Showing results by narrator "Mark Smith" in All Categories

Criminals should not return to the scene of their crime. Sometimes, it's just too horrible to bear!

A breathtaking piece of luck, coupled with an unlikely coincidence, secured by a piercing intellect and curious nature, lead three friends to believe they might possibly uncover pirate gold! With all the insight and reasoning of a Sherlock Holmes, Poe's William Legrand plucks faint clues seemingly from mid-air and carefully arrives at a conclusion of exactly where in the world to dig.Has he reasoned - and guessed - correctly? Or, will the only gold he sees be the color of his eponymous beetle?

"Captains Courageous" is an 1897 novel by Rudyard Kipling that follows the adventures of fifteen year old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the arrogant and spoiled son of a railroad tycoon. The novel originally appeared as a serialization in McClure's, beginning with the November 1896 edition.

When a hardened criminal kills guards and breaks out of prison, Steve Fraser, a lieutenant in the Texas Rangers, is tasked with bringing him to justice. From the bowels of a mine, deep underground, to the stone labyrinths of the mountains of Wyoming, Steve follows his quarry. But his chase requires him to befriend people who turn out to be wanted in another killing. How can he justify his actions with his innate sense of honesty, his new friends, and the bewitching woman he meets in their midst?

"The Wind in the Willows" is a classic of children's literature by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley. The classic story of how Rat, Mole, and the other river bankers saved Toad from his excesses.

The Communists never have a chance. They are prepared to fight with atomic weapons. The U.S. instead uses... Dolliver Wims, history's first recorded person capable of turning other people accident-prone. Wims is a walking disaster who never gets caught in the shambles he creates! With great good humor, Sabia turns his lens on what might have happened had the Cold War gone hot!

First serialized in "Outing" magazine, "White Fang" was published in 1906. The story takes place in Yukon Territory, Canada, during the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the 19th century, and details a wild wolfdog's journey to domestication.

"White Fang" is a companion novel (and a thematic mirror) to London's best known work, "The Call of the Wild", which is about a kidnapped, domesticated dog embracing his wild ancestry to survive and thrive in the wild.

"Kidnapped" is a historical fiction adventure novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. Written as a "boys' novel" and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886, the novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Seamus Heaney. A sequel, "Catriona", was published in 1893.

The story takes place in the extreme conditions of the Yukon during the 19th century Klondike Gold Rush, where strong sled dogs were in high demand. After Buck, a domesticated dog, is snatched from a pastoral ranch in California, he is sold into a brutal life as a sled dog. The novella details Buck's struggle to adjust and survive the cruel treatment he receives from humans, other dogs, and nature. He eventually sheds the veneer of civilization altogether and instead relies on primordial instincts and the lessons he has learned to become a respected and feared leader in the wild.

Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen made his name as the highest-scoring ace fighter pilot of WWI. His popular name, the Red Baron, owed to being of minor nobility (Freiherr = "free lord") and to choosing to fly a brightly-painted red aeroplane when camouflage colors were the norm. This advertisement to the enemy brought him frequent combats, so that he liked to claim that he shot down Englishmen before breakfast. When it seemed that he was being particularly sought by crack enemy pilots, the men of his command, Jasta 11, also painted their planes red.

Three years after the events that took place in "The Lost World", Professor Challenger urgently summons his fellow explorers to a meeting. Oddly, he requires each to bring an oxygen cylinder with him. What he soon informs them is that from astronomical data and just received telegraphs of strange accidents on the other side of the world, he has deduced that the Earth is starting to move through a region of space containing something poisonous to humankind.

A British newspaper editor in India does some favors for a memorable pair of strangers who confide in him their plan to become kings in Afghanistan. Then, two years later, he has a bizarre return visit - kings they have become, sure enough, but they've found the price of kingly mistakes was very high!

Robert Louis Stevenson's swashbuckling high-seas adventure! Now with waves crashing and swords clashing, a pirate tale like you've never heard before!

Time agents Ross Murdock and Eveleen Riorden are recalled from their honeymoon to take part in a dangerous assignment: find a team of Russian scientists who have vanished without a trace from a research mission in the past of a far-off planet. Along with a team of Russian time agents with their own mysterious agenda and Saba, a new agent teamed with Gordon Ashe, they leap into the alien world's distant history.

Dr. Watson chronicles here some of the more interesting detective cases that he and his good friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have encountered during their association. We see the cases unfold as he does, scratch our heads as does he while the evidence is collected, and then marvel at the impeccable observations, remarkable insight, and doggedness which Holmes displays as he teases apart the tangled clues.

It's a good thing that Time Agents are intensively trained. When Ross Murdock and Gordon Ashe set up a time gate on the alien world of Hawaika for an exploration into its troubling past, they didn't anticipate that a storm would sweep them and their helper Karara Trehern and her two dolphins through it unprepared...and then collapse the gate. Trapped in a time of sword-and-spear technology, they rapidly discover that each of the world's cultures appear to be trying to wipe one another out.

A great collection of stories from the author of Fight Club. In 'Zombies', the best and brightest of a high school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. While in 'Tunnel of Love', a massage therapist runs the curious practice of...

At fifty degrees below zero, your spit freezes instantly upon hitting the ground. At seventy-five below zero, it freezes in mid-air. If you get wet at that temperature you need to know one thing, and know it very well - how to build a fire.

"Around the World in Eighty Days" (French: "Le tour du monde en quatre vingts jours") is a classic adventure novel by the French writer Jules Verne, first published in 1873. In the story, Phileas Fogg of London and his newly employed French valet Passepartout attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a 320,000 pounds wager (equal to 31,324,289 pounds today) set by his friends at the Reform Club. It is one of Verne's most acclaimed works.

Only two people were in a position to experience all the events leading up to the first flight of a viable airplane, and here in three short essays they report how it came about.The idea of powered flight was so new that there were not even accepted methods of measuring the forces at play on a machine in-flight.