Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

On a windy night in 1937, a 17-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him "Cesare" after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies.

FBI agent Puller Monk is losing his mind. His father passed away six months ago and left him a predisposition for Alzheimer's disease. Add to that a lethal American spy raised by the North Koreans, and Monk's life just got a lot more complicated. Aware of his dark side and willingness to take chances no matter what the risk, Monk is asked by the NSA to go undercover. His mission: find the sleeper spy, infiltrate the contact she's been seducing, and stop her before she carries out her shadowy objective.

One frigid, January morning in Manhattan, a new father, racked by sleep deprivation, decides to let his wife sleep in - then spontaneously flees lower Manhattan with the baby for a weekend in the Caribbean. It wasn’t a kidnapping, he wasn’t leaving his wife; he just wanted to spend a little time with the baby and give his wife a break. When the wife awakes, truly rested for the first time in nearly a year, she feels great - and embarks on a city adventure as misguided in its own way as her husband’s impulsive escape. Told from the couple’s alternating points of view, the story unfolds across one life-changing long weekend.

On their quest to reach the very core of the Earth, Professor Lindenbrock and his nephew, Axel, gain access to the interior by travelling north to cold and barren Iceland, where they enter the subterranean regions through the cone of the extinct volcano Sneffels.

Imprisoned at Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp, Daniel feels his humanity slipping away. Treasured memories of the young woman he loved and the prayers that once lingered on his lips become hazier with each passing day. Then a visit from a mysterious stranger changes everything, as Daniel’s former identity as a crafter of fine violins is revealed to all. The camp’s two most dangerous men use this information to make a cruel wager....

During 20 years of almost total darkness in a rat-infested cell, Keith Johnson has had time to plan. So, like a ghost, he has returned to even the score. He has no intention of killing his betrayers; he wants to ruin their lives like they ruined his. Johnson's elaborate plan is meant to cause the three to self-destruct, and given their characters, it ought to be easy. But his scheme goes haywire with consequences he neither foresees nor wants.

Twelve original dark academia stories from bestselling thriller writers—imagine darkened libraries, exclusive elite schools, looming Gothic towers, charismatic professors, illicit affairs, the tang of autumn in the air . . . and the rivalries and obsessions that lead to murder.

Otto Penzler presents a collection of 19 unsolved mystery stories by a number of noted authors, including Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, and Mark Twain, where the ending is left up to the listener to determine.

Late on the evening of October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of 18 raiders descended on Harpers Ferry at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages, and retreated to a fire engine house. The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted, and hanged. Among Brown's raiders were five African Americans whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and, even today, are little remembered.

Charles "Jay" Tice was a spy's spy. The chief of the CIA's elite Clandestine Services, he was a legend throughout the world of international intelligence. But secretly he was also a traitor, reputedly selling information that will seriously compromise the security of the United States for decades to come. Since his treachery was exposed, Tice has been kept under strict surveillance in a maximum security prison.Then one morning, his cell is discovered empty. Jay Tice has vanished - without tripping an alarm or leaving any trace of his passing.

"For Christ sake don’t become a fluffmeister," are the last words Barnaby Griswold gets from his father. But despite trying to turn out otherwise, Barnaby knows himself a fool and already makes his living as a fluffmeister, as a puffer-up of investments. Well-bred, more or less educated, friendly to everyone, Barnaby is in fact foolishly successful. Until he blows it all. At 46, disgraced and broke and lonely, Barnaby must repair his life. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll find out that doing the foolish thing can lead to redemption.

The Soviet Union is in turmoil. With the election of Gorbachev have come new ideas about freedom, compassion, and openness - ideas that leave no place for the dark machinations of the KGB. Reform is coming to the Soviet intelligence service, unless Victor Ivanovich Kazin can stop it. Kazin is one of the Old Guard, and an agent doesn’t survive three decades in the KGB without being relentless. He is a liar, a cheat, a backstabber - and he is proud of it.

Mr. Phileas Fogg, master of precision, enters into the strangest wager ever made over the whist table--that he will circle the globe in 80 days. The news astounds Jean Passepartout, sometime wandering minstrel, bareback rider, funambulist, gymnast, and fireman, now turned valet to Mr. Fogg in the expectancy of a quiet and well-regulated life. For the next 80 days, their lives are anything but quiet or well regulated.

War in Europe began with the first human migrants. Rival bands fought for thousands of years before the Greeks and Romans began writing about their military history, first as legend—for instance, the hero Achilles battling the Trojans—and then as fact. Finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technology exploded: railroads, steamships, telegraphs, machine guns, automobiles, airplanes, and tanks enabled European states to muster, equip, arm, transport, and command more men than ever before, with more firepower than ever before.

In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp's three-year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. In Hell's Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, 10 members of Ripp's family on his father's side died in the Holocaust. His mother's side of the family, numbering 30 people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power.

The Euganean Hills golf community in northern Italy is a golfer's paradise. With a perpetual smell of freshly cut grass, rolling green plains, and bright blue skies, it seems nothing could go wrong for the tight-knit group that lives there. But the normally laid-back residents are shaken to their cores when one of their own turns up at the club brutally murdered. After discovering his friend's body, investigative journalist Riccardo Ranieri makes it his mission to track down the perpetrator of the heinous crime.

Charlie is a sportswriter whose father's unexpected heart attack sets his own biological clock ticking. He decides he wants a family, but he doesn't even have a girlfriend. He enlists the help of Lacy, a single mom who works on the advice desk of their newspaper. The two develop a fast friendship that threatens to become very romantic indeed.

Most New Yorkers, even famous ones, have cherished rituals and favorite places that connect them to their city in unique ways. They have their beloved restaurants, museums, parks, galleries, landmarks, haunts, and hideaways. It may be watching tango dancers on Saturday nights in Central Park. Or riding a bike over the Brooklyn Bridge for a slice of Grimaldi's pepperoni pizza and a view of the Manhattan skyline from across the East River.

After the bursting of the real-estate bubble, the US pushed a monetary and fiscal policy that is, at best, blatantly wrong, and, at worst, carries enormous financial risk. And because Washington knows this, America's greatest weapon - its propaganda machine - has been called into service, diverting attention away from the fact that it was and continues to be government interference in the market economy that's lead us to where we are now, namely at the end of one financial calamity and the beginning of yet another.

J. D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American World War II draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war - from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.