family assistant, Lorna Silva, to free herself from her family’s stranglehold on her life.

You think you know her story. You've read the Brothers Grimm, you've watched the Disney cartoons, you cheered as these virtuous women lived happily ever after. But the lives of real princesses couldn't be more different. Sure, many were graceful and benevolent leaders - but just as many were ruthless in their quest for power, and all of them had skeletons rattling in their royal closets.

A chilling genre-busting memoir by a major American essayist. Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book, Jane: A Murder, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt, who had been murdered 35 years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969.

Asserting that you can live wholeheartedly after loss and that your feline friend would want nothing less for you, Soul Comfort for Cat Lovers is a compassionate handbook for your grief-healing journey.

Frances Metcalfe is struggling to stay afloat. A stay-at-home mom whose troubled son is her full-time job, she thought that the day he got accepted into the elite Forrester Academy would be the day she started living her life. Overweight, insecure, and lonely, she is desperate to fit into Forrester’s world. But after a disturbing incident at the school leads the other children and their families to ostracize the Metcalfes, she feels more alone than ever before. Until she meets Kate Randolph.

Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these tales explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller’s unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl’s loss of innocence at the hands of her employer’s son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter’s hospital room.