Showing results by narrator "Des Linden" in All Categories

It starts as a prank - a way to blow off steam after a long summer at Camp Horseshoe. Among the teen counselors, tensions and hormones are running high. No wonder the others agree when Jo-Beth Chancellor suggests they scare Monica O'Neal a little.... or a lot. Monica has it coming, and no one will really get hurt. What could go wrong? Everything.

To defend her client, she must dig up a town’s darkest secrets. Defense attorney Cass Leary thought she’d escaped her hometown for good. But after leaving her high-paying job in Chicago, she decides to revisit her troubled past. When someone murders the beloved high school basketball coach and Cass steps in to defend the girl accused of the crime, she doesn’t expect the death threats that follow.... Confronting the town that shunned her as a child, she unearths secrets that some would kill to keep buried.

Ashley Fox has known three things since age 12: she was an excellent seamstress, what her wedding would look like, and that she'd never leave the island of Getaway Bay. Now, at age 35, she's been right about two of them, at least. With an ill parent to take care of and her trusty sewing machine, Ash loves living in Getaway Bay and owning her own custom wedding dress shop. But the husband and wedding she's always dreamed of? Those seem like they're never going to happen for her.

Brett Westerly is his father's golden child, but it's come at a cost. As head of the family corporation, he throws himself into his work - hiding in his office is easier than confronting the reality of his broken family. After a bitter divorce that split the family and divided loyalties, the wealthy Westerly matriarch offers an early inheritance to any grandchild who marries and invites the entire family to the wedding.

When a strapping young Jack MacBride arrives in Finch to wrap up his late uncle's affairs, heads turn in the sleepy English village. But when Lori volunteers to help Jack clear out his uncle's overgrown garden, they discover something even more shocking than a stranger turning up in Finch. After Lori laughingly tosses a coin into the garden's old well and makes a wish, she is baffled to find that the wish seems to have come true. Word spreads, and the villagers turn out in droves to make wishes of their own. But as they soon learn, one person's wish is another person's worst nightmare.

Lori Shepherd travels to New Zealand in Aunt Dimity's fifteenth charming adventure. Mystery readers everywhere continue to be won over by Nancy Atherton's popular cozy series. In the latest installment, Lori Shepherd is bereft when she learns that her beloved neighbors, Ruth and Louise Pym, may be dying. Summoning her to their sickroom, the elderly sisters have a favor to ask: Will Lori find their long-lost brother, Aubrey, before death claims them? Despite her misgivings, Lori sets out for distant New Zealand-where Aubrey fled after being cast out of the family in disgrace. With the help of a charming kiwi bird and her otherworldly friend, Aunt Dimity, Lori tries to heal a family broken by deceit.

After nearly a decade as a sous-chef in a trendy eatery, Jenna is desperate for a change. She’s supported her ex-husband’s dreams for so long that she can’t even remember her own... until she sees a for-lease sign near her parents’ home and envisions her very own cooking store. Her crash course in business is aided by a streetwise store manager and Jenna’s adoptive mother.

When Lori Shepherd returns from her trip to America, she is shocked to hear that Prunella "Pruneface" Hooper has been killed. This is the first murder in the village of Finch in more than a century, and everyone is in an uproar. Before the town implodes in the wake of this scandal, Lori sets out to solve the murder. Unfortunately, nearly everyone in Finch had a reason to want Mrs. Hooper dead.

In Aunt Dimity Beats the Devil, Lori's twins are now toddlers, walking and talking enough to drive her nearly stir crazy. So she jumps at the offer of a break - a trip to evaluate a rare-book collection in a remote and misty corner of Northumberland. On a dark and stormy night in late October, she sets out for Wyrdhurst Hall, the grim neo-Gothic castle owned by newlyweds Nicole and Jared Hollander. On the way there she encounters Adam Chase, a charming, handsome stranger who knows more than he's telling about the hall's mysterious secrets....

