Showing results by narrator "Zura Johnson" in All Categories

Casey Walsh and Boone Murphy had a bright future together—until tragedy tore them apart. Now, more than a decade later, the beauty-school dropout runs Meadow Valley's family tavern and steers clear of the boy who once stole her heart—no small feat in such a small town. Boone Murphy was finally going to put Meadow Valley in his rear-view mirror, even if that meant selling his business and leaving his family's horse ranch behind. It also meant leaving Casey Walsh. Now, he's back home, and his only dream is winning back the girl he's always loved.

Dancer Beth Spence finally gets a shot at her dream—auditioning for the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes. But her audition concludes with a torn Achilles tendon and possibly the end of her dance career. When her sister, Delaney, flies her to Meadow Valley, California, to recuperate, she is reluctant to go but out of options. Beth has no idea that Delaney has set her up with a job managing widower Eli Murphy’s veterinary clinic while staying in the guest house on his ranch.

Breck, the dungeon core, has been captured by a group calling themselves The Scorpion. The god of living death essence now has his claws around him. The remaining dungeon mobs and bosses are struggling to keep the dungeon from falling apart in his absence. Zach is gathering allies to form an alliance to combat the growing dark forces on the rise. More gods are being reborn as these two massive armies are getting ready to clash.

In a world of sword and sorcery, Breck died and was reborn as a dungeon core, a specialized living gem in charge of creating and managing a dungeon. Unlike most dungeons, he was handicapped with the inability to create bones, the very building blocks that comprise most living creatures. Breck just wants his life back, his humanity, and will do whatever it takes to achieve his goal.

Sidra Solei is a cynical, deep-sea siren whose heart hardened after the final battle between her pod and the humans. When her sister arrives in the one place Sidra finds solace to inform her their pod's hunger has become too great, Sidra is determined to act. Dead set on saving her starving pod, Sidra sets off beyond their territory for the first time since childhood. In the vast, open sea, she crosses paths with a pesky seal intent on stealing her catch. But when they're both caught in the same fisherman's net, Sidra discovers the seal is actually a selkie named Breena.

Someone’s hunting the Ungovernable. And they’re not going to stop until every one of the crew is dead. When an enemy from ex-smuggler pilot Jez’s past reappears, determined to extract revenge, the crew of the Ungovernable have two options: fight, or run. But when a hyperjump gone wrong leaves the Ungovernable crippled, her weapons down and her cloaking disabled, their options become scarce indeed.

Marta and her twin brother, Nick, have always been haunted and fascinated by an ancestral legend that holds that members of their family are doomed to various types of falls. And when their own family collapses in the wake of a revelation and a resulting devastating fight with their Catholic mother, the twins move to Prague, the city in which their 'falling curse' began.

Happily married with two wonderful children, Dom and Stacey are living the dream. He runs a successful design agency; she's finding fame as an author of children’s books. Everything is perfect. But then they meet the mesmerizing Tamara, and their lives are changed forever. Tamara is a woman with a plan. She executes it step by step—patient, systematic, methodical. And as her plan unfolds, Dom and Stacey find their lives slipping out of control, taking them from heaven into the deepest, darkest hell....

Mia Madden is pretty sure that the road to dating app hell is paved with suspiciously hot profiles. Take tonight's date, for example. Alex Conroy is unreasonably gorgeous—he's got that whole "board-room in the streets, lumberjack in the sheets" happening—but he also represents everything she loathes about corporate hustle culture. Yet another lousy date to laugh-cry about later. Except, it turns out that Alex is also the hot-shot new boss her dad can't stop complaining about—the Forbes thirty-under-thirty company fixer of his nightmares. Worse, their respective best friends are dating.

They just pulled off the heist of the century. Now, ex-smuggler pilot Jez and the motley crew of the Ungovernable have a promise to keep: an extraction from a high-security political prison. But the timeline for the rescue is shorter than they ever imagined, and if they want to save their target from certain death, they’ll have to go in blind - no specs, no intel, no time to prepare, and only the skeleton of a plan.

