Showing results by narrator "John Lee" in All Categories

There is an ancient evil lurking in the mountains of California. One peak over from Friendly, California, there is another, darker place. In that place there are two churches. Displaced from a time and place far distant, an ancient carving watches from an alcove above the door of a nearly forgotten church. When the evil it embodies reaches out and snags the soul of Silas Greene, roots creep down into the mountain and out into everything they touch. There is another church on the mountain. It is made of stone, carved into the stone of the mountain, and also all but forgotten.

On November 1, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko sipped tea in London's Millennium Hotel. Hours later, the Russian émigré and former intelligence officer, who was sharply critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin, fell ill and within days was rushed to the hospital. Fatally poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope slipped into his drink, Litvinenko issued a dramatic deathbed statement accusing Putin himself of engineering his murder.

THE BLOOD REMEMBERS... Malcolm Harker is heir to the family fortune - and he is about to discover the family curse. Sunlight burns his eyes, consecrated wine sears his throat, and dark memories fill his dreams. The answer rests in his name, his ancient blood, and a terrifying legend that is much, much more than legend. It is fact. THE BLOOD CALLS... Malcolm Harker is an educated man. To unmask the lie that his family has accepted as truth, Harker must find the crypt of Vlad of Wallachia, the man once known as the Impaler.

Of One Blood is a poignant and disturbing play about the infamous murder of three civil rights workers - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - in Mississippi in 1964. The broadcast includes an interview with Rita Bender, Michael Schwerner's wife in 1964.

Wounded in love, tormented by his past, Shakespeare's most complex villain is brought magnificently to life in this tale of two adversaries - one an accused killer; the other, one of the most powerful men in Venice. Having escaped from Cyprus, accused of the murders of the governor, known as the Moor, and his lovely young wife, Iago is now locked in battle with Annibale Malipiero, known as Il Terribile, the chief inquisitor of Italy's greatest city. Malipiero is repelled by the more brutal tasks of the interrogante. His obsession is with the very nature of evil.

This book comprises some of the author's earliest and most memorable stories. Often touted as a successor to Lovecraft, and compared to Thomas Ligotti, Osier's work is dark, surreal, and guaranteed to leave you with images that will haunt you long after you finish listening. From the streets of Chicago to the pages of a lost volume of boyhood reading matter, from the aquarium in the front room to the frigid, drifting snow, get ready for one of the darkest literary rides of your life.

He is England's greatest knight, the man who saved the life of Alfred the Great and an entire kingdom from a Viking invasion. But when he is called back into service to combat a plague of monstrous beasts known as abominations, he meets a fate worse than death and is condemned to a life of anguish, solitude, and remorse. She is a fierce young warrior, raised among an elite order of knights. Driven by a dark secret from her past, she defies her controlling father and sets out on a dangerous quest.

At first distant glance, the spherical object appeared nothing more innocuous than a shooting star. Yet, upon further observation, there was something unsettling about its descent. This was no natural free-fall. The year is 1953, and the citizens of the American rural town of Kingshire Falls are busy preparing for its centenary.

When 60-something musician pals Roy and George attend the funeral of an old bandmate, they realise that since they stopped performing, they've got stuck in a rut. Retirement's all well and good, but they seem to spend most of their time in front of the TV, or propping up the bar at the Hen & Pewter. Believing that jazz players should keep swinging while they've still got rhythm, the duo decide it's time to recreate the good old days, and start a new band. 

In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany, Immanuel Birnbaum, a German-Jewish journalist based in Warsaw, is forbidden from writing for newspapers in his homeland. Six years later, just months before the German invasion of Poland that ignites World War II, Immanuel escapes to Sweden with his wife and two young sons.

After recently discovering he’s a paladin and that the world of the supernatural is real, Steve Firestone, a divorced late-night radio host, has that first-day-at-school feeling. Only this is no Hogwarts. Being 40, out of shape, and with a mouth that gets him into trouble, Steve must find a way to meet his tutor’s exhausting demands and learn to channel divine power to live up to his ancestry. That’s if he wishes to stay at the academy and with his party of new friends, including Nymantha, the fearsome wizard to whose flame Steve is a moth.

Spaceman Spiritus is a prisoner, found guilty of the enduring crime of solitude, sentenced to labor far underground somewhere in a distant galaxy. Peel is a rancher, a man tracing a lifetime of memories for those he loved and for the natural world around him. He’s about to plummet back to Earth with an angel by his side. And as for Martha and Pup, well...they’re the dogs charged with saving us all. Told in a braid of voices, Spaceman Spiritus weaves the trajectory of these characters into a thrilling, provocative, and ultimately, heart-wrenching allegory.

In 1678, a handful of perjurers claimed that the Catholics of England planned to assassinate the king. Men like the "Reverend Doctor" Titus Oates and "Captain" William Bedloe parlayed their fantastical tales of Irish ruffians, medical poisoners, and silver bullets into public adulation and government pensions. The result was the trial and execution of over a dozen innocent Catholics, and the imprisonment of many more, some of whom died in custody. Victor Stater examines the Popish Plot in full, arguing that it had a profound and lasting significance on British politics. 

Assembled and edited by Julian Hawthorne and first published in 1907, the Old Time English volume of The Lock and Key Library features ten classic mysteries and ghost stories by Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas de Quincey, Charles Robert Maturin, Laurence Sterne, and William Makepeace Thackeray. This volume of The Lock and Key Library is sure to haunt and charm fans of ghost and detective mysteries alike.

Friends first and love forever. The time is long overdue for men to mature—to treat women with love, respect, dignity, and cherish them inside and out. He not only must find the right woman to spend his life with, but also must develop and maintain a healthy relationship with her. In order to do so, he must find the courage within himself to participate in a love so intimate that he must risk his very soul—and hers as well.

In 1951, Ervin Shane boarded a Greyhound headed to wherever the winter sun was warmer. A thousand miles later, a layover in a West Texas bus station and a chance browsing of the want-ads led him to curtail his journey and take up as the custodian of The Sunshine Motel - a neon-bathed oasis situated halfway between somewhere and somewhere else, offering wayfarers, “…clean sheets, a warm blanket and a soft pillow for those lost souls bound for nowhere in particular.”

After the events of his last quest, the Arkane Academy for the Gifted and Strange have concluded that Steve Firestone's patron is the source of a great curse that has plagued his family for centuries.

Meet Steve Firestone, late-night radio host and paladin. Since he joined the Arkane Academy for the Gifted and Strange, he's learned our world is full of supernatural monsters ripped from the pages of Dungeons & Dragons—and most of them want to eat or kill us. That's where Steve and his new friends come in. That is, if Steve can learn to channel the divine power of his mysterious patron. Depending on whom he talks to, it's either a Cthulhu-like space-squid or a fallen paladin residing somewhere in Hell. Neither seems like an ideal source.

Actuary Problem Dog* is a parody Twitter account that has been a reliable source of geeky, self-deprecating actuarial humor for over 10 years.

From the author of Confessions of an Actuarial Tutor comes this collection of more than 670 jokes that only actuaries will find funny (though probably only because they have such low standards for humor). With jokes covering actuaries and their (lack of) personality and social life, along with jokes on pensions, insurance, finance, mortality, statistics, Excel, and even accountants. By the Law of Averages, you’re sure to find something that will eventually make you almost laugh.