Showing results by narrator "Karen Peakes" in All Categories

Ivy Mason has it all: beauty, a plush apartment, a fancy car, and a debonair British spy boyfriend who pays all her bills. If only her boyfriend was in her life - and her bed - more than just sporadically.

Every brilliant person comes with problems. Even if that brilliant person is a child. At least, it seems that way for Nathan. All he wanted was a perfect family. Is that too much to ask? But instead of a perfect child, he got Cassie. She's a genius, sure, but she's not what he wanted. He doesn't care that she's a virtuoso on the violin or doing college level work at ten. She doesn't speak. Ever. To anyone. And Nathan knows that that means there's something wrong with her. No matter what his wife says, he has to do something about his daughter.

Putting out fires is what Lieutenant Charlie McMahon does best. The streets of Chicago keep him busy and provide a respite from his family's chaos. But everything changes when his rescue squad is called to a house where female victims are found chained to a wall and burned alive. The terror becomes personal as the women are identified, leaving Charlie to reel over one, haunting question: What have I done?

Suzanne Matson’s engrossing and intimate new novel, Ultraviolet, centers on Kathryn - the daughter of Elsie and mother of Samantha - while illuminating the lives of three generations of women, each more independent than the last. Their stories open in 1930s India, where Elsie lives with her authoritarian missionary husband and their children. Returning to the American Midwest as a teenager, Kathryn feels alienated and restless. When she loses her mother prematurely to a stroke, she escapes to Oregon for a fresh start.

Caught somewhere between love, hate, and indifference, Emily Bowen’s marriage is hanging on by a thread. After being let go from his job, her husband pulled away from her, and the distance continues to grow during their family’s sabbatical in Switzerland. With their relationship as cold as the wind baying outside, Emily finds unexpected warmth in a man from her past. As she contemplates seizing the connection she’s been craving, Emily must decide if she’s willing to sacrifice the life she’s built for an unseen future.

Samantha Reid, the brilliant Director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, is enjoying a rare evening away from Washington at a Florida charity ball when a bomb sends the well-heeled attendees stampeding into the night. Narrowly escaping the blast, Reid returns to the White House, where she has been trailing the massacres and illicit arms sales of a shadowy group of Russian oligarchs... all of whom want her dead.

After losing first her husband, then her daughter, 78-year-old grandmother Ruby wants to teach her risk-averse granddaughter, Tulsa, that some leaps are worth taking, no matter how high the potential fall. Tulsa loves her grandmother dearly, but she has a business to run and no time for romance - not even the paperback version. But when Ruby ropes her into a book club, Tulsa can't bring herself to disappoint the woman who raised her.

Twenty-three-year-old Elaine Kelly doesn't earn much as a bank teller, and most of her salary goes toward caring for her terminally ill mother. When a lonely old man who deposits money at her bank every week gets hit and killed by a delivery truck, Elaine - a good Irish girl from Queens - thinks she's found the answer to her problems. She'll just transfer $1 million from the dead man's account into hers.

Eric Brach's new book Double Lives: True Tales of the Criminals Next Door offers terrifying true stories about the criminals hidden among us and the banality of evil and crime, elevated by its frank discussion of the nation-wide criminal scourge of the moment: opioid addiction. Double Lives chronicles the very monsters who walk unnoticed among us - even serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or John Wayne Gacy. They are neighbors and students, professionals and friends living out criminal double lives.

Tanya Kagan, a specialist in Russian art at a top New York auction house, is trying to entice Russia's wealthy oligarchs to bid on the biggest sale of her career, The Order of Saint Catherine, while making sense of the sudden and unexplained departure of her husband. As questions arise over the provenance of the Order and auction fever kicks in, Reyn takes us into the world of Catherine the Great, the infamous 18th-century woman who may have owned the priceless artifact, and who it turns out faced many of the same issues Tanya wrestles with in her own life.

Laura Reese is losing control. Compassionate and conscientious, she excels as a post-op nurse, but her new supervisor doesn't care how much she needs time off. Although she's a selfless wife and mother, news of her husband's promotion only fills her with anxiety. The country-club lifestyle he craves triggers memories of the dysfunctional family she came from, and of her own mother's single-minded ambition to climb the social ladder.

An airplane plunges into an icy river and the world witnesses the dramatic rescue. Then, life after the Miracle on the Hudson landing puts three families on another crash course...with their own fragile humanity.

Hannah Griffin was a girl when tragedy struck her family’s Oregon Christmas tree farm. She still remembers the flames reflected against the newly fallen snow and the bodies the police dug up—twenty victims of America’s most shocking mass murder—one of them her mother’s. Twenty years later Hannah is a talented CSI investigating the brutal death of a little boy when the past comes hurtling back. Someone knows her secret identity. Someone wants her to remember what she’s spent decades trying to forget.

Why I Run: 35 Progressive Candidates Who Are Changing Politics is a collection of original essays from women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and progressive allies who have recently run for office. Contributors like Stacey Abrams, Deb Haaland, Jason Kander, Andrea Jenkins, and Michelle Lujan Grisham share what inspired them to run, what it takes to win, and what lessons can be learned in the face of a loss.

Eight years ago, thirteen-year-old Julie Whitaker was kidnapped from her bedroom in the middle of the night. In the years since, her family have papered over the cracks of their grief – while hoping against hope that Julie is still alive. And then, one night, the doorbell rings. Gripping...

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions...tequila, guns and cocaine. Inspired by the author's time with Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Girl is a smart, rollicking ride told with heart, a loving fictional portrait of a larger-than-life literary icon, and soon to be a major film. Alley Russo is a recent college grad desperately trying to make it in the gruelling world of New York publishing, but like so many who have come before her, she has no connections and has settled for an unpaid magazine internship...

In the sleepy town of Cherrystone, Washington, Sheriff Emily Kenyon is consumed with the case of Amanda Crawford–young, pregnant, and days from giving birth–whose lifeless body is recovered from freezing waters. All evidence points to Amanda's controlling husband Mitch, but as Emily struggles to build her case, she's suddenly thrust into a nightmare that spans three states. When Emily is called to consult on a series of sorority murders, she finds herself investigating meticulously staged crime scenes. Each victim appears to be part of a calculated rehearsal for something more sinister.

In this captivating story of resilience, three generations of women battle to save their family’s vineyard from the ravages of WWII. Champagne, 1939 Gabrielle Leblanc Dupree is taking her family’s future into her hands. While she should be preparing for a lavish party to celebrate two...

In a secluded farmhouse in Cherrystone, Washington, a family has been slaughtered—and a teenage son has disappeared. Is he frightened child or a cold-blooded killer? As single mother and detective Emily Kenyon leads the hunt for a killer, her teenage daughter secretly reaches out to the missing boy, drawn to his artistic soul and convinced of his innocence.