Showing results by narrator "Todd Haberkorn" in All Categories

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly 500 stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap.

Life's been hard for Zeke. Being a punching bag for his alcoholic father has turned him into stone. Not even the dodgy trailer park he lives in can scare him. Fighting is his release and sex, drugs, and his guitar bring him peace, but deep down Zeke isn't quite as hard as he makes himself out to be. When he meets Patience, she finds all his broken pieces and puts him back together. She's a ray of light in his shadowed life and the last thing he wants to do is bring her into his dark world.

Amateur sleuth and restless spirit Pascha gets the chance of a post-lifetime when a reporter turns up dead. Detective Gregor Kreidler - a friend of Pascha's crime-fighting partner, coroner Martin Gänsewein - tops the list of suspects for the murder of Susanne Hauschild, who also happens to be Gregor's ex-wife. Martin already has his hands full with his girlfriend - who's ready to give birth any day - and he's too distracted to comb the streets, so Pascha decides to play ghost cop with gusto.

avid is having the summer of his life at his grandmother’s Intergalactic Bed & Breakfast, an inn for vacationing aliens. By now even the slimiest tourists don’t faze him, and he has all of security officer Tate’s safety procedures down pat. In fact, David thinks it’s about time the grown-ups entrusted him and his friend Amy with even more responsibility. David and Amy get their big break when Grandma is invited to travel long-distance to accept an award and Tate decides to follow her.

Tony’s mom, Al, is a terrific single mother who works as a dancer at the Kitty Kat Club. Twelve-year-old Tony is a budding artist, inspired by backstage life at the club. When some of his drawings end up in an art show and catch the attention of the social services agency, Al and Tony find themselves in the middle of a legal wrangle and a media circus. Is Al a responsible mother? It’s the case of the stripper vs. the state, and Al isn’t giving Tony up without a fight.

Some people die heroically, others accidentally. Some people die for a cause, while others die from making a single bad choice. When Daniel Anderson’s older brother is killed in Iraq, he wonders which category Eli’s death falls into. To deliberately put himself at such risk, to leave Danny - who always depended on him - Eli must have died heroically, to make the world a better place, right? In an attempt to puzzle out this crushing loss, Danny creates a Book of the Dead - an old binder that he fills with details about dead people.

As members of the yearbook committee, Nick, Zola, Matt, and Christina are eager to capture all the memorable moments of their junior year at Lewis and Clark High School - the plays and football games, dances and fund-drives, teachers and classes that are the epicenter of their teenage lives. But how do you document a horrific tragedy - a deadly school shooting by a classmate?

August DuPont has spent his whole life inside a dilapidated house with his aunt Hydrangea. His lonely existence ends abruptly with the arrival of an invitation to meet an aunt - and cousins - he didn't even know existed. When Aunt Orchid suggests that August attend school with his cousins, it's a dream come true. But August has scarcely begun to celebrate his reversal of fortune when he is confronted by a small problem on his way home. So begins an adventure filled with a wild child, a zombie, a fabled white alligator, and an unimaginable family secret.

When marine engineer and very part-time spook Tom Dugan becomes collateral damage in the War on Terror, he's not about to take it lying down. Falsely implicated in a hijacking, he's offered a chance to clear himself by helping the CIA snare their real prey, Dugan's best friend, London ship owner Alex Kairouz. Reluctantly, Dugan agrees to go undercover in Alex's company, despite doubts about his friend's guilt. Once undercover, Dugan's steadfast refusal to accept Alex's guilt puts him at odds not only with his CIA superiors, but also with a beautiful British agent with whom he's romantically involved.

When ex-military contractor John Knox receives a text from partner Grace Chu warning that she fears her cover may have been blown while on assignment, he jumps into action. Knox must locate her overseas handlers, convince them of the threat, and then attempt to retrace the well-hidden steps of a woman who had been attempting to determine how one million euros' worth of AIDS vaccine disappeared, all while eluding angry poachers on a parallel trail.

