Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Urban

On a December morning in 1982, the courtyard of a Beijing siheyuan - a lively quadrangle of homes - begins to stir. Auntie Xue’s son Jiyue is getting married today, and she is determined to make the day a triumph. Despite Jiyue’s woeful ignorance in matters of the heart - and the body. Despite a chef in training tasked with the onerous responsibility of preparing the banquet.

In the summer of 1967, the Levitsky family convenes for a long weekend at their home in the suburbs—an idyllic holiday for the perfect family. But Nora has always known better. Growing up, she learned to tiptoe around her mother Lillian’s explosive temper. Her father did the same. Nora’s sole confidante was their housekeeper, Clara, and their bond has only strengthened through the years.

Raymond Jaffe feels like he doesn’t belong. Not with his mother’s new family. Not as a weekend guest with his father and his father’s wife. Not at school, where he’s an outcast. After his best friend moves away, Raymond has only two real connections: to the feral cat he’s tamed and to a blind ninety-two-year-old woman in his building who’s introduced herself with a curious question: Have you seen Luis Velez?

Things started out so sweet. Everyone was going to be rich. All because of Trunk Man. He was the guy Papa and his meatheads stuffed in the back of a stolen Nissan and drove to a forest preserve outside Detroit. He owed Papa big-time. To save his own sorry neck, Trunk Man made an offer: a million dollars in bonds tucked away in a safe. Boost it, split it, and toss Trunk Man from a roof. Easy.

At nineteen, Susie Vogelman should be coasting: she’s an NYU dropout with no responsibilities, endless prescription pills, and a Brentwood estate to waste away in. But Los Angeles has other plans. A string of brutal murders targeting addicts spreads through the city, and Susie’s ivory tower begins to crumble. The headlines point too close to home: her father’s ties to an opioid empire, a sinister secret society, and her own complicity in the systems holding it all together.

On a cold Manchester night, Victor Mitchum and his loyal-ish dog witness something they were never meant to see. Living on the streets has made Victor good at watching people—which is exactly why private investigator Kasper Dąbrowski recruits him to help find a missing woman. But as Victor watches from the shadows, he realises he has stumbled into something far more dangerous. Working alongside Kasper and his sister, Victor discovers he’s not just tracking kidnappers—he’s watching killers. And now they know someone is watching them.

When beautiful and successful Susan Harris jumps from the roof of her apartment building, she sets a tremor through her New York City mothers’ group that forces them all to look at one another with new cynicism: How could this have happened right under their noses? To one of them? Between her death and the harrowing private school admission season on the horizon, these women are forced to explore the hard truths about themselves.

When Rolling Stone journalist Kayla McCray is assigned a cover story on pop icon Lexi Mayhem, Kayla stumbles across a startling new angle to the exposé. Years ago, another rising star from Lexi’s past mysteriously leaped to her death. Some things are better off forgotten, Lexi says. Kayla disagrees. It’s 2005 and Ava Petrova moves to New York with a notebook full of songs and a dream. Then she meets Lexi, an up-and-coming singer who brands Ava with an enigmatic new stage name and introduces her to an intoxicating city alive with possibilities.

Devon and James Payne are brothers and rivals since childhood. But they share an affinity for sports that brings glory to their Connecticut town and promise for the future. Then they’re in a car accident. Devon is paralyzed for life, while James goes on to live the dream. For the Paynes, the tremulous repercussions of that evening never settled. Over the course of a decade, Devon decides to visit his seven siblings now scattered across the globe.

In New York City, Joanna Marshall is an aspiring singer obsessed with success, determined to overcome the racism and sexism that stand in her way. Her childhood friends Maggie Ellersley and Peter Bye confront similar barriers but with different goals in mind: Maggie is focused on finding love; Peter, on becoming a surgeon. But as their interests overlap and their ambitions collide, the course of Joanna and Maggie’s lives seems destined to change forever. Written in response to the dominant stereotypes of the time, There Is Confusion paints a revelatory portrait....

