Showing results by narrator "Christa Lewis" in All Categories

Hollywood, 1924. Grace Michelle should be basking in her new role as lead costume designer on a major motion picture. Instead, she's barely holding it together—grieving her sister, juggling a demanding set, and trying to care for a troubled foster teen. But when the film's director is murdered and the girl is found unconscious at the scene, Grace's life takes a darker turn.

When over seventy-five pieces of rare and intriguing seventeenth and eighteenth century Delftware are rediscovered in an historic Manhattan townhouse, decorative art advisor and writer Genevieve Wheeler Brown quickly recognizes that, together, these pieces tell an amazing story. What begins as a curatorial exercise quickly evolves not only into an exploration of this colorful, expressive, and sometimes even humorous decorative art, coveted for hundreds of years, but also an unexpected uncovering of forceful female lives yet untold.

In Writing Rediscovered, author and writing scholar Elizabeth Wardle invites you to transform your approach to writing through nine powerful "threshold concepts." These foundational ideas will reshape how you think, feel, and act as a writer.

FBI Special Agent Ilona Farris has barely recovered from her first escapade with the newly formed Unsolvable Crimes Unit when a bizarre case lands on her desk. A man has been chained to a sack of stones and pushed into the water at Seattle Marina. However, the victim supposedly died in a plane crash over twenty years ago. Witnesses report seeing a man in a straw hat and long coat at the scene. There one moment, then disappearing without a trace.

American Alana Eastwood is researching her family tree. Remarkably, Alana traces her Eastwood lineage to an African child, living at Wortley Hall Manor on England's 1801 census. The boy is known as Otobong. Alana believes Otobong to be her earliest traceable ancestor and plans to visit her distant relatives still living in Nottingham. Discovering he was connected to a homicide in 1835 sets Alana on a mission to prove his innocence. Then the body of a man turns up on a beach in Mississippi, eerily close to where Alana's father was born. 

Park rangers are puzzled when a child is found wandering alone in the middle of a forest near Seattle. Stranger still, he speaks a peculiar language that sounds a little like German and is dressed in clothes people wore in the Middle Ages. With no one having reported him missing, FBI Special Agent Will McCord assembles a dedicated unit to investigate the case, placing Detective Ilona Farris at its head. Their relationship is edgy. They used to be an item. But McCord knows Farris is the best person for the job. Especially when more children turn up in similar circumstances.

The Alpenrose is a mountain resort nestled in Austria's scenic landscape among historic churches and castles. It is a vacation idyll that attracts tourists from all over Europe. It is also a mass burial site. Amid the snow-topped peaks and panoramic vistas, ghosts haunt the forest: Edgar Gstranz, a young skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, a philosophy student who committed suicide in her bathtub; and Karin Frenzel, a widow who (perhaps) died in a bus accident. 

Trillium Bay, 1889. Alexander Bostwick doesn't believe in ghosts, but the unexpected death of his bride has him feeling haunted. The lingering scent of her perfume—along with her personal possessions popping up in the most peculiar places—has him worried he's lost his senses as well as his wife. With half of Chicago feeling sorry for him and the other half suspecting he had a hand in her demise, Alex escapes to Trillium Bay, hoping peace and quiet might ease his troubled mind.

Dovey Van Dalen has a gorgeous day planned for her 200th birthday: driving her new Porsche, admiring the cherry blossoms abloom in her adopted city of Washington DC, and a little pampering. But her boss has other ideas. A powerful artifact has been stolen, and he fears it's causing chaos in the unmagical world . . .

A truck veers off an overpass and falls onto the interstate below, right into the middle of the morning commute. Many people lose their lives, and the city of Seattle reels from the disaster. When an elaborate mural that appears to glorify the event is discovered, it is seen as being in very poor taste. That's until it transpires it was painted two days before the crash. Was it a warning by some psychic or savant? Or the work of a psychopath who played a role in the tragedy, seeking to cause as much pain and disruption as possible?

Now capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin rose from insignificant origins on swampy soil, becoming a city of immigrants over the ages. Through a series of ten vignettes, Mary Fulbrook discusses the periods and regimes that shaped its characterwhether Prussian militarism; courtly...

“A heartbreaking and bittersweet novel about the need for queer joy even in the midst of the horrors of war. The ending had me in tears.”—Malinda Lo, New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of Last Night at the Telegraph Club For fans of Ruta Sepetys and Malinda...

When a five-year-old girl reports being saved by a mysterious being in the middle of a tornado, her story is readily dismissed. But less so the computer-assisted discovery of a pattern in a series of deaths that suggests they are no accident. Special agent Ilona Farris of the FBI puzzles over how a killer could predict the storm events so accurately, yet stops short at believing they are dealing with the thunder beings of Native American legend.

New York City, 1920. Grace Michelle has clawed her way from the streets to a dream role as costume designer for the glamorous Ziegfeld Follies. But when her sister—the show's dazzling star—is found dead, Grace's world crumbles. To find the killer, Grace must step into her sister's spotlight, trading sketches for sequins in a role she never wanted. With every curtain rise, the danger grows—onstage and off—as she's drawn into a tangled plot of fame, ambition, and betrayal.

Dovey didn't expect to fall in love after the age of 200, yet she can't stop thinking about Grant "Gib" Barlow, the gorgeous FBI agent who helped her crack her last case. A romance with an unbound is obviously a terrible idea, but for Gib, it could be fatal—because Dovey's employer, Elric Ostergaard, arguably the most powerful mystic in the world, also happens to be her longtime lover.

Now in its second edition, Sink Into Sleep provides the tools and techniques to reverse insomnia and improve sleep long-term. Insomnia, persistent trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, affects our daytime functioning and wellbeing. This book breaks down the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), the sleep program considered first-line treatment in the clinic, into a step-by-step and listener friendly program that can be easily followed at home.

Italy, 1943: With war blazing through Europe, nowhere is entirely safe—not even the remote hills of the Tuscan countryside. It's here that Italian partisans, including thousands of women, risk their lives to provide Jewish refugees with an escape route to Switzerland. And it's here, too, that Gianna Conti travels to join the Italian Resistance in the wake of her brother Matteo's death at the hands of German soldiers. Her father has been hiding Jewish refugees on their family's vineyard in Chianti, but now Gianna is bringing the fight directly to the enemy.

Ben Franklin's Guide to Wealth is the modern version of the treatise The Way of Wealth by Richard Saunders—one of Ben Franklin's many pseudonyms. Franklin practiced what he preached in the treatise, and it made him rich enough to have a full life, travel extensively, and follow his intellectual musings, which in turn led him to become an accomplished scientist, inventor, political activist, diplomat, and writer. Franklin wasn't born rich. He built his legacy using his intelligence, curiosity, natural good sense, and proclivity for thrift and hard work. When he died, he left a fortune.

In 1934, Lola was on top of the world. Dubbed "The Siren" by MGM, she was a protégé of Louis B. Mayer, the original talkie sex symbol before the rise of stars like Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. But like Harlow, Lola Grayson had a dominant stage mother and bad health that struggled to meet the demand of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Exploited, pushed, primped, and promoted as MGM's biggest star, Lola Grayson made one fatal mistake—falling in love with fellow MGM star Robert Taggart. Together, they were the golden couple that audiences demanded to see.

Thirty-year-old Charlotte James, better known to her mystery fans as C. J. Barrett, decides to take a break from writing her popular Steve Sheppard mystery series. Leaving New York City, she moves back to her hometown of Austin to wind down, recuperate, and maybe come up with some new ideas for...