Showing results by narrator "Christina Delaine" in All Categories

Needlepointers Angie and Sarah are helping with set design for the movie being shot in their little New England hometown - but as the lighthouse and the wharves bustle with activity, a real-life drama is about to unfold. The director, Marv Mason, has been harassing the pretty young female lead, and the two exchanged heated words at a lobster bake. Now someone's lowered the boom on him....

Steadfast in fighting crime, but operating outside the police force - and sometimes even the law - is the private detective. Driven by his own moral code, he is a shadowy figure in a trench coat standing on a street corner, his face most likely obscured by a tilted fedora, a lit cigarette dangling from his hand. The hard-boiled detective is known by his dark past, private pain, and powers of deduction. He only asks questions - never answers them. In his stories he is both the main character and the narrator.

It begins as Henya, wife of Rabbi Mendel Kolopsky, considers an unexpected pregnancy and the hardships ahead for the children she already has. Soon after the child is born, Cossacks ransack the Kolopskys' home, severely beating Mendel. In the aftermath, he tells Henya that, contrary to his brother belief that socialism is their ticket to escaping the region's brutal anti-Semitic pogroms, he still believes America holds the answer. Henya, meanwhile, understands that any future will be perilous: she now knows their baby daughter, who has slept through this night of melee, is surely deaf.

 Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: Climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects. 

At the deteriorating Pheasant Run, the occupants keep their secrets and sadnesses locked tight behind closed apartment doors. Kind Leo Umberti, formerly an insurance agent, now quietly spends his days painting abstract landscapes and mourning a long-ago loss. Down the hall, retired professor Rydell Clovis tries desperately to stay fit enough to restart a career in academia. Cassie McMackin, on the same floor, has seemingly lost everything - her husband and only child dead within months of each other - leaving her loosely tethered to this world.

When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife Meghan find their daughter Maisie shaken and bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever handled, and a letter laying out impossible demands regarding its future.

Sheila's life is built of little thievings. Adrift in her mid-30s, she sleeps in fragments, ditches her temp jobs, eavesdrops on her neighbor's Skype calls, and keeps a stolen letter in her nightstand, penned by a UPS driver she barely knows. Her mother is stifling and her father is a bad memory. Her only friends are her mysterious, slovenly neighbor Vinnie and his daughter Torrey, a quirky 12-year-old coping with a recent tragedy. When her grandmother Rosamond dies, Sheila inherits a box of secret love letters from Harold C. Carr - a man who is not her grandfather.

Sarah Price wants a career in politics. But she has a secret past that won't stay past, threatening her job on a San Diego congressman's reelection campaign. Casey Cheng wants a story. An ambitious local television reporter, Casey needs to get her career back on track after being seriously injured in a mass shooting. When she investigates the man who nearly killed her, she finds a connection to a group of online harassers called #TrueMen - and realizes her shooter may not be the only killer they have inspired.

When agoraphobic genius Salem Wiley lands her dream job as an FBI cryptanalyst, she vows never to return to the witch hunt underworld, where ancient secrets encrypted by hunted women have the power to rewrite history. Her resolve disappears when sweet Mercy Mayfair, the child she is pledged to protect, is kidnapped. As the clock ticks, Salem must face the terrible truth that there is only one way to free Mercy: crack the unbreakable code of Stonehenge. 

In this widely anticipated and deeply researched book, Dr. Donohue, a victim of workplace stress herself, lays out a seven-step solution to give you the tools you need to make communication a cure for workplace stress, not a cause - even (especially) when you're working with a generationally diverse team.  

In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead 140 years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance.  

A young woman arrives at the grand ancestral home of her husband’s family, hoping to fortify her cracking marriage. But what she finds is not what she expected: tragedy haunts the hallways, whispering of heartache and a past she never knew existed. Inspired by the true titans of the steel-boom era, Bethlehem is a story of temptation and regret, a story of secrets and the cost of keeping them, a story of forgiveness. It is the story of two complex women - thrown together in the name of family - who, in coming to understand each other, come finally to understand themselves.

Like many Americans in the middle of the 21st century, aspiring actress Kira Clark is in debt. She financed her drama education with loans secured by a “lifetime services contract”. If she defaults, her creditors will control every aspect of her life. Behind on her payments and facing foreclosure, Kira reluctantly accepts a large signing bonus to become a corporate gunfighter for TKC Insurance. After a year of training, she will take her place on the dueling fields that have become the final, lethal stop in the American legal system.

The Underdogs tells the story of Karen Shirk, felled at age 24 by a neuromuscular disease and facing life as a ventilator-dependent, immobile patient, who was turned down by every service dog agency in the country because she was "too disabled". Her nurse encouraged her to tone down the suicidal thoughts, find a puppy, and raise her own service dog. Karen did this, and Ben, a German shepherd, dragged her back into life.

LAPD detective Cassandra Lee is known for her single-mindedness, and right now she's got only one goal: track down the Bonebreaker, the man who murdered her father. But her quest for justice is derailed when LA comes under attack. The Aztec Empire, a Central American group determined to take back the US territories that their Spanish ancestors once controlled, has led a mutant army into California.

Speed: the most demonized - and misunderstood - drug in the land. Deprived of the ingrained romantic mysticism of the opiate or the cosmopolitan chic of cocaine or the mundane tolerance of marijuana, there is no sympathy for this devil. Yet speed - crystal meth, amphetamines, Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Adderall; crank, spizz, chickenscratch, oblivious marching powder, the go-fast - is the most American of drugs: twice the productivity at half the cost, and equal opportunity for all.

This anthology, with stories set in different prisons across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature. Featuring brand-new stories by: Christopher M. Stephen, Sin Soracco, Scott Gutches, Eric Boyd, Ali F. Sareini, Stephen Geez, B.M. Dolarman, Zeke Caligiuri, Marco Verdoni, Kenneth R. Brydon, Linda Michelle Marquardt, Andre White, Timothy Pauley, Bryan K. Palmer, and William Van Poyck.

SFX: Ker-flush "That's the sound of my career going down the toilet. Three months ago, I was the freelance reporter to call for full-color images of an international crisis. Now? I'm stationed at the far edge of the Chicago flyover as a disappointing mother-sub to my eight-year-old niece and the babysitter for a newsroom College Boy. One photo of the lifeless man was all I needed to see - there's more to this story than anyone wants to admit."

Hope Solo is the face of the modern female athlete. She is fearless, outspoken, and the best in the world at what she does: protecting the goal of the U.S. women's soccer team. Her outsized talent has led her to the pinnacle of her sport - the Olympics and the World Cup - and made her into an international celebrity who is just as likely to appear on ABC's Dancing with the Stars as she is on the covers of Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, and Vogue.

Little Tug may not be very tall or very fast, but when the big ships in the harbor need help, they know they can count on him to be there with a push, a pull, and a ride to safety. But what happens when Little Tug gets tired?