The narrator of Rob Doyle's Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or "on the dole" in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist's search for universal truth.

In Death in the Fifth Position, dashing P.R. man Peter Sargent is hired by a ballet company on the eve of a major upcoming performance. Handling the press seems to be no problem, but when a rising star in the company is killed during the performance - dropped from thirty feet above the stage, crashing to her death in a perfect fifth position - Sargent has a real case on his hands.

The Bronx, 1958. The Policewoman's Bureau doesn’t officially exist, and yet it handles those cases only a woman's touch could solve. Marie Cirile, a young officer with the 44th Precinct, has joined the few women stepping away from the select matronly duties available to female officers to take up serious cases. With courage and a stiff upper lip when undercover, Marie is dispatched in often grim and scary circumstances, using her air of innocence and others' prejudice against her to take down degenerates and sex offenders.

Every morning, seventeen-year-old Maria Anís Rosario takes the subway an hour from her boisterous and close-knit family in Queens to her private high school on the Upper East Side, where she struggles to fit in as one of the only Latina students - until Rocky welcomes her into this new life. White, rebellious, and ignored by her wealthy parents, Rocky uses her money toward one goal: to get away with anything. To Maria, it’s a dazzling privilege.

Sicily, 1993. Fear rules the streets of Palermo. Teenage boys patrol the narrow streets armed with AK-47’s, marking out the territory of their mafia bosses. This is what hell is. Federico, a privileged local boy, is asked by his teacher, Don Pino, to help out at the youth club he runs in one of the most destitute areas of the city. A tangle of alleys controlled by men with nicknames like the Hunter, it is also where kids like Francesco, Lucia, and Totò never give up hope for a different life.

Nick Cullen's wife was brutally murdered in a burglary gone horribly wrong, and he's not the type to move on with his life, especially when he has seen the faces of the murderers in person. His plan: learn how to drive a cab so he can find his wife's murderers on the streets of Los Angeles. Nick's nighttime rides lead him down dead end after dead end, until one day he manages to get a hold of the ID of one of the men who destroyed his life. Nick's chase heats up and he's forced to face the truth of how far a man will go who has nothing left to lose.

It's 1968, New York City is in a state of mayhem, and private eye Alex Novalis is flat broke. So he accepts a mundane missing persons gig from wealthy construction mogul Gabriel Kravitz, whose 18-year-old daughter, Lydia, has disappeared. The only lead is that Lydia had been sleeping with Jerry Pedrosian, a radical artist and known womanizer. But there are few clues, and everyone in Lydia's life seems to be hiding something... including her miniskirted best friend, Andrea Marshall, who Novalis is inconveniently attracted to.

"I’m being followed,” she said. “I think he wants to kill me.” When a panicked young woman slips her hand into his in 1960s Chinatown, just before a knife-wielding stalker attacks, private eye Alex Novalis finds his cherished hard-boiled persona threatened by a romantic streak that has a habit of getting him into trouble. Sandy Smollett is triple trouble - a stripper who comes on like the girl next door and has a way of bending the truth to suit any occasion. Novalis finds her irresistible.

Long Beach homicide detective Danny Beckett can’t escape the pain. It’s everywhere: in the injuries that earned him a year-long medical leave; in the suffering of every victim he’s ever encountered; in the agony of his past. But he must keep the pain at bay to prove he still has what it takes to do the job. So it’s only fitting that his first major case back is a gruesome one: A California congressman’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren have been brutally murdered, and the carnage is some of the worst Danny’s ever seen. Is it a mob hit? Political retribution? A random sex crime? Nothing quite adds up….

On a sweltering September night, Long Beach Homicide Detective Danny Beckett is called to a grisly crime scene at the mouth of the Los Angeles River. A defenseless homeless man has been burned to death by three teenagers with gang ties. The suspects are already in custody, and the evidence is overwhelming - but when one suspect’s brother is targeted for murder, Danny starts to think there may be more to this seemingly clear-cut case.