Showing results by narrator "Richard Powers" in All Categories

Fate - is it written in the stars from the moment we are born, or is it a bendable thing that we can shape with our own hands? Jepp of Astraveld needs to know. He left his countryside home on the empty promise of a stranger, only to become a captive in the strange, luxurious prison that is Coudenberg Palace, the royal court of the Spanish infanta. Nobody warned Jepp that, as a court dwarf, daily injustices would become his seemingly unshakeable fate. If the humiliations were his alone, perhaps he could endure them, but it breaks Jepp’s heart to see his friend Lia suffer.

"Hunters found his body naked in the snow." So begins this astonishing new work of literary fiction. The body in the snow is that of Ben Wylie, the heir to America's second-wealthiest business dynasty, and it is found in a remote patch of Northern Canada. Far away, in post-rash New York, Jamie Cabot, the son of the Wylie family's housekeepers, must figure out how and why Ben died.

In the year 2036, the world's best boarding school is the Stansbury School. The students are screened at a young age and then given 12 years of the finest education and developmental drug regimen available. But when several alumni are murdered, school officials decide to keep the police in the dark. They discreetly ask the school's valedictorian to solve the mystery, but he discovers that the most obvious culprit, the school's chemically imbalanced delinquent and his own nemesis, is being framed.

Many people mistakenly believe that investing in real estate needs to be left to the professionals and property moguls. But the truth is anyone can build wealth by investing in real estate. The trick to becoming a successful investor? Getting a solid grasp on the basics. Real Estate Investing for Beginners gives you insight into how to successfully evaluate, buy, and maintain investment properties with confidence. Real Estate Investing for Beginners gives you the right set of tools to build the lifelong wealth and financial security you want.

Actor and award-winning travel writer Andrew McCarthy's featured story recounts his quest to uncover his family's Irish history while 25 other prominent writers tell their own heartfelt stories of connection. Spanning the globe, these stories offer personal takes on journeying home, whether the authors are actively seeking long-lost relatives, meeting up with seldom-seen family members, or perhaps just visiting the old country to get a feel for their roots.

Tom Fairchild is struggling to make it as a graphic artist, but his probation officer thinks he belongs in jail. Then millionaire Stuart Barlowe offers him $50,000 to travel to Italy with his daughter Allison, a map expert, to duplicate a rare Renaissance map. But Tom soon suspects that Barlowe wants a forgery, not a duplicate. When people start turning up dead, and Tom and Allison realize they are being tailed, it quickly becomes clear that they have no one to trust but each other.

Nathan Nelson is just above average in everything he does. However, his father, a renowned physicist, pursuing his quest to uncover his son's latent gifts, sends Nathan to whiz-kid summer camps. By the time Nathan is 17, hopes for a late-blooming prodigy seem dashed. But then a tragic accident and ensuing coma leave Nathan with an altered mind that allows him to memorize vast amounts of information.

Someone is about to make a killing in the music industry. Why would songwriting legend Gideon Pike disappear just as his 30-year career turns a multimillion-dollar profit Music columnist Mick Sever goes looking for his missing friend Gideon in the gritty backrooms of Miami's nightclubs, dodging suicide speedboats and running from sniper fire. What surfaces is how the major players in the music industry are not making the headlines, but just pulling the strings that create them.

What makes a penguin a bird? Is a camel more closely related to a horse than to a giraffe? Why is a whale not a fish? Similar puzzles preoccupied Charles Darwin throughout his life. Whimsy, in the playfulness of stories for children, is a way to appreciate Darwinian histories. In Do Elephants Have Knees? Charles R. Ault Jr. uses the fanciful imagery of story to explain Darwinian thought. At the same time, he launches careful consideration of Darwin's humanity, the origins of his curiosity, and his ideas.

Theodore Mead Fegley has always been the smartest person he knows. By age 12 he was in high school, and by 15 he was attending a top-ranking university. And now, at the tender age of 18, he's on the verge of proving the Riemann Hypothesis, a mathematical equation that has mystified academics for almost 150 years. But only days before graduation, Mead suddenly packs his bags and flees home to rural Illinois.

How many 14-year-old boys would turn down an offer of time travel to any baseball game in history? Certainly not die-hard New York Yankees fan Matt Collier. Accompanied by the Time Keeper, guardian of Time throughout the universe, Matt becomes the batboy for his beloved team and tries to change the outcome of the 1960 World Series, the first ever to end with a home run.

A dramatic, ambitious first novel of a Midwestern family's self-destruction and repair.

From one coast to the other, to the far side of the globe, three diverse characters follow paths that will mysteriously connect: Tina Lopez, endowed with a special gift from God; Ethan Kelly, a young Irish-American priest-in-training; and K.C. Littleton, who will prove that old adage, "Be careful what you wish for." All will discover a new appreciation for faith, forgiveness, and family.

When children’s hospital volunteer and high-school student Gene Adamson hears the words of the dying man, the gunman who used him as a shield after murdering a prominent geneticist, Gene thinks the man delirious. But then the bodies of killer and victim disappear from the morgue, and a ten-year-old girl desperately needing a heart transplant is mysteriously bumped from her number-one spot on the organ-recipient list. The list. What is the list?

Harms' Way takes us into the chilling world of a supermax detention facility where America's most psychotic killers are kept in solitary confinement. Yet as we get to know Ethan and explore this world through his wry humor and tragic sense of destiny, we find ourselves uncomfortably at home. 

Near Cape Cod, Provincetown, with a gay resort, an art colony, and a working fishing port, has long been a place of freedom, escape, diversity, and risk. Mark Winslow, a Boston comic, arrives with his troupe of actors, ready to break into the Provincetown club circuit. But the town and the region are far from peaceful this summer.

Pastor Sheldon Long was born of the woods, raised in a secluded cabin by a mute mother and an abusive father who preached God's vengeance. Forced to take control of his own destiny, Pastor Long found God in his own way, melded with the mythologies of his mother's tribe. Now he's out to send the wicked, as he has judged them, to heaven. Steven, Pastor Long's son, is pining for his former babysitter and crushing on nearly every girl he goes to school with. Soon his preoccupation with the opposite sex lures him into investigating a string of drownings that police are declaring accidents.

Rock-and-roll journalist Mick Sever is back with a new assignment: interview music legend Danny Murtz. One of the most successful producers in history, Murtz has walls lined with platinum records - and a closet full of skeletons. But before Mick can hop a plane to the island paradise where Murtz has secluded himself after his latest "incident" (Murtz's romantic conquests have a way of vanishing into thin air), he's nearly run down by a speeding car. Coincidence?

A young woman is found strangled, dressed in Victorian finery as if for high tea, in Mingo House, a morbid brownstone and museum, a 19th-century time capsule in Boston’s Back Bay. Dubbed the “Victorian Girl” by the media everywhere, she becomes the eye of a hurricane of publicity and speculation and of a darkness reaching back to the Mingo family’s roots in England and to the builders of the mansion, a Civil War arms dealer and his séance-holding wife.

Bobby Eckstrum is known around the town of Columbia as a drunk. In a surprising turn of events, he is thought to have murdered and robbed Roger Simms, a local rancher. A posse is organized, and they hunt down and kill the man they believe to be Bobby. But Destiny Eckstrum, Bobby's daughter, believes they did not kill her father, but rather his equally shiftless brother who is said to live elsewhere in Colorado.