When an explosion rips apart a Chicago building, the lives of three women are forever altered. A year later, Cecily is in mourning. She was supposed to be in the building that day. Instead, she stood on the street and witnessed it going down, with her husband and best friend inside. Kate, now living thousands of miles away, fled the disaster and is hoping that her past won’t catch up with her. And Franny, a young woman in search of her birth mother, watched the horror unfold on the morning news, knowing that the woman she was so desperate to reconnect with was in the building.

When a finely wrought silver sleigh figurine turns up in her thrift shop, Lori Shepherd recognizes it instantly. It was the object that mesmerized the sweet but very poor nine-year-old Daisy Pickering at Sproggton Manor, the bizarre Jacobean house-turned-museum Lori recently visited with her twin sons. Hoping to avoid any real commotion, Lori decides to speak with the museum curator, who turns out to be oddly uninterested in the theft. But there’s not much that could be done anyway for the Pickerings seem to have come into some money and moved to Australia.

A “profound, sometimes hilarious, often heartbreaking” (The New York Times) view of prison life, as told by currently and formerly incarcerated people, from the co-creators and co-hosts of the Peabody- and Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle “A must-read for fans of the legendary podcast...

Hudson Anderson has watched his brothers fall victim to the marriage flu. He wants nothing to do with it. That is until he meets fiery Daisy Green, who shows up on the property he’s just purchased, calling him a thief and insisting the property isn’t his. He should brush her off and move on with his life. But instead, he finds himself intrigued, and he wants to get to know her.

She's just his barista...until she buys into Legacy Brew as a co-owner. Then she's Coy's business partner and the source of his five-year-long crush. But after they share a kiss one night, Macie's seriously considering mixing business and pleasure.

The gentle spirit's sixteenth adventure is a New York Times bestseller and as "cozy and charming as a cup of Earl Grey" (Bookpage.com). After a dizzying time Down Under, Lori Shepherd returns to Finch and finds that her wealthy father-in-law, William Willis, Sr., has just purchased a splendid ten-acre estate nearby. While William fends off local ladies intent on romance, Lori oversees the painstaking restoration of a peculiar painting found during renovations. It's nothing Lori can't handle-until moving furniture, strange sounds, and the theft of the painting prompt her to call on Aunt Dimity for help uncovering the estate's shadowy past.

When Grace, April, and Poppy join the US Army Nurse Corps, they see it as little more than an adventure, one made all the better by their first station: Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Joined at the hip, idealistic Grace, exuberant Poppy, and brave but haunted April frolic in the sun, attending parties, flirting with the handsome soldiers, and becoming fast friends with seasoned nurse Eva. Like the Hawaiian sun, their future seems warm and bright - until the infamous morning of December 7.

Painfully shy electrician Wyatt Haney is a pro at complex wiring jobs, but when it comes to women, he just can't seem to make a lasting connection. If he had even half the courage of the superhero he penned for his comic book series, he'd finally be able to talk to his beautiful neighbor, Kayla - and stop hiding behind a hoodie. When an electrical fire breaks out in Kayla's apartment, Wyatt comes to the rescue, sparking an attraction neither of them expected.

In A Scattered Life, Karen McQuestion proves to be an adept chronicler of unforgettable female characters. Poignantly written, she thoughtfully examines how women love, learn, and come to accept themselves and others, as well as life’s often harsh realities of deception and loss. Skyla Plinka has all she could ask for - at least that’s what her mother-in-law Audrey thinks. On most days, Skyla agrees, yet there’s a part of her that longs for her free-spirited days before husband, child, and the humdrum life of rural Wisconsin.

In tumultuous 1860, South Carolina farmer Polly struggles to hold onto both her land and the slaves who plant and tend her valuable cotton, while still reeling from the murder of her young brothers years before. This horrific crime has gone unsolved and unpunished—until now. When details of the brutal murder come to light, she must make decisions that will change not only her own life, but the lives of every person on her farm.

Six new contemporary romance novellas from bestselling authors.