Showing results by narrator "Whitney Dykhouse" in All Categories

My lips are white. Sixteen-year-old Sep stares into the bathroom mirror. It’s not some weird lipstick (she never wears lipstick). Her lips are just - white. In a panic, she digs up an old lipstick and smears it on her colorless lips. But soon, more and more white spots begin to bloom, spreading their chalky tendrils across her olive brown skin. Does she have a disease? Is she turning into some kind of freak?

Mona’s demanding mother ruled their home until a car crash took her life and changed their family forever. Left to tend to a distant father and a needy younger brother, Mona finds her new role almost too much to bear. And when a new stepmother, troubled and depressed, adds yet another crack to the family portrait, Mona’s forced to shoulder an even greater share of the emotional burden.

Lawyer turned stay-at-home-mom Sarah Shaw is struggling to be present for her two young sons and law professor husband, three years after the death of their infant daughter. Then one day, walking in L.A., Sarah’s heart catches at the sight of a young homeless mother and toddler, and saving them becomes her secret, obsessive mission. When tragedy threatens them, Sarah discovers she is capable of deceptions and transgressions she never imagined. Her lies unleash a downward spiral that will threaten her marriage, family, and her sanity.

Faye Martin never expected her husband to abandon her and their three children...or that she'd have to struggle every day to make ends meet. So when her 4-year-old daughter is discovered through a YouTube video and offered a starring role on a television series, it seems like her prayers have been answered. But when the reality of their new life settles in, Faye realizes that fame and fortune don't come without a price.

In powerful, vivid verse, the master behind The Watch That Ends the Night recounts one of history’s most harrowing - and chilling - tales of survival.

Seventeen-year-old Chloe had a plan: work hard, get good grades, and attend a top-tier college. But after she collapses during cross-country practice and is told that she needs a new heart, all her careful preparations are laid to waste. Eight months after her transplant, everything is different. Stuck in summer school with the underachievers, all she wants to do now is grab her surfboard and hit the waves - which is strange, because she wasn’t interested in surfing before her transplant. (It doesn’t hurt that her instructor, Kai, is seriously good-looking.)

Twelve-year-old Sara and her brother, Hawk, are told that they are not to bother the man - The Mister - who just moved into the silo apartment on their farm. It doesn’t matter that they know nothing about him and they think they ought to know something. It doesn’t matter that he’s always riding that unicycle around. Mama told them no way, no how are they to bother The Mister unless they want to be in a mess of trouble.

A mother’s secrets threaten a daughter’s future.... Bethany Waterbury left Hollywood and the shadow of her mother's death to give herself a fresh start. Her main intention - to connect with the family she’d never really had the chance to know. Author Kent Black is enjoying his chart-topping success and living freely wherever his travels take him. But when he meets the illustrious Bethany Waterbury, his wanderlust subsides and the thought of a steady future begins to take over.

Residents had long forgotten the shocking events of the summer of 1972. Until someone moved into Old Lady Ketchel’s derelict home on 33 Tailings Way. It had been 25 years since Old Lady Ketchel’s reign of terror ended, and the Slaughter family and empire met its fiery end. Enough time for residents to purge the town of the Slaughter monarchy, and any vestige of the family’s past influence or existence. Or so they thought. Little did they know that Enoch Slaughter, Jr. had fathered a baby boy with a teenage stripper just before his demise.

Before Ratmansky was the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, the resident choreographer at American Ballet Theatre, the artist in residence at New York City Ballet, and generally, as The New Yorker has it, "the most sought-after man in ballet," he was just a boy from Kyiv, sneaking into the ballet at night, concocting his own juvenile adaptations of novels and stories, and dreaming up new possibilities for bodies in motion.

News of the murder sparks fear in the small community of Cherry Creek, and that fear only grows when the arsonist leaves a calling card belonging to a killer everyone believed was long dead. The Dragonfly mysteriously disappeared from the local asylum decades ago, stepping out of existence and into legend. The story draws the attention of Noelle McKenzie, a local author, and she digs into details from the past while Captain Derek Dempsey searches for evidence in the present.

