Showing results by narrator "Elisabeth Rodgers" in All Categories

Ask yourself this: If the dead rise tomorrow, are you ready? Do you have a plan? The dead rose, and the living quickly realized that Hollywood-style tactics were the quickest way to find yourself one of the walking dead. Kasey, a strong-willed loner from West Virginia, and Ben, a college student from Pennsylvania, have shared an unlikely friendship over the years. And their bond is stretched to its limits when society collapses under a tide of zombies. But Kasey has something she likes to call The Zombie Plan.

Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan knows what it’s like to be haunted by the past. For years after her daughter, Bonnie, was stolen from her, she fought for closure. When her mother, Sandra, asks Eve to find a missing friend named Beth Avery, she wants to help but is sure that Sandra is hiding something. The fact that she adamantly refuses to go to the police reinforces Eve’s suspicions that something is very wrong. Eve learns that Beth has been locked away in a mental hospital for years....

Explores works that dazzle the eye and excite the imagination. The art and science objects were selected for their maximum "wow" factor. Some are big, some are not so big, but all of them are eye-filling feasts of form, pattern, color, line and texture. This tour is particularly recommended for family groups with children.

Paris Metro is the gripping story of an American journalist compelled to reexamine her convictions as terrorism threatens to engulf her family. It's 2015, and Kit is living in Paris, estranged from her Iraqi diplomat husband and raising their teenage son, Ahmed. When Charlie Hebdo is attacked and a cartoonist friend of hers is killed, and then terrorists storm the Bataclan, Kit's Parisian world is shattered. As she is drawn back into reporting, she begins to suspect that Ahmed may be running with the terrorists.

Claire Rawlings, mother of two and medical resident, will not let the troubling signs of an allergic reaction prevent her from making it in for rounds. But when Claire's symptoms overpower her while she's driving into work, her two children in tow, she must pull over. Moments later, she wakes up on the floor of a gas station bathroom - her car and her precious girls have vanished. The police have no leads, and the weight of guilt presses down on Claire as each hour passes with no trace of her girls.

This remarkable novel immerses us in the lives of two women in a small upstate New York town: Frances Thorn, who waits tables, despite her privileged background, and raises her twin daughters without even a memory of their father; and Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer. At the heart of the two women’s friendship is a Hans Christian Andersen tale about a prideful girl (the subject of Helle’s final opera) who is damned for using a precarious loaf of bread, intended as a gift for her parents, as a stepping stone.  

Hell - part mystery, part domestic meditation, part horror story - is a brilliantly eerie novel in which three households coexist in a single restless vision: a dollhouse; a dysfunctional family in 1950s Philadelphia; and the cottage home of Edwina Moss, a 19th-century expert on domestic management. While the inhabitants of the dollhouse are powerless to shape their destiny, the four members of the Philadelphia family dedicate themselves to mutual vigilance. Edwina Moss concedes domestic control to the imagination and, finally, to the spirit of Antonin Careme.

It is the turn of this century. Two couples - businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife, Carole Ridingham; his partner, Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth Farr - have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now.

Labrador is the story of two unforgettable sisters. Willie, the eldest, is willful, beautiful, and wayward; to Kitty, the youngest, she is the radiant center around which everything revolves. Kitty, too, is willful, but in the brooding manner of the inveterate loner. She is the one who is visited by an angel, Rogni, who reshapes her beliefs by telling her eerie, enigmatic fables that defy time and place, parables about bears, martyrs, and imprisoned daughters that seem to contain warnings about betrayals and violence to come.

With their deadly plants, razor-sharp shears, shady corners, and ready-made burial sites, gardens make an ideal scene for the perfect murder. But the outsize influence that gardens and gardening have had on the mystery genre has been underappreciated. Now, Marta McDowell, a writer and gardener with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, illuminates the many ways in which our greatest mystery writers, from Edgar Allen Poe to authors on today’s bestseller lists, have found inspiration in the sinister side of gardens.

Oh, what fun it is to die! When Austin’s parents drag him and his little sister Fiona to a remote cottage for Christmas, he’s less than thrilled about the forced bonding exercise. But after learning that their holiday getaway was the site of a horrific crime, this family on the rocks will have to fight for their lives against a legendary killer because Candy Cain is slashing through the snow with a very long naughty list.

The fascinating history of American bookishness as told through the sale of Charles Lamb’s library in 1848.

An unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum’s austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft.

Laura, a student from a modest background, escapes her small town to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield fellowship to study at Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her coursework, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation. Years later, back in the United States with a PhD and dissertation on Henry James, she loses her job as an adjunct and reconnects with the Weatherfield Foundation. Commissioned to write a history for its centennial, she becomes obsessed by the Gilded Age origins of the Weatherfield fortune.

Grace Smith has never been one to conform to society’s expectations. She flees small-town Indiana to seek adventure—and finds more than she bargained for when she’s hired by an eccentric millionaire to learn codebreaking. Soon she’s using those skills to help head the government’s fledgling cryptanalysis unit.

Edith Hamilton didn’t publish her first book until she was 62. But over the next three decades this former headmistress would become the twentieth century’s most famous interpreter of the classical world. Today, Hamilton’s Mythology (1942) remains the standard version of ancient tales. During the Cold War, her influence even extended to politics, as she argued that postwar America could learn from the fate of Athens after its victory in the Persian Wars. Victoria Houseman tells the fascinating life story of a remarkable classicist whose ideas were shaped by—and aspired to shape—her times.

Conn Whitman’s long-distance swims keep him centered and sane—until a terrifying underwater encounter in a woodland lake plunges him into the middle of a murder investigation. Once a superstar investigative reporter, disgraced by misconduct, Conn returned to his Vermont hometown to put his life back together. Now, after ten years on the job, he knows his community like nobody else. So, when he kicks a submerged object while swimming—something with the density and resilience of human flesh—he immediately wonders if it’s connected to an unsolved murder in a nearby town.

It’s been said that at the core of every legend lies a seed of truth. For four American tourists vacationing in Greece, this is a lesson learned the hard way. When the group sets out to find a subterranean pool that’s rumored to be the one by which the demi-god Narcissus once wasted away in self-obsession, what started as a fun excursion quickly escalates into a full-blown nightmare.