Blame the booze, her shaky marriage, her troubled son, or a thousand other things, but Jewelann Jordan has one thing on her mind when she attends her class reunion: making sure her old crush Christian Campbell sees exactly what he lost all those years ago. A late night, a hotel room, a rekindled flame that burns even hotter than it did back then—what could go wrong? Everything. The night with Christian isn't the first secret Jewelann has kept from her husband Ken, so one more shouldn't be much harder—except that Christian shows up without warning.

Breck isn’t alone. After months of being in this strange new world full of swords and magic, trapped as a dungeon core, he’s desperate to communicate with a fellow Earthling. He’ll stop at nothing to advance up the essence ranks and make contact with Zach. During his attempts to rank up, his experiments turn deadly. He’ll need to call upon help from everyone and everything he can.

After her grandmother is murdered in a home invasion, Tamsin Culver leaves her cushy programming job in San Francisco and returns to her Midwestern hometown to settle the estate. What she doesn't expect is to find out her grandmother's life-changing secret. She's not an Earth native but an exile from another level of the Nigh-Space continuum, an adjacent reality with technology far more advanced than ours. What's more, her grandmother ruled there as an oligarch, meaning Tamsin is the heir to vast wealth only accessible by someone from her bloodline.

Since her parents were killed, Vivienne has always felt ungrounded, shuffled through the foster care system. Just when liberation finally seems possible - days before her 18th birthday - Vivienne is hospitalized with symptoms no one can explain. The doctors may be puzzled, but Deacon, her mysterious new friend, claims she has an active Nevergene. His far-fetched diagnosis comes with a warning: She is about to become an involuntary test subject for Humanitarian Organization for Order and Knowledge - or H.O.O.K.

Growing up in Chicago’s Little Sicily in the years following the Great War, Grace Dragotta has always wanted to be a ballerina, ever since she first peered through the windows of the Near North Ballet company. So when Grace is orphaned, she chooses the ballet as her home, imagining herself forever ensconced in a transcendent world of light and beauty so different from her poor, immigrant upbringing.

After taking down the two most powerful mafia bosses in the system, ex-smuggler pilot Jez and the crew race back to the capital to head off an impending civil war in the ensuing power vacuum. But to stop a bloodbath, they need to buy themselves time to prepare. So while Masha, Ysbel, and Tanya provide a distraction, Jez and Lev infiltrate a government paralyzed by the news, while Tae goes out into the volatile streets to neutralize the gangs who are more than willing to prove they’re the mafia’s natural successors. But preventing a civil war is more complicated than it sounds.

The great wizard Merlyn prophesized that his seventh descendant would do wonderful, miraculous things—baffling everyone when his great-great-many-times-great grandchild turns out to be twins. Soon enough, however, it becomes clear which sibling is the Septimum Genus: Percy is a natural with magic. Merlynda (to put it simply) is not.

The Jenny L. Howe Rom-Com Collection includes the following titles: The Makeup Test and On the Plus Side. In The Makeup Test two college exes find themselves battling against each other—and their unresolved feelings—for a spot in a prestigious literature Ph.D. program. What starts as a personal battle of wits (and lit) turns into all-out war. On the Plus Side follows Everly Winters who is perfectly happy to navigate life like a good neutral paint color: appreciated but unnoticed.

In age-old Slavic fairy tales, the witch Baba Yaga is sought out by those with a burning need for guidance. In contemporary life, Baba Yaga—a dangerous, slippery oracle—answered earnest questions on The Hairpin for years. This book collects her most poignant, surreal, and humorous exchanges along with all-new questions and answers for those seeking her mystical advice.

Ex-smuggler pilot Jez and the crew of The Ungovernable desperately need a way to stop the government from killing them all. So, when Grigory - godfather of the biggest mafia organization in the System - invites them aboard his private gambling ship and tells them he can give them a way out, it’s an offer they can’t refuse. But accepting it means dealing into Grigory’s game, and he hasn’t forgotten the money they'd cost him in their first heist. If they don’t want to end up floating in space without a spacesuit, they’ll have to find a way to beat him at his own game.