Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Riker" in All Categories

Murder is not a one-size-fits-all crime. People kill for many reasons. Revenge. Jealously. Hate. Even love. Officer Georgia Morgan with the Nashville Police Department Forensics Unit didn’t generally care about motivation behind a killing. That was big picture. She cared about the micro picture: hair fibers, fingerprints, DNA, and all the other minute details that proved guilt or innocence. Homicide Detective Jake Bishop was her opposite.

Jenny McAllister might not have been the most beautiful woman in the great hall, but she was certainly the most memorable. Even in the London high society of Wallis Simpson’s circle, the passion in her face drew attention, as if there were a flame inside her that no pain or fear could quench. The Great War had been over for eighteen years, but the horror of it still permeated everything. The remnants of a lost generation danced too wildly and laughed with too much ease.

These 11 stories by Joshua Ferris, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, are at once thrilling, strange, and comic. The modern tribulations of marriage, ambition, and the fear of missing out as the temptations flow like wine and the minutes of life tick down are explored with the characteristic wit and insight that have made Ferris one of our most critically acclaimed novelists.

After Alice Dreger's live tweeting of her son's abstinence sex ed class went viral, Dreger was asked by many parents how she had managed to raise a 14-year-old so comfortable talking about sex - comfortable enough even to challenge sex ed teachers when they presented misinformation. The Talk is a response to those questions.

Best-selling authors Jeffery Deaver and Anne Perry join rising stars like Dana Chamblee Carpenter and Paul Gail Benson in a collection that proves Music City is a deadly place to be when your song gets called. Featuring stories by Donald Bain, Robert Dugoni, Jefferson Bass, Mary Burton, Jonathan Stone, Steven James, Maggie Toussaint, Clay Stafford, Heywood Gould, Jaden Terrell, and more....

This fictionalized true story revolves around the relationship of a couple planning to marry who end up in a bitter feud over a prenuptial agreement with a villa at Lake Como, Italy becoming the critical point shaping the deal. Victor Paxton, the uber rich older man, lives in Chicago and Palm Beach where he meets the attractive younger Sydney Wyles who works in a high-end Palm Beach art gallery owned by a longtime friend of his from Chicago, the eccentric James Whitmore.

He was deader than a dead duck up a dead end with a dead weight tied to his cold dead ankles. But his widow, sitting at his bedside, chafing his hand and talking softly to him, every so often bending over to kiss him, still didn’t seem quite ready to let him go. The doc caught the eye of the driver, hovering in the doorway with the body bag as his partner rolled the gurney along the hall.

An old man crawled down the Ozarks from Elsinore to Gideon. He was dying and wanted to find his son. Six-year-old Sybil sat braiding the hair of a doll while the old man yelled his sad story through her window. Spit shot through the gaps of his missing teeth and splattered against the glass. But in rural Missouri, that was no excuse for a lack of hospitality.

Sara Ainsley Sims awoke to darkness. She lay face down, cheek pressed against the cool concrete. She lifted her head. On the wall, half-moons of light came into focus, then blurred. Disoriented, she fought the urge to throw up. She struggled to sit, but the plastic ribs of her corset jabbed her sides, and the stiff netting of the crinoline petticoat entangled her legs. Head pounding, she realized she still wore her vintage re-enactor gown. The night filtered back to her.

I made my way from the Vietnam Memorial and across a soccer field, only to witness that worm, Jack Adams, tugging on the collar of his trench coat—he was actually wearing a trench coat—and readjusting a pair of sunglasses. I’d almost laughed when the paunchy, balding Adams, chief operations engineer for NASA, had insisted that I meet him on a park bench at West Potomac Park.

A woman called to me from the end of the grocery aisle. “Yoo-hoo, Baxley! Did you hear about last night’s burglary?” Charlotte Armstrong was my best friend and a reporter for our weekly paper. Excitement radiated from her plus-sized body, fluorescent lighting glinted off her purple glasses. I put down the generic peanut butter I’d been considering. “Are you kidding? The whodunit question buzzed around the hardware store and the bank like a drunken hornet.”