Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

This collection features a selection of classic short stories and poems by legendary Western authors Stephen Crane, Bret Harte, and Jack London.

Hazel's parents saw the 1912 sinking of the Titanic as a portent of doom and locked their daughter away. Isolated and alone, each birthday she wishes to be free, whatever the risk. If only her childhood friend, Henry, would return and breach the high walls. On the front lines of the Great War, Henry kept a token of happier times - a worn photograph of a young girl with long blonde plaits. He returns from war damaged and vowing to do one brave thing to make up for his cowardice: release Hazel from her prison.

It all comes down to this: Bobby has to find the girl, save the woman, wake the team, stop the disaster, open the door, and eat the partridge in a pear tree. Not even Head Cowboy can do it all alone. Like it or not, he needs help, and the only places he has left to look for it are the unlikely ones.

Where does a hit man draw the line? With a controversial presidential election just weeks away, Quarry is hired to carry out a rare political assignment: kill the Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd, a passionate civil rights crusader and campaigner for the underdog candidate. But when a hate group out of Ferguson, Missouri, turns out to be gunning for the same target, Quarry starts to wonder just who it is he's working for.

Sixteen-year-old Claire wants her father back. His death left her only memories and an empty locket. After six difficult years in foster care, her vocabulary no longer includes "hope" and "trust". But everything changes dramatically when she encounters Justin, a Spirit Knight restlessly hunting dangerous ghosts that devour the living, who rides into her path on his magical horse and takes her under his wing. When an evil spirit threatens Claire's life, she'll need Justin's help to survive.

Now genuinely a Spirit Knight, 16-year-old Claire wants to know everything about the job. Fate dumps a dragon on her, and she only has more questions. She knows how much she needs training and wishes she could snap her fingers to learn everything at once. Justin can answer Claire's questions, but between his demanding young daughters, his sarcastic horse, and the recent loss of his own mentor, he'd rather just be a Knight.

The Spaghetti is a floating palace of elegance and entertainment. There's only one problem: Miss LaPasta doesn't want Barnabas Brambles to come aboard, because she's heard he's the meanest man alive. Lucky for Barnabas Brambles, his boss is Sir Sidney, the nicest man alive.

When Sir Sidney, a kindly old circus owner, becomes too tired to travel with his show, he places a Help Wanted ad in the newspaper. Enter Barnabas Brambles: "I have a degree in lion taming from the University of Piccadilly Circus." But does Leo the lion need taming? Will Elsa the elephant still get her gourmet peanuts? And what will Brambles say when he discovers Bert and Gert - two mice who travel with the circus on popcorn cleanup patrol?

In Speculative Los Angeles, 14 of the city’s most prophetic voices reimagine the city in very different ways. In this audiobook, you’ll encounter 21st-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization.

A railroad vice president and his chauffeur are struck with sudden and mysterious seizures on their way to work; a family in New York City suffers from a dangerous disease; the healthy American consul in the Virgin Islands collapses and dies without explanation; a Wall Street speculator is apparently stabbed to death with a rubber dagger. When facing an unsolvable mystery that defies all easy explanation, Professor Craig Kennedy, armed with his knowledge of chemistry, technology, and Freudian psychology, is just the man for the job.

Professor Craig Kennedy and his loyal sidekick, newspaper reporter Walter Jameson, first learn of the Clutching Hand and his gang when they investigate a string of murders involving the policyholders of Taylor Dodge's insurance company. After receiving a threatening note, Dodge himself is robbed and killed, and his daughter, Elaine, turns to Kennedy for help. Using the latest advances in forensic science, the professor uncovers the exotic and deadly scheme behind the murders. But when the Clutching Hand and his band of evildoers kidnap Elaine, Kennedy must leap into action.

Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, with the help of his friend newspaper reporter Hutchison Hatch, solves a variety of mysteries using cold, hard logic. No matter how twisted the trail of clues or how clever the perpetrator, Professor Van Dusen, aptly dubbed “The Thinking Machine”, reminds us that “two and two make four, not some times, but all the time”.

Silvariah Frandelle, the famed “Miner Girl” who escaped certain death on Mars, wants nothing more than a stable life on Earth, free from the trauma of the past. Lazarus Penn stands in her way. No device or tactic is beneath him as he fights to take possession of her and everything that belongs to her. From the courts of Guam City, the tourist haven floating in space, to the depths of the sea, to the streets of Old Seattle, he sets forces in pursuit, both human and otherwise, to regain his power over her and take possession of her as is - he believes - his right.

The circus is in town, and on the planet Boon, that’s big - potentially riotous - news. The delicate, decaying political balance maintained by the cloned human grands at the expense of the uplifted dog and cat populations is in danger of toppling under the influence of mysterious forces both outer and inner.

Into the darkness within; or else the light.... When Margaret Atwood wrote these words, she left open the possibility that even our darkest tales may harbor a glimmer of hope. In Or Else the Light, the third and final entry in the Dystopia Triptych, more than a dozen of the best minds in science fiction conclude their stories with a descent into darkness, or perhaps a ray of light.

Leonardo DiCaprio. Alex Rodriguez. Tobey Maguire. Affleck. Damon. Cassavetes. What do these people have in common? Not just fame and fortune; all these men are also alumni of the ultra-exclusive, high-stakes poker ring that inspired Aaron Sorkin's Oscar-nominated film, Molly's Game. But Houston Curtis, the card shark who co-founded the game with Tobey Maguire, knows that Sorkin's is the whitewashed version. In Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist, Curtis goes all-in, revealing the true story behind the game. 

Quarry, star of 13 previous novels, a comic book, and the acclaimed Cinemax TV series, returns in an all-new assignment that takes the hitman's hitman into uncharted territory, when he finds out that for the first time someone has taken out a hit on him. And is the mysterious killer assigned to hit the hitman someone from Quarry's past? Maybe even a past lover?

As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages - of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain - the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other, but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required intelligence and clear-sightedness as characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

In this original collection from Skyboat Media and Blackstone Publishing, Elizabeth Gaskell showcases the height of gothic fiction's ability to delight in the otherworldly and to dig deep into what truly haunts us. Set against the backdrop of the Salem witch trials, "Lois the Witch" reveals much about the complicity of mankind. Recently orphaned, Lois is forced to leave the English parsonage that had been her home and sail to America.

The survivor of a plane crash wakes up in a hospital in Canada, his memory a blank. Then in walks Kitty, a gorgeous woman, who tells him that he is Paul Madden, a photographer and her fiancé. Not bad. Except that a man on the phone keeps calling him Matt Helm. Things don’t add up. This can only mean trouble....