Showing results by narrator "Caroline Shaffer" in All Categories

Christine Morris has been sent to Edinburgh to attend a conference on the latest in police methodology. There she is tracked down by the Northern Constabulary, Stornoway, Outer Hebrides, who inform her that her estranged mother has been involved in a vehicular homicide and has gone missing. Reluctantly, Christine agrees to fly up to Stornoway, where her mother was last seen. Her arrival is followed by the suspicious death of one of the islanders.

Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns with her first story collection in over eight years. In Acts of God, she has crafted 10 different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will. For Marie James, a teenager from Fayetteville, Arkansas, the future changes when she joins a group of friends in their effort to find survivors among the debris left when a tornado destroys a neighboring town.

On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers.

Living in the present as well as the past, Montserrat de la Rosa plans a grand escape from her assisted living community, banking on the help of her deceased husband.

It was in New York that he discovered Sarah. As Simon recovers from a professional disaster - and escapes Chicago for New York - he is drawn to the beautiful, exciting, and mysterious Sarah. Even though the forty-year-old Simon has a wife and child, he falls madly in love with Sarah. Devoting themselves with abandon to the pursuit of happiness, the lovers tour New York, Paris, Venice, and beyond. Their journey takes them deep within their emotions, and reveals dangerous secrets in Sarah’s past.

Thirty-year-old Max Maguire, detective with the New York Police Department, finds herself in France again when she is sent as a bodyguard for one of America's most famous wine critics, who is traveling to Bordeaux to taste some of the most expensive wines in the world. In the tragic circumstances that follow, Max is once again paired with French examining magistrate Olivier Chaumont, with whom she had had a fling the year before while solving a case in Champagne.

Stuck in a dead-end job at the DMV, Brenda feels invisible, certain no one could guess she was once loved by someone who's now a famous movie star. But when she fails an angry woman on her driving test and the woman turns the situation into a violent standoff, Brenda discovers just how grand her own stage can be in this funny, wrenching story of how past loves can reverberate for years and keep us going in ways we never imagined.

Hidden among the photographs, uniforms, revolvers, and war medals of the Civil War are the remarkable stories of some of the most unlikely heroes: women. This audiobook brings to light the incredible stories of women from the Civil War that remain relevant to our nation today. Each woman's experience helps us see a truer, fuller, richer version of what really happened in this country during this time period.

Ballerina Lucia del Mar has two great passions: dance, which consumes most of her waking hours, and the Internet, which brings the outside world into her tightly regimented life. These two passions collide when a White House performance and reception leads to an encounter with handsome Moroccan businessman Rashid al-Jazari, creator of a brilliant technology that has set the Internet rumor mill ablaze.

Kimmer Reed is a Hunter Agency operative, a street foundling escaped from an abusive family and raised to be code-name Chimera - a fierce, savvy loner with a natural gift for reading people. Now on her first assignment with the one man she trusts - the one man she can't read - she finds herself overseas in the Basque countryside, framed for the theft of the very antiquity she has been sent to guard and doubting her ability to work with a partner at all - never mind the man she loves.

Gwendolyn Golden and Armand Leopold have been America's go-to couple for home decorating tips, letting the cameras into their So Perfect house, their So Perfect life, their So Perfect marriage. One problem: It's all an act. Actually, two problems: America just found out it's all an act. When a picture of Armand kissing another man hits the newsstands, everyone knows the jig is up. Both are evicted from their home and eviscerated by the press.

For Kate Mitchell, finishing her master's thesis on reclusive photographer Reed O'Connor was just another item to check off her list. She knew exactly what she was doing. Or did she? There's just one portrait that doesn't fit. One portrait... and the passion she sees behind it. Finding the story behind O'Connor's picture becomes Kate's obsession, and the people she meets will challenge everything she thought she knew about life, love, and inspiration. A single picture can tell more than one story.

Morning sickness sucks. Which is why fashion designer turned amateur sleuth Maddie Springer has spent the last six weeks being a couch potato and Moonlight vampire movie devotee. But when Maddie's best friends finally convince her to venture out, Maddie stumbles on a dead body of a girl who has been bitten on the neck, and life suddenly imitates art in the most deadliest of ways. Now Maddie is smack in the middle of a murder investigation involving a deadly dance club and a coven of Hollywood "vampires".

Meeting handsome actor Byron Slater after winning a contest, Miranda Peterson enjoys the attention of the media and the glamour of Byron's world, until she stumbles on the private actor's deadly secrets.

Everyone in the charming Hudson Valley town of Oak Falls expected Flynn Keegan, their handsome blond "Golden Boy", to make it big in Hollywood. So when veterinarian Kate Turner identifies a bone dug up by one of her dog patients as human, no one thinks back 10 years to remember Flynn. Until DNA and a smashed skull prove he was murdered. Kate soon discovers that chains of love can be as strong as those made of steel-and some deadly secrets have put her next on the kill list.

In this powerful, wide-ranging, and emotional story about the limits of medical knowledge, Abel discovers why she wasn't diagnosed with celiac as a child. She considers how environmental fears and Internet anecdotes lead people to avoid gluten. And she grapples with the question that confronts us all: how to live calmly, even joyfully, in the face of uncertainty.

Former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is getting a little bored in Magpie, Montana, where she landed at a small local newspaper after being downsized from her job in Kabul. Then Judith Calf Looking, a local Blackfeet Indian girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriff - whose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in years - thinks Judith probably froze to death while hitchhiking back to the reservation from wherever she'd been.

Foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is livid. She's been downsized from her Kabul posting. Her editor reassigns her to a stateside suburban beat formerly the province of interns. When she arrives in Montana for some R&R at a friend's cabin, her friend is nowhere in sight. Anger turns to terror when Lola discovers her friend shot dead. She can't get out of Montana fast enough, until she finds that she can't get out at all.

Silver Screen Kisses is a collection of stories inspired by movies that are on every favorite-movie list. Written by award-winning and best-selling authors, these contemporary romances take the listener back to Echo Ridge in the spring, when the promise of new love is budding just like the tulips around the Emerald Inn Bed & Breakfast.

A scrappy, hot-blooded woman can only take so much! Violet Parker is on fire...or rather under fire yet again. New evidence has fanned the embers of a cold murder case, and her alibi is smoldering at the corners. While battling a dogged detective determined to pin the murder on her, Violet scrambles to find the real killer. Will she escape "the heat" with singed tail feathers? Or will Violet go down in flames?