Showing results by narrator "Roxanne Hernandez" in All Categories

FBI Special Agent Nina Guerrera escaped a serial killer’s trap at 16. Years later, when she’s jumped in a Virginia park, a video of the attack goes viral. Legions of new fans are not the only ones impressed with her fighting skills. The man who abducted her 11 years ago is watching. Determined to reclaim his lost prize, he commits a grisly murder designed to pull her into the investigation...but his games are just beginning. And he’s using the internet to invite the public to play along. 

Written with compassionate realism and wit, the stories in this mesmerizing collection depict the disparities of town and village life in South America, of the frightfully poor and outrageously rich, of memories and illusions, and of lost opportunities and present joys. Stories include "No One Writes to the Colonel", "Tuesday Siesta", "One of These Days", "There Are No Thieves in This Town", "Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon", "Montiel's Widow", "One Day After Saturday", "Artificial Roses", and "Big Mama's Funeral".

The daughter of a Chilean father and a Filipina mother, Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon grew up as a shy, timid child in a small Midwestern town. Targeted by school bullies and dismissed by many of her teachers, she worried that people would find out the truth: that she was INTF. Incompetent. Nerd. Terrified. Failure. Yet in the span of just six years, Cecilia became the first Latina pilot to secure a place on the United States Unlimited Aerobatic Team and earn the right to represent her country at the Olympics of aviation, the World Aerobatic Championships. How did she do it?

A family is murdered as they sleep. FBI Special Agent Nina Guerrera and her new team are tasked with determining whether there is any link between this attack and another triple homicide from four years earlier and more than 2,000 miles away. In the process, they’ll discover a serial killer so cunning that his grisly trail of death spanning nearly three decades has gone undetected. Each crime scene reminds Nina of the ghostly Latin folktale of La Llorona, which terrified her when she was an abandoned and vulnerable child. Now it’s back to haunt her.

Luis Fuentes has always been sheltered from the gang violence that nearly destroyed his brothers' lives. But that didn't stop him from taking risks - whether he's scaling a mountain in the Rockies or dreaming of a future as an astronaut, Luis can't stop looking for the next thrill.

Every year in the United States there are fifteen thousand murders, give or take a few hundred. Of those, nearly forty percent go unsolved. In this six-part audio series, Christina Walsh is determined to change that. After struggling with the loss of her father, she sets out on a journey to bring the justice that has eluded her to the families of other victims. And she starts with a particularly strange case. The murder of world-renowned violinist Leona McPherson who mysteriously disappeared years ago after a concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. 

For 2,000 years, the Mayan Calendar has prophesied the end of mankind on a date equating to December 21st, 2012. As that day approaches, greed, corruption, economic collapse, and violence seem to be pushing our species to the predicted brink of disaster. But there is another doomsday threat looming in our near future, a very real threat that can wipe out not only humanity but our entire planet. Phobos: Mayan Fear, Steve Alten's third book in the Mayan prophecy-based Domain series, is a doomsday rollercoaster ride of adventure.

What happens to us when we die? Is there really an afterlife? Do we possess souls? Does God exist? For Michael Gabriel the answers to these questions lie in another dimension, a realm of eternity where there is no concept of time, only pure life force, pure existence, and pure evil. Now, as was foretold 500 years ago in the Mayan Popol Vuh, Michael's sons are born: white-haired, azure-eyed Jacob, blessed with inhuman physical prowess, intelligence, and insight into the cosmos; and dark-haired Immanuel, who refuses his genetic calling, desiring only a normal life.

It's a glamorous life, but 16-year-old Kaitlin Burke, costar of one of the hottest shows on TV, is exhausted from the pressures of fame. Then she hits on an outrageously daring solution, one that has to remain top secret or it will jeopardize everything she's ever worked for.