Charlie is already feeling adrift when she relocates to an exclusive town in coastal New England with her mysteriously distant husband, Dev, and their young twins in tow. She hopes the move will recharge her stalled marriage, and she wants her kids to feel like they belong, even if she’s clearly a fish out of water herself. In a strange new world where summer is a verb and both the harbor and the partygoers are awash in a dizzying constellation of pinks and pastels, she’s never felt so confounded or alone. She’ll need more than a preppy handbook to find her way.

Somewhere in the Badlands, embedded deep in centuries-buried rock and sand, lies the skeleton of a massive dinosaur, larger than anything the late nineteenth century world has ever seen. Some legends call it the Black Beauty, with its bones as black as ebony, but to seventeen-year-old Samuel Bolt it's the "rex," the king dinosaur that could put him and his struggling, temperamental archaeologist father in the history books if they can just quarry it out.

Professional organizer Crystal Ward has nothing against publicity—as long as it's the truth. But a local reporter is putting Crys in the headlines for her role in solving crimes, not clearing out clutter. Now she's receiving requests for services that aren't on her website, and the spotlight is wearing on her family.

Everyone has a tiger inside them. . . It's the part of you that only comes out when you're about to be pushed off a cliff, poisoned in your family’s kitchen, framed for a crime, and anything else that awaits artist Cate Finley upon her homecoming. Back in the summer of 2000, having suffered enough under the iron fist of her older sister, Margaret, sixteen-year-old Cate raids the safe at her family's rural Arizona ranch and hops a bus for New York City, hoping to pursue an art career.

Alice Brewster is at a low point. After being let go from her job at the ritzy Grant Hotel, she's taken to hiding out at a dingy Manhattan pub just so that she won't have to tell anyone the shameful truth. So when blonde, beautiful Taylor waltzes in one sunny afternoon, Alice is ready for the distraction of an unpredictable new friend. As Alice and Taylor get closer, Alice confesses the real reason she lost her job—a hotel guest, the wealthy real estate mogul Weston Chambers, assaulted her. But while Alice wants sympathy, Taylor's rage is white hot. We could kill him, she says.

Curtis Keller is a lucky man. He has the love and support of a family like no other. But he's never fallen in love with a woman. He likes to play the field, have a good time, and enjoyed friends with benefits. But when wild child Simone Pierpont comes into his life for the first time he considers settling down—until she abandons him. Simone Pierpont fell in love. She hadn't meant to, but her best friend's brother-in-law had treated her, the Parisian oil heiress, with more compassion than she'd ever known. What was she to do? So she left him stranded on a yacht in the French Rivera.

Aja narrowly escaped dying, being incarcerated as a traitor, and suffering a catastrophic rift in her relationship with Marsha. All just to have the Black Widow avoid capture, pivot, and sell her trafficking operation to some unknown U.S. billionaire. Complicating matters, three U.S. Senators who tried to eliminate SHIELD through budget cuts are missing. Fueling rumors that they may somehow be involved in the billionaire’s nefarious operation. And then there’s the not-so-little matter of Aja’s former paramour joining the team to work on the SPIDA project.

John Forrester is a simple man whose never needed more than his work, his truck, and a small apartment with his flat screen TV. After a bad breakup with his ex-wife John swore he’d never get married again and has done his best to keep to himself. But one woman always creeps into his mind—Arianna Keller. Arianna Keller had an amazing career, center stage on Broadway. However, her run in New York is over and circumstances have forced her back home to Nashville, Tennessee.

Aja and her SHIELD colleagues successfully rescued 50 trafficked children in their last mission. But it was not without significant losses or loose ends. So, while Cybersecurity Specialists try to restore SHIELD’s hacked network, Aja and Marsha take some well-deserved time off to recover and recharge. Unfortunately, criminals who prey on children never take a vacation, and while on hiatus, they inadvertently discover a new threat in a most unusual setting.