Showing results by narrator "Paul Woodson" in All Categories

Wounded five times and awarded numerous decorations for valor, Gottlob Herbert Bidermann saw action in the Crimea and siege of Sebastopol, participated in the vicious battles in the forests south of Leningrad, and ended the war in the Courland Pocket. In his memoir, he shares his impressions of countless Russian POWs seen at the outset of his service, of peasants struggling to survive the hostilities while caught between two ruthless antagonists, and of corpses littering the landscape.

He has been known by countless names and terrifying deeds throughout the lands of mankind - thief, magic wielder, swordsman, assassin, adventurer. But chief among those names and perhaps the most dangerous of his personae is that of Nightfall, a man - or perhaps the legendary demon himself - gifted with unique powers which any sorcerer would kill to possess. Yet though Nightfall has always escaped his pursuers by moving on to new realms, new identities, and new enterprises, even the cleverest of beings must occasionally slip.

Until recent years, very little was known of the tens of thousands of foreign nationals from Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, and Spain who served voluntarily in the military formations of the German army and the German Waffen-SS. In Kaisergruber's book, the listener discovers important issues of collaboration, the apparent contributions of the volunteers to the German war effort, their varied experiences, their motives, the attitude of the German High Command and bureaucracy, and the reaction to these in the occupied countries.

The handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most determined of gumshoe gals, from debutant detectives like Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange to spinster sleuths like Mary Roberts Rinehart's Hilda Adams, from groundbreaking female cops like Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly to contemporary crime-fighting PIs like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and include indelible tales from Agatha Christie, Carolyn Wells, Edgar Wallace, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Laura Lippman, and many more. 

In April 1938, a man calling himself Josef Hofmann arrives at a boarding house in Hamm, Germany, and lets a room from the widow who owns it. Fifty years later, Walter Gersdorff, the widow's son, who was 11 years old in the spring of 1938, discovers the carefully hidden diary the boarder had kept during his stay, even though he should never have written any of its contents down. What Walter finds is a scathing chronicle of one the most tumultuous years in German history, narrated by a secret agent on a deadly mission.

John Lennon 1980 traces the powerful, life-affirming story of the former Beatle’s remarkable comeback after five years of self-imposed retirement. Lennon’s final pivotal year would climax in several moments of creative triumph as he rediscovered his artistic self in dramatic fashion. With the bravura release of the Double Fantasy album with wife, Yoko Ono, he was poised and ready for an even brighter future only to be wrenched from the world by an assassin’s bullets.

Sheltered heiress Lady Briannon Findlay is a wallflower and prefers it that way. Until she meets the nefarious Masked Marauder, a gentleman thief waylaying carriages from London to Essex, who awakens sensual impulses she never knew she had. Provocative and darkly attractive, his artful seduction leaves her wanting more. When Brynn discovers that Archer and the Masked Marauder are one and the same, trust and attraction collide. But after a murder is committed by an imposter marauder, they must risk everything to find the real killer...including their love.

Tyrant magus Edrin Walker destroyed the monster sent by the Skallgrim, but not before it laid waste to Setharis, and infested their magical elite with mind-controlling parasites. Edrin's own Gift to seize the minds of others was cracked by the strain of battle, and he barely survives the interrogation of a captured magus. There's no time for recovery though: a Skallgrim army is marching on the mountain passes of the Clanhold. Edrin and a coterie of villains race to stop them, but the mountains are filled with gods, daemons, magic, and his hideous past.  

After 10 years on the run, dodging daemons and debt, reviled magician Edrin Walker returns home to avenge the brutal murder of his friend. Lynas had uncovered a terrible secret, something that threatened to devour the entire city. He tried to warn the Arcanum, the sorcerers who rule the city. He failed. Lynas was skinned alive and Walker felt every cut. Now nothing will stop him from finding the murderer. Magi, mortals, daemons, and even the gods - Walker will burn them all if he has to. After all, it wouldn't be the first time he's killed a god....