To keep the light of his life, he'll have to do some dark things. After Matt Caine loses his wife in a car accident, all he has left is his daughter, Anna. But just as the little girl - who survived the accident - finally starts thriving, Matt's former in-laws threaten to take her away via a bitter custody battle. Desperate to keep Anna and in debt to some dangerous local thugs, Matt has no good options. But he does have Jay, one very bad friend.

As America plunges into the Great Depression, Marthanne Hendrix finds herself in rural Vidalia, Georgia, with no memory of how she got there.

Bewildered when the neighbors call her Oma, Marthanne is haunted by memories of another life—and another self. With the help of Comfort, a domestic worker living with her own tremendous loss, Marthanne discovers that Oma is another distinct personality inhabiting her body. In a time when mental illness is taboo, Marthanne and Oma’s simple, small-town life is fraught with complexity and danger.

With gossip running rampant, Marthanne and Oma will do anything to avoid their greatest fear: commitment to an insane asylum. Only by relying on Comfort’s kindness can they navigate their uncertain future. Friendship becomes sanctuary, and the quest for an ordinary life leads to an extraordinary bond.

Deeply moving and exquisitely wrought, Show Me a Kindness is a haunting novel of love, survival, and hiding in plain sight.

York August Sixteen was abandoned as a baby, abused and molested as a child, and beaten and harassed as a teen and had his rightful place in the Republic's Space Navy stolen from him. Fighting back against huge government systems was useless. Dispensing justice on an individual, case-by-case basis was more to his liking, yet even that was taken away when he was stationed on a lonely communication space station. York's life would change when he decided to seek justice for people even less fortunate than him.

Fynn has always been lazy: his favorite activities are skipping class, smoking, and lounging around. When his girlfriend breaks up with him, telling him to try doing something else for a change, he has no idea where to even start. One night, on a walk around the neighborhood, he comes across Niko stargazing on a hill. Niko wants nothing to do with this chain-smoking, loud-mouthed guy getting in the way of his astronomy - but Fynn is intrigued. What's up with this nerdy boy who loves to watch the stars, and why is Fynn so captivated by him?

When Sir Sidney, a kindly old circus owner, becomes too tired to travel with his show, he places a Help Wanted ad in the newspaper. Enter Barnabas Brambles: "I have a degree in lion taming from the University of Piccadilly Circus." But does Leo the lion need taming? Will Elsa the elephant still get her gourmet peanuts? And what will Brambles say when he discovers Bert and Gert - two mice who travel with the circus on popcorn cleanup patrol?

In this strange, new world deep among the shadows under a triple-canopy jungle and plagued by dangers real and imagined, soldiers strive to fulfill a mission they don’t understand and are ill-equipped to carry out. And high above them, the heavy rush of wings slashing through the humid air herald a coming wave of death and destruction, and just possibly, salvation.

Sixth grader Spencer Lemon is rapidly losing his eyesight. So he has no idea why he was chosen to guard Pandora’s Book. When Ed, the old guy at a nursing home, hands over the book, there’s no time to explain the rules to Spencer. Spencer only knows that the book contains famous dead people - who can be brought back to life. Then Ed disappears, and a strange man shows up on Spencer’s doorstep - and he seems to know a lot about Pandora’s Book. Is he a bad guy? Or can he help Spencer unravel the secrets of the book?

In The Cowboy Takes a Wife, Desiree Parrish has two weeks to find a man to protect her from her abusive ex-husband. In The Unforgiving Bride, from the moment rancher Falcon Whitelaw sees Mara Ainsworth, she's the woman of his dreams - but she belongs to someone else. Then a tragic accident leaves her widowed - and she blames Falcon.

Wilmington, Delaware, is one of those cities that feels more like a small town. Neighbors know one another, and businesses cater to the needs of the citizenry. But what happens when the local car salesman suffers one lost sale too many, when one more customer decides to buy from the competition because the price is too high, interest rates aren’t friendly, or that shade of blue just won’t work?

Wisconsin. Summer. Late at night. Two teenage girls are picked up by two boys, who invite them back to their place to party. But an innocent mistake turns the party into a nightmare, where nothing is what it seems....