Showing results by narrator "Thom Rivera" in All Categories

Cathy O’Connor has seen it all. Her dad owns the local Haunted Horror Museum, a popular location filled with spooky items. The museum has been trying to get its hands on a real mummy for a long time. And this year, a mysterious mummy, Arragotus, has arrived. But when Slappy is dropped at the museum’s doorstep the night before Cathy’s class is coming, scary things start to happen. The dummy meets the mummy, and nobody is safe. Will it be a wrap for Cathy’s friends and family?

Beginning with a novella by Spider-Man's co-creator Stan Lee and veteran Marvel writer Peter David retelling the wall-crawler's origin, this exciting anthology has original stories featuring one of the world's most enduring heroes.

On 3 December 1976, just weeks before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions, seven gunmen from West Kingston stormed his house. Marley survived and went on to perform at the free concert. Not a lot was recorded about the fate of the seven gunmen, but much has been said, whispered and sung about in the streets of West Kingston.

Josh Duffy is staring into the abyss. A decorated army veteran turned military contractor, his last mission went sideways, leaving him badly injured and his career derailed. Now, he’s working as a mall cop, trying to keep his family one step ahead of the bill collectors. So when a chance at redemption - and a big pay day - comes his way, Duff eagerly jumps in. The job - to ride shotgun on a motorcade of heavily armed and armored vehicles as they roll into Mexico’s cartel country.

On the eve of his 90th birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit - he has purchased hundreds of women - he asks a madam for her assistance. The 14-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to a master's work.

Inequality. Influence. Fraud. Sabotage. These are the themes of great fiction and our modern economy. In this collection of short stories by some of today’s most scintillating writers, the rich get poorer and the poor get richer. Yeah, right! From the heartbreaking to the hilarious, here are eight instantly classic battles over currency, class, privilege - and social distance.

You shouldn't come in here. You could get lost. It has happened before. I'll tell you the story one day, if you want to hear it. In fairy tales, there are men and there are wolves, there are beasts and dead parents, there are girls and forests. Ofelia knows all this, like any young woman with a head full of stories. And she sees right away what the Capitán is, in his immaculate uniform, boots and gloves, smiling: a wolf.

Former CIA operative turned mercenary for hire Ryan Decker’s specialty is rescuing kidnap victims. Hired by an influential US senator to liberate her daughter from a human-trafficking ring, Decker never anticipated sabotage or that the assault could go so disastrously wrong. The hostage is dead. His team is wiped out, and so are their families, including Decker’s own wife and son - eliminated one by one by the Russian mafia. And he’s survived to take the fall.

Nothing exciting happens on the Hill of Dust in the remote mountains of Mexico in the 1950s. There's no electricity, no plumbing, no cars, just day after day of pasturing goats. And now, without his sister and mother, 11-year-old Teo's life feels even more barren. And then one day, the mysterious young Esma, who calls herself the Gypsy Queen of Lightning, rolls into town like a fresh burst of color. Against all odds, her caravan's Mistress of Destiny predicts that Teo and Esma will be longtime friends.

The Lost Recordings is an audio documentary about Nueva Canción, a musical movement that emerged across Latin America in the 1960s and '70s. The genre became an essential means of artistic expression and social resistance to the many dictatorships and oppressive regimes of the time.

For decades now wealth and power have been shifting from states to markets. This experiment has been a failure for all but a privileged few. But this trend is beginning to reverse, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen the state play the most direct and positive role in citizens’ everyday lives in living memory. Graeme Garrard makes a powerful case for the state as our only realistic hope of countering the rising power of multinational corporations, organized crime, and international organizations that will always put their own interests first. 

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".

Dr. Amy Winslow tells the story: in foggy, nighttime San Francisco a jogging SFPD captain is savagely attacked by a Bengal tiger which then vanishes. In her ER, Amy labors unsuccessfully to save the captain’s life, then consoles his aggrieved closest friend, Lt. Luis Ortega. Neither suspects their lives will intertwine in a life-or-death mystery. 

Lean Brands provides a lean, agile approach to building global brands, helping you 1) quickly analyze your environment; 2) create a differentiated and meaningful brand positioning; and 3) bring your brand strategy to life on the ground, where it counts. You'll learn how to "recon" and take advantage of weaknesses of your competition, as well as hone in on what will work in new markets to make sure you are memorable. 

First contact with a mysterious race of aliens reveals an unusual request; a family's pet dog comes to grips with the newly bestowed gift of human-like intelligence; a poet, in danger and alone on a distant world, makes unlikely allies; hundreds of years in the future, a famous hermit lives in the sea above the now-underwater Harvard University; former friends navigate unsteady peace between human refugees and the technologically superior race that saved them; in a future where human life can be infinitely extended through cybertronic rebirth, one woman declines immortality.

When someone disappears on Northern California’s lawless Murder Mountain, it isn’t news. The vast terrain for illegal marijuana harvests is also a notorious black hole for outsiders. But when that someone is the family friend of the persuasive and righteous Senator Steele, finding him becomes covert investigator Ryan Decker’s mission. 

An unnamed paralegal, brought back to life through a controversial process, maneuvers through a near-future world that both needs and resents him. As the United States president spouts anti-reanimation rhetoric and giant pharmaceutical companies rake in profits, the man falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez. His world expands as he meets her network of family and friends, setting him on a course to discover his first-life history, which the reanimation process erased.

An alien race calling themselves the Kh'thon descend upon the planet, announcing that they are the former occupants and rightful owners of Earth. The evidence they present is startling: Their ships are manned by Homo sapiens, supposedly descendants of human beings who served the Kh'thon on Earth countless millennia ago, and their will is enforced by the Exemplar, humans augmented with a dizzying array of powers, each the match of any one of the X-Men.

Los Angeles, 1986. A group of right-wing Christians has put an initiative on the November ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps - and it looks like it’s going to pass. Rios, now living in LA, agrees to be counsel for a group of young activists who call themselves QUEER. QUEER claims to be committed to peaceful civil disobedience. But when one of its members is implicated in the bombing of an evangelical church that kills its pastor, Rios finds himself with a client suddenly facing the death penalty.

The stories in this collection reflect a fundamental truth about Santa Fe: history depends on who's telling it. Too often the story of this city has been told only by the conquerors and the tourism PR firms. Hear the stories that never make the glossy tour brochures: the working class and the underground, the decolonized and the ever-haunted; the Santa Fe only we know.... Conquered and reconquered, colonized and commodified, Santa Fe understands - from historical genocide to the murders of family members - the intimacy of violence.