When Detective Sergeant Blake Harte is given the opportunity of a relaxing week away at a spa manor, he jumps at the opportunity. He can take one person with him - and who more than Harrison Baxter deserves time away from Harmschapel after everything he has been through? But once at the Manor of the Lakes, the rest and relaxation they both crave is quickly brought to an end, when Blake and Harrison witness a man being murdered, by a mysterious hooded figure who appears to have the ability to walk on water.  

In The Allure of the Multiverse, physicist Paul Halpern tells the epic story of how science became besotted with the multiverse, and the controversies that ensued. The questions that brought scientists to this point are big and deep: Is reality such that anything can happen, must happen? How does quantum mechanics "choose" the outcomes of its apparently random processes? And why is the universe habitable? Each question quickly leads to the multiverse. 

On the border between Valdemar and the deadly Pelagirs Forest, the gryphon hero Kelvren returns from a near-fatal self-sacrifice that won him the approval of Valdemar's ground troops, but caused a diplomatic crisis. Frustrated by his lack of a hero's welcome, Kelvren is talked into helping with an expedition by his old friend, Firesong. Firesong struggles with his own age and mortality, and he intends to solve a vast mystery at the center of legendary Lake Evendim as his crowning achievement.

The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English listeners for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient. The collection's central novella follows Ramon Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland.

To defeat his greatest enemy, he may have to become his greatest fear.... Now that he's come home, Wardin is determined to reclaim all that was lost. But when his enemies unite against him, he finds himself outnumbered and outmatched, and his kingdom in more danger than ever. Amid these threats comes a chilling warning against walking the same treacherous path as his father before him. Desperate not to repeat the failures of his forebears, Wardin turns to mysterious new allies and perilous new magic. And even that may not be enough.

A royal prince exiled from his country long ago, Theo St. George forged a new life in London's dark and seedy underworld. As a coldhearted mercenary, he's willing to do anything for a price. When he accepts a position as bodyguard to a duke in danger, he finds his true opponent in the nobleman's prim and icy sister. Pamela, Lady Deering, has been forced to accept her brother's generosity after the death of her husband. One of society's irreproachable pillars, the last thing she needs is to dally with a sinfully handsome bodyguard called Beast.

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined. 

Skif was an orphan who would have died from malnutrition and exposure if he had never met Deke the pickpocket. By the time he was twelve, Skif was an accomplished cat burglar. But it wasn't until he decided to steal a finely tacked-out white horse, which was, oddly enough, standing unattended in the street, that this young thief discovered that the tables could turn on him - and that he himself could be stolen!

One hundred years ago in Port Arbello a pretty little girl began to scream. And struggle. And die. No one heard. No one saw. Just one man whose guilty heart burst in pain as he dashed himself to death in the sea. Now something peculiar is happening in Port Arbello. The children are disappearing, one by one. An evil history is repeating itself. And one strange, terrified child has ended her silence with a scream that began 100 years ago.

Highlander Ronan Maclaren must marry, but he's in no particular hurry. He's perfectly happy as the laird of his clan, running the Maclaren Whisky Distillery, and besides, he just hasn't found the right woman. Lady Imogen Kinley has cleverly avoided wedlock for years. Men, she has learned from painful experience, are not to be trusted. Determined to remain independent, she takes an indecent amount of pleasure in making herself as unattractive to potential suitors as possible.

Nothing is more dear to Griffin than his magic school, but for a man with no magic, life there has its challenges. They laugh at him. They exclude him. And that's just his fellow teachers. So when a dragon no one else has seen delivers a chilling warning to Griffin, it's no surprise that his colleagues don't take him seriously. Unfortunately, convincing them that the magistery stands at the brink of destruction is only the beginning of his troubles. As an ancient struggle between dragons and men reignites, Griffin's only hope lies in deciphering the secrets of a long-dead madman.