Showing results by narrator "Michael Levine" in All Categories

America's Favorite Holidays explores how five of America's culturally important holidays - Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgiving - came to be what they are today, seasonal and religious celebrations heavily influenced by modern popular culture.

Trapped somewhere between life and death, demigod Cyril has lost the ability to communicate with his love. But not before giving her valuable lessons in magic, as well as his blessing to move on without him. Coming to terms with Cyril's absence isn't easy, but Linden is doing her best to honor his wishes. Until she receives an unusual request from Moreaux, an estranged member of Cyril's family.

J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As J. attempts to give the boy a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, he also becomes the personal secretary of the boy's father, Vasily, an ex-scientist whom J. suspects is on the run from gangsters.

Considered by many to be the first Beat novel, this underground classic follows a clique of young bohemians from dive bar to dance hall in 1940s New York. Recently fired from his job and not yet ready to find a new one, aspiring author Blake Williams begins his evenings at the Sporting Club Bar in Greenwich Village, where he knows he will find Henry Porter.

Here is the story of a community - Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts - and a sporting event - the island's legendary Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby - that is rendered with the same depth, color, and emotional power of the best fiction. Among the characters we meet Dick Hathaway, a crotchety legend who once caught a bluefish from a helicopter and was ultimately banned for cheating; and Janet Messineo, a recovering alcoholic who says that striped bass saved her life.

Jake Wilkerson, a disillusioned young pastor who is an expert at hiding his fears, takes on a new assignment at a small rural church in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. It's a far piece from anywhere and full of curiously odd and eccentric people, including Emma Grainger, a single woman and a veterinarian who dismisses all Christians as "those people", and Tassy, a young runaway with a secret.

In the beginning was the Oak, its hungry roots reaching deep into the earth, its gnarled limbs searching the distant heavens. Two hundred years ago, Obediah Magrute worshipped the Oak and died violently beneath it, feeding it with his blood and bone, shouting his chilling curse to the skies. Now, Laura and Mark Avery have come to the bustling little Vermont village.

Synth is a drug able to induce hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. But it's brand new, highly addictive, and more than likely dangerous. Even the dealers peddling the pills don't know what long term effects the drug will have on its users.

Sammy Dee is a mid-level Long Island mafioso in witness protection. Didier Onyekachukwu was the corrupt minister of finance of the former Upper Volta. Both men find themselves in middle age, living in the Southern California version of genteel poverty in a down-market condo complex called Paradise Gardens. Enter Marcy Gray, a "mature" actress barely getting by on a meager SAG pension.

Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Strapped in to artificial wings spanning 25 feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth's gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize.

Cyril is weary from weeks of traveling the Scottish moors, but his luck takes a turn when he rescues a battered and broken child. To express his gratitude, the boy's father offers Cyril a night of carnal indulgence with his eldest daughter. Cyril graciously accepts, looking forward to a night of sexual release to ease the loneliness of his travels.

Fundraiser Linden Hill has a knack for reading people. She always knows which conversations will put a prospect at ease, which drink will loosen a patron's lips - or his wallet - and how cleavage will make a donor sweeten the deal. She's even foreseen her dateless weekends 464 times in a row. But 10 years after watching life drain from her former mentor's and first love's eyes, her skills for divining the predictable are lost.

Business. Violence. Concerns about profits. Questions of conscience. This is the untold story of the dealings between a US tire giant and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the man who would become the first head of state convicted of crimes against humanity since the Nazi era.

How does a maximum-security inmate commit a murder on the outside? The answer is more terrifying than you think. Mark my words.... Derek Warren is smooth, charming, and a master manipulator. But is he a killer?

Billionaire playboy Peter Wells pays for sex. His girlfriend-for-hire arrangements are tidy, simple, and not apt to land him with a palimony suit. When an anonymous gossip columnist reveals his predilections for escorts and control, Peter vows revenge.

A homeless man has been found in an alley, clobbered to death. The crime seems pretty cut and dried - vagrants fighting over turf - until the Newcastle Police Department uncovers a connection to a local shelter in danger of being taken over by greedy developers. Is the dead John Doe a victim of some sinister plot? And what became of the scruffy mutt he had recently adopted?

The husband-and-wife sleuth team is back in five tales of holiday mystery and mayhem. "Holly, Jolly Roger" takes Belle and Rosco to sunny St. Lucia in the Caribbean as they try to decipher the clues to a legendary buried treasure. "The Mystery of Wordsworth House" may remain just that unless Belle and Rosco can turn their stay at a snowy Montreal inn into a chance for a family to solve the riddle of their past... with the help of a ghost.

Jamaica Nevisson - or Cassandra Lovett, as she's known to the adoring fans of her daytime soap - has vanished without a trace. She and her pal, Genie Pepper, went pleasure yachting off Nantucket, only to end up lost at sea. So far only the charred hull of the boat has turned up.

Newlyweds Rosco Polycrates and Belle Graham are settling into life with a new puppy in their charming New England townhouse when Belle's estranged father sets out to visit them. Except renowned anthropologist Theodore A. Graham never makes it off the train. According to the coroner, he died of a heart attack aboard the Amtrak to Newcastle. Now Belle is flying down to Florida to dispose of the effects of a man she barely knew.

Belle Graham hears it first from the gossip columnist for the Evening Crier, where Belle is resident crossword editor. Fire has destroyed one of the stables at King Wenstarin Farms - the multimillion-dollar corporation owned by the notorious Collins clan - and the barn manager lies in a coma. Did someone torch the place? That's what Belle's PI husband Rosco Polycrates has been hired to find out.