Showing results by narrator "Gregory Smith" in All Categories

How do you rebuild a broken life? Where do you begin? These were the questions Gregory Smith asked himself after stumbling out of a NSW rainforest in 2000, close to death after living as a hermit in the wild. Determined to turn a wretched life into one worth living, Gregory stripped himself bare emotionally, psychologically and spiritually to undertake an extraordinary personal reconstruction. Today, with a PhD to his name and a loving family by his side, Gregory has overcome a life of homelessness and despair to become one of society's great teachers.

Jonathan Thomas Meriweather is a typical college student, interested in girls, music, and an occasional taste of reefer. But when a journey through an interdimensional portal lands him in a world of talking animals and ominous sorcery, he finds he is on a very different trip indeed. Here, when he plays a strange instrument called a duar, peculiar things happen: powerful magic that may be the only way to stop a dark force that threatens his new world — and his old one.

Jon-Tom just wanted to go home. Trapped in a world where animals speak and magic is real, the American college student yearned for an ordinary dorm-room life. But here his music has magical power — even if he can’t control it — which may be able to save the world from the army of the Plated Folk, whose sinister queen plans on killing and eating every warm-blooded mammal she can get her pincers on and taking over their lands.

Jon-Tom and his friends have seen better days. After his motley crew moved heaven and Earth to save civilization at the battle of Jo-Troom Gate, his merry band went its separate ways. Mudge, the foul-mouthed otter, eagerly returned to thieving, drinking, and whoring, while Talea, the girl of Jon-Tom’s dreams, embarked on her own adventures, leaving him to study magic with Clothahump, the irascible wizard whose inept spell trapped him in this weird otherworld in the first place.

Adventuress Countess Alessandra Zorzi has a new vocation: reacquiring the occult artifacts she stole to put into the safer hands of Miskatonic University. With her new apprentice, Pepper Kelly, Zorzi tracks the infamous Zanthu Tablets to Paris. But the city is rife with spies and the countess has many enemies. When Pepper is kidnapped, it becomes clear that someone is out for revenge. Zorzi must rescue her apprentice, find the tablets, and prevent an old enemy from summoning an army of vengeful ghouls from the depths of the catacombs. Stealing relics is a lot harder the second time around.

Far to the south of the peaceful Bellwoods, where Jon-Tom the spellsinger continues trying to master the art of turning music into magic, a sinister force has awakened: a magician with great ambition and unheard-of power. He summons lightning to do his bidding, commands an army of faceless flying demons, and claims to come from another world — one Jon-Tom suspects might be his own. If he can somehow reason with the unknown magician, perhaps they can combine their talents and find a way to go home together.

Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, Lori Schiller's memoir is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage. At 17, Lori Schiller was the perfect child - the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia.

Jon-Tom has been trapped in a strange land of talking owls and wizarding turtles for a year now, his sole consolation that in this universe his musical abilities have inadvertently made him something of a sorcerer. But when an encounter with some burglars leads to him snapping the magical duar that channels his power, he finds himself an ordinary human again — on a quest to repair his instrument with nothing but his staff and his semi-faithful, ever-complaining otter sidekick to defend him.

Exiled from the Smoky Mountains for gunning down a man in self-defense, Breck Wallace tries to make a new home in St. Louis, even tries his hand at romance, but some men are too wild to settle down. Breck is soon back on the trail, where a vicious gang of trappers, after his goods, picks up his scent and begins to dog his every step, until Breck’s only choice is to bed down for the winter with a tribe of friendly Indians. In the frigid, brutal cold of a Rocky Mountain winter, he hopes to find peace...but death is not done with Breck Wallace.

It’s an ordinary day in the Bellwoods, save for the fact that Jon-Tom the spellsinger has awoken as a six-foot blue crab. He soon reverts to normal — as normal as a college student trapped in a world of magic and talking animals can be, anyway — but the bizarre changes keep happening, affecting not just him but the whole of this strange world. His wizardly mentor suspects these are the effects of the perambulator, a cosmic being whose presence distorts reality.

The glaciers of the Sierra Nevada are melting, destroying the habitat of the mastodons, creating the rich land that will become California. The coastal people struggle to understand the changing world around them: Their seer Sunchaser has lost his way to the Spirit World and mammoths continue to disappear. When a beautiful woman arrives, fleeing from her abusive husband, the people know what they must do - for if the Spirits are already taking the animals away, what will happen if they shelter a stranger?

Enticed by the richest poker tournament the West has ever seen, a horde of cheating and ruthless of card players is gathering at Tombstone, Arizona. Lawman John Slaughter already has his hands full when a local Romeo takes off with a rancher’s daughter and draws the ire of her father and a blood-thirsty posse. Back in town, a murder shatters the poker tournament, where a beautiful Englishwoman is the prime suspect.

Jon-Tom and Mudge are bored. Their adventuring days long behind them, the spellsinger and his once-thieving otter sidekick have settled into a life of tepid domesticity, and they are sick of it. They hunger for an old-fashioned adventure, but there are no more great evils to combat. And so they decide to follow the music. Literally.

Vampires don't exist, do they? That is a question Private Detective Tony Mandolin finds himself pondering as the evidence piles up in a case involving a string of dead redheads and the usual dose of weirdness San Francisco has to offer. To complicate things, Mandolin has to deal with the perception that he has become the latest golden boy of the fog city's crime boss. Then there's his cross-dressing friend Frankie.... Just another day in San Francisco.

It’s been a year since a serial killer put my small town on the map. A year of chasing my tail in an investigation of dead ends and false leads while the families wait for justice. When the killer strikes again, I’m drawn into a desperate race against time to stop him once and for all.

Vampires don't exist, do they? That is a question Private Detective Tony Mandolin finds himself pondering as the evidence piles up in a case involving a string of dead redheads and the usual dose of weirdness San Francisco has to offer. To complicate things, Mandolin has to deal with the perception that he has become the latest golden boy of the fog city's crime boss. Then there's his cross-dressing friend Frankie...just another day in San Francisco.

In Othir, he was at the top of the food chain — an assassin beyond compare, a dark shadow in the night. But Caim left that life behind when he helped an empress claim her throne. And now his past has come calling again. Searching for the truth behind the murder and disappearance of his parents, Caim discovers a land in thrall to the Shadow. Haunted by temptations from the Other Side, he becomes mired in a war he does not want to fight.

Across the border is another wanderer and another tribe. Preacher’s old enemy, Willie Deaver, plies a band of Indians with the deadliest combination possible: whisky, guns, and bullets — then directs them to try out their killing tools on the Assiniboine. The raid reaps a harvest of devastating death, bloodshed, and helpless captives. Deaver is all the more delighted when he learns Preacher is among the fallen.

Once he was a young, happily married businessman. Then he lost his wife to human madness and that young man was gone, replaced by the Loner, the wandering son of legendary gunfighter Frank Morgan and the current occupant of a cell in Hell Gate prison. The Loner’s crime? He looked too much like an outlaw who escaped from this very prison. So the Kid teams up with a fellow inmate with an escape plan, vowing to hunt down a look-alike killer on the loose.

He was one of Russia's most infamous rulers, and he alone held the key to a legendary Byzantine collection of books, given to him in the dowry of Princess Sophia of Constantinople. Ivan Vasilyevich - otherwise known as Ivan the Terrible - owned a library filled with rare and priceless tomes that men would kill for. Would die for. But the czar carried the knowledge of its whereabouts to his grave. And it falls to archaeologist Annja Creed, almost 500 years later, to discover the secrets of the Library of Gold.