Showing results by narrator "Will Damron" in All Categories

It’s summer, and Gotham City has cause for celebration. The last vestiges of The Joker’s toxic legacy have finally faded, just in time for the mayor to partner with retail magnate Max Shreck to stage a Fourth of July celebration for the ages. But not everyone is rejoicing. Batman’s eternal vigilance continues as threats from rival gangs and masked criminals escalate by the day. Meanwhile, on the streets, protests grow in opposition to the city’s lavish excesses.

When Tea accidentally resurrects her brother from the dead, she learns she is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy means that she's a bone witch, a title that makes her feared and ostracized by her community. But Tea finds solace and guidance with an older, wiser bone witch, who takes Tea and her brother to another land for training.

Blake Porter is riding high, until he's not. Fired abruptly from his job as a VP of marketing and unable to make the mortgage payments on the new brownstone he shares with his fiancée, he's desperate to make ends meet. Enter Whitney. Beautiful, charming, down-to-earth, and looking for a room to rent. She's exactly what Blake's looking for. Or is she? Because something isn't quite right. The neighbors start treating Blake differently. The smell of decay permeates his home, no matter how hard he scrubs. Strange noises jar him awake in the middle of the night.

After Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer. Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all, and if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been "exiled" to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found wrapped in plastic and weighed down at the bottom of the harbor. Crossing all lines of protocol and jurisdiction, he starts doggedly working the case.

Perla Wultz lives with her husband, Grant, and their precious daughter, Sophie, in a gated Pasadena community. Affluent, sociable, and accomplished, Perla plays the part of loving wife and mother to perfection. It seems an ideal life, if not for a decades-old crime that has become Perla’s dark and consuming secret obsession. Twenty-three years ago, Leewood Folcrum confessed to murdering two young girls during a birthday party. Though he’s been condemned to a life sentence, his crime is not forgotten.

Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast—again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres, and she sees little choice but to surrender herself in the exchange—again...

In late March 1944, as Stalin’s forces push into Ukraine, young Emil and Adeline Martel must make a terrible decision: Do they wait for the Soviet bear’s intrusion and risk being sent to Siberia? Or do they reluctantly follow the wolves—murderous Nazi officers who have pledged to protect “pure-blood” Germans? The Martels are one of many families of German heritage whose ancestors have farmed in Ukraine for more than a century.

Simon and Vicky couldn’t seem more normal: a wealthy Chicago couple, he a respected law professor, she an advocate for domestic violence victims. A stable, if unexciting marriage. But one thing’s for sure: absolutely nothing is what it seems. The pair are far from normal, and one of them just may be a killer. When the body of a beautiful socialite is found hanging in a mansion in a nearby suburb, Simon and Vicky’s secrets begin to unravel. A secret whirlwind affair. A twenty-million-dollar trust fund about to come due.

“The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Falls, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he’d take him there after finishing an errand.” Thus begins Fever Beach, with an errand that leads—in pure Hiaasen-style—into the depths of Florida at its most Floridian: a sun-soaked bastion of right-wing extremism, white power, greed, and corruption.

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager - obsessed with music, food, and girls - but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier - a move they think will keep him out of combat.

When ex-navy SEAL Salam “Fade” al-Fayed steps in front of a sniper’s bullet, he assumes that he’s reached the end of the road—his death wish has finally been answered. Instead, he wakes in a hospital. As one of the deadliest operatives in U.S. history, he’s now incapable of even standing without assistance. Alone and wanted by authorities, he’s destined to spend the rest of his life lying in a prison infirmary. So when a shadowy organization offers him a new identity and next-generation medical care, he has no choice but to agree. Nothing’s free, though.

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative flows like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction.

The Joker is dead, but not forgotten. Gotham City is saved, but it is still not safe. By night, its new symbol of hope, Batman, continues his fight to protect the innocent and the powerless. By day, his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, wonders whether there may someday be a future beyond skulking the city’s rooftops or the cavernous halls of his stately manor alongside the ever-dutiful Alfred Pennyworth. But even after death, the Clown Prince of Crime’s imprint can be seen in more than just the pavement.

Harry Booth started stealing at nine to keep a roof over his ailing mother’s head, slipping into luxurious, empty homes at night to find items he could trade for precious cash. When his mother finally succumbed to cancer, he left Chicago—but kept up his nightwork, developing into a master thief with a code of honor and an expertise in not attracting attention—or getting attached.

In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, from his precocious childhood in St. Louis to his first, failed startup experience; his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team; and his struggle to keep his company at the cutting edge while fending off determined rivals, including Elon Musk.

Miley's plans take a terrifying detour when she's abducted during a morning run. Held captive in a desolate off-grid cabin, she'll have to use her athletic prowess, cunning mind, and courage to survive. As the nightmare at the cabin escalates, Miley is forced to form an unlikely alliance and attempt a risky escape.

Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.

Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing eighteen pounds and measuring twenty-seven inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken in by his devout Amish grandparents who disapprove of all the attention and hide him away from the English world. But it’s hard to hide forever when you’re nearly eight feet tall.