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

For 32 years archaeologist Julius Gabriel investigated the Mayan calendar, a 2,500-year-old enigma of time and space that predicts humanity will perish on December 21, 2012 (the winter solstice). Julius believes that certain mysterious sites represent pieces of a global puzzle linked to the salvation of our species. Ridiculed by his peers, Julius dies before he can solve the doomsday prophecy. Now only one person can prevent our annihilation: Julius' son, Michael, a patient locked up in a Miami mental asylum.

Six female undergrads at an elite university vanish. The media descends. The families demand action. And as Special Agent Nina Guerrera follows clue by chilling clue, she realizes she’s tracking the most cunning predator of her career. The case takes a turn for the worse, and the bizarre, when several victims are found perfectly preserved in an underground chamber of an abandoned mine. No signs of violence, no hint of how they died. Just more evidence that the killer is cruel, calculating, and a master of mind control.

On the stolen throne of Darion sits the ursurper, Sedry, haunted by the silent grey eyes of the half-sister he banished, whose gift for magic was equal to his own; Elfrid, the Bastard. At watch, folded into the darkness, Bal of Korent remembers a half-grown, dark-haired child, swift as a sabre, trained in the ways of the warrior, as no woman before: Elfrid, the Sword. In the hugshed gloom of night, a shadowed figure walks alone. Waiting for the morning, for battle, for vengeance. She has waited in exile for eight long years. Now, Elfrid of Darion has come home....

From an O. Henry Prize-winner, this dazzling novel in stories marks the arrival of a powerfully original and beguiling new voice in American fiction. The linked stories that make up this spare and beautifully written novel follow the life of Ayela, the illegitimate daughter of a Mexican dressmaker, and create a portrait, composite yet intriguingly incomplete, that captures the complexity of who she was.

Isabel Allende is an informative introduction to the distinguished author. Isabel Allende, one of the world's most widely read Latin American writers, is a Chilean novelest who, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was strongly influenced by her grandparents. Her vivid fiction, such as The House of the Spirits, blends realism with magical elements and spotlights political and often feminist concerns.

When Beatriz, lonely and desperate for money, places an ad as a writing consultant in the local paper, her first client is Dolores Maria Rubia de Alicanto, an imposing old widow who has hired her to transcribe the story of her life. Beatriz is taken aback when the woman starts with the words "My husband betrayed me..." and proceeds to relay a gripping story of deception, crumbled desire, and vengeance.

I throw back my tumble of black hair, roll one bare shoulder forward, then the other. The stack of bangles on each wrist shimmies and slides as my hands rise like birds in flight..Set during the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War, sixteen-year-old Drina yearns to dance Flamenco. When she dances, she forgets who she is. She forgets what seems to be her legacy: I am nothing. I belong nowhere. Why does her mother forbid her to dance, the very thing that makes her feel alive?

Sixteen-year-olds Charlie, Keiran, Brooke, and Hallie have just been signed up for their own reality television show. They can't even believe it. "You'll be The Hills meets The Secret Life of the American Teenager," the Armani-suited executive tells them, "and the hottest thing on our network." How could they say no? But soon enough, cameras following them everywhere and interfering producers surreptitiously scripting their lives start to affect the four best friends' relationship.

Check it out: not just a book about sex, but a look at girl culture by teenagers. No stuffy school textbook. No nosy adults. Just a diverse group of teen girls from a community youth project who had questions about sexuality. To find answers, they collected stories, poetry, and artwork from other youths. They also interviewed frontline health experts to get solid facts about the personalities and pressures that young women have to deal with. It's a great mix of real-life examples and life-saving info.

At once surreal and grounded in stark reality, these stories offer poignant, touching, and at times shocking insight into the lives and minds of women in modern Brazil. Varied in detail, each tale explores a woman's sense of identity and place, within Brazilian society and at vulnerable moments within her most intimate relationships. Diving deep to the raw psychological core of her protagonists, Leite shatters the traditional rules for both women and literature, producing a powerful voice of female rebellion.