Showing results by narrator "Eric Conger" in All Categories

A few years back, Virgil investigated the corrupt - and, as it turned out, homicidal - local school board in Trippton, Minnesota. Now the town's back in view with more alarming news: a woman's been found frozen in ice. There's a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of 20 years ago, and so Virgil begins to dig into 20 years' worth of bad blood.

"Silos" are organizations' vertical structures—but the word has become synonymous with barriers to workplace effectiveness and connotes deep political infighting. Silos devastate organizations, kill productivity, push good people out the door, and jeopardize the achievement of corporate goals. They cause stress, exasperation, and disappointment by forcing employees to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with people who should be teammates.

Canadian billionaire Steven Edmond's grandson was an aid volunteer in the former Yugoslavia. After he was murdered, Edmond sought revenge by hiring an ex-Vietnam special forces agent to hunt the killer down: Cal Dexter, ex-Vietnam Special Forces, the one man who could bring the killer to justice. But what starts as a personal, domestic tragedy soon explodes into a terrifying drama on the centre stage of world terrorism.

On a late autumn Sunday in Southern Minnesota, a farmer is bludgeoned around the head by a teenager wielding a bat. Following the teenager’s apparent suicide, Sheriff Lee Coakley is worried that she is up against a far more complicated case than she first thought, and calls in investigator Virgil Flowers. It doesn't take long for Flowers to uncover a series of crimes so monstrous that the small town can never be the same again.

The president of the United States has terminal cancer. Chief of Staff Eli James, his faithful consigliere and best friend, is one of the few who know. But just as the president’s condition mysteriously improves, Eli’s hit with another blow: his daughter has cancer too. Hell-bent on helping her, Eli turns to Big Pharma’s top lobbyist for advice, but their encounter yields more questions than answers. As he races along a twisted trail to the truth, he stumbles upon a devastating cover-up worth billions of dollars—and millions of lives.

In Southeast Minnesota, a school board meeting is coming to an end. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed due to personnel issues. Issues is correct. The proposal up for a vote is whether to authorise the killing of a local reporter. Meanwhile, Virgil Flowers is helping out a friend by looking into a dognapping when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A murdered body has been found, and the victim is a local reporter....

Attorney Calvin Dexter hangs his shingle in a quiet New Jersey town, has a reasonably successful practice, and takes the hills strong while triathlon training. But Dexter is no ordinary lawyer. On Sundays, he reads the paper and shuffles around his dark, empty house, trying to forget about a life he has lost forever... until, of course, Dexter reads something in the papers that sends him the necessary signal. Until one of the handful who know of Dexter’s other life tries to contact him.

How many business books can stand a 100-year test of time? This little volume has done just that. It's been called "The best marketing book you've never read". And while it continues to slip under the radar of many, thousands of ambitious business people regard this classic tale as one of the most important business lessons they've ever learned.

The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it. The first bomb goes off on the top floor of PyeMart's headquarters. The second one explodes at the construction site itself. Who's behind the bombs, and how far will they go? It's Virgil Flowers's job to find out... before more people get killed.

Everyone wants to be an influencer. We all want to learn how to help ourselves and others change behavior. And yet, in spite of the fact that we routinely attempt to do everything from lose weight to improve quality at work, few of us have more than one or two ideas about how to exert influence. For the first time, Influencer brings together the breakthrough strategies of contemporary influence masters.

Applying cutting-edge research in the field of positive psychology - the scientific principles taught in his wildly popular course at Harvard University - Ben-Shahar takes us off the impossible pursuit of perfection and directs us to the way to happiness, richness, and true fulfillment. He shows us the freedom derived from not trying to do it all right all the time and the real lessons that failure and painful emotions can teach us.

Hell comes to Southern California every October. It rides in on searing Santa Ana winds that blast at near hurricane force, igniting voracious wildfires. Master thief Danny Cole longs for the flames. A tsunami of fire is exactly what he needs to pull off a daring crime and avenge a fallen friend. As the most devastating firestorms in Los Angeles’ history scorch the hills of Malibu, relentless arson investigator Walter Sharpe and his wild card of a new partner, Andrew Walker, a former US marshal, suspect that someone set the massive blazes intentionally, a terrifying means to an unknown end.

The success of Starbucks is one of the most remarkable business stories in decades. Since 1987, the coffee merchant has grown from a single retail store on Seattle's waterfront to a company with more than 1,000 stores nationwide and a new one opening somewhere every business day. According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks "has changed everything...from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street."

At the local state university, two feuding departments have faced off on the battleground of PC culture. Each carries their views to extremes that may seem absurd, but highly educated people of sound mind and good intentions can reasonably disagree, right? Then someone winds up dead, and Virgil Flowers is brought in to investigate...and he soon comes to realise he's dealing with people who, on this one particular issue, are functionally crazy.

The first storm comes from, of all places, the Minnesota zoo. Two large and very rare Amur tigers have vanished from their cage, and authorities are worried that they’ve been stolen for their body parts. Traditional Chinese medicine prizes those parts for home remedies, and people will do extreme things to get what they need. Some of them are a great deal more extreme than others - as Virgil is about to find out. Forget a storm...this one’s a tornado.

Pinion, Minnesota: a huge city of all of 700 folks who define the phrase ‘small town’. Nothing has ever happened in Pinion, and nothing ever will...until the mayor of sorts comes up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map. He’s heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of curious people and making the townsfolk rich overnight. Why not stage a prank in Pinion and do the same? What could go wrong? And then a dead body shows up.

After dozens of Hollywood apartment buildings erupt in flames during a single night of terror, arson investigators Walter Sharpe and Andrew Walker are assigned to catch the serial torcher and end his spree. But then a catastrophic fire destroys a major freeway, crippling the city and forcing Sharpe and Walker to take on another massive case. Desperate for help, they know exactly who to call: homicide detectives Eve Ronin and Duncan Pavone. Together the four detectives must quickly figure out whether the freeway disaster was a tragic accident…or the work of a mastermind with a horrific plan.

In Israel, a man clutching a backpack searches desperately for a boat. In Minnesota, Virgil Flowers gets a message from Lucas Davenport: You're about to get a visitor. It's an Israeli cop, and she's tailing a man who's smuggled out an extraordinary relic - a copper scroll revealing startling details about the man known as King Solomon. Bad men are chasing the relic, and they don't care who's in the way or what they have to do to get it…

Bonnie and Clyde, they thought. And what's-his-name, the sidekick. Three teenagers with dead-end lives, and chips on their shoulders, and guns. As their crime spree cuts a swathe through Minnesota, captured on the killers' cell phones, and sent to a local television station, Investigator Virgil Flowers joins the growing army of cops trying to catch them. But even he doesn't realise what's about to happen next.

The Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command from July 2000 through July 2003, General Tommy Franks made history leading American and Coalition forces to victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, the decisive battles that launched the war on terrorism.