Showing results by narrator "Will Damron" in All Categories

To the people of Sweet Water, a fading railroad town on the Western plains, Mrs. Forrester is the resident aristocrat, at once gracious and comfortably remote. To her aging husband, she is a treasure whose value increases as his powers fail. To Niel Herbert, who falls in love with her as a boy and becomes her confidant as a man, Mrs. Forrester is by turns steadfast and faithless, dazzling and pathetic.

Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.

"Hurry! It's coming!" A desperate young mother shoves her infant son deep into a crevice between two logs. Will her baby survive? Will anyone? That scene, and the hundreds of others like it, are everything Algar Kersek could have hoped for. The alien general has traveled deep into the Sonora desert to be present for the recording of the memories of a dying human. Dr. John Richardson is the last surviving witness to the horrors of a Prosian Deathstroke. His memories of the event will be captured on a crystal, there to be copied and distributed to every corner of the Empire.

Assassin-for-hire Kade Dennon knows exactly who he is: a soulless killer who can't be saved. And he thinks he's fine with that...until he meets Kathleen. Beautiful, kind, and tough as nails, Kathleen Turner is nothing like the nameless one-night stands Kade usually goes for. Just being around her makes the hardened hit man feel emotions he never thought were possible. There's just one problem: Kathleen is dating Kade's brother, hotshot attorney Blane Kirk.

Florida, circa 1980. Reed Crowe, the eponymous Florida Man, is a middle-aged beach bum, beleaguered and disenfranchised, living on ill-gotten gains deep in the jungly heart of Florida. When sinkholes start opening on Emerald Island, not only are Reed Crowe's seedy businesses - a moribund motel and a shabby amusement park - endangered, but so are his secrets. Crowe, amateur spelunker, begins uncovering artifacts that change his understanding of the island’s history, as well as his understanding of his family’s birthright as pioneering homesteaders.

Attacked and injected with a drug that slows his metabolism to a fraction of normal, Martin James becomes an unwilling time traveler who hurtles through the years. His children grow up, his wife grows older, and his only hope is finding the people who injected him in the first place - not an easy task when one day for Martin lasts four years. And while Martin James strives to find a cure before everyone he loves is gone, others are uncertain if his journey can be stopped at all.

Erin is a plastic girl living in a plastic world. Every day she eats a breakfast of boiled chicken, then conveys her articulated body to Tablet Town, where she sells other figurines Smartbodies: wearable tech that allows full physical immersion in a virtual world, a refuge from real life’s brutal wars, oppressive governmental monitoring, and omnipresent eco-terrorist insurgency. If you cut her, she will not bleed—but she and her fellow figurines can still be cracked or blown apart by gunfire or bombs, or crumble away from nuclear fallout.

My man-free life is going along fine until the day I walk into my new job as a part-time tutor to the daughter of the new doctor in town. The sight of this man is making my skin tingle and my breath hitch, and something very much like butterflies are erupting in my stomach. Butterflies! I don’t do butterflies over a man. My reaction doesn’t mean I need to change my stance on men. After all, Grant’s a broody, stern, cantankerous man. If I were going to start dating, it certainly wouldn’t be someone who obviously hasn’t smiled since he was forced to for school pictures.

Hidden beneath the surface of the internet, a new, stark reality is looming - one that cuts to the very heart of our endless debates about the impact of AI. Anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computer scientist Siddharth Suri team up to unveil how services delivered by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Uber can only function smoothly thanks to the judgment and experience of a vast, invisible human labor force. These people doing "ghost work" make the internet seem smart. An estimated 8 percent of Americans have worked at least once in this "ghost economy".

Peter Beard lived an astonishing life. The artist, wildlife photographer, and bon vivant enthralled and inspired both because of his work and his legendary lifestyle. In Twentieth-Century Man, Wallace has rendered this towering figure in all of his contradictions and complexities—a deeply romantic and idiosyncratic personality, beloved by so many, whose sensibilities nonetheless remained firmly rooted in an era characterized by racist and colonialist attitudes. Stirring and visceral, Twentieth-Century Man is the definitive portrait of Peter Beard.

Jo Greaver is a model of success. Young and ambitious, she’s built a thriving beauty business from nothing. But she has secrets she’ll do anything to keep buried. When her blackmailer offers to meet, Jo expects to pay him off - but gets a bullet instead. Bleeding and in shock, Jo flees with no one to turn to. When NYPD detective Sheryn Sterling and her partner, Rafael Mendoza, find Andray Baxter murdered in his own home - shot through the heart - everything points to Jo as the killer. Her blood is at the scene, and so are disturbing photos of her taken as a young teen.

A public library in California where none of the books have ever been published is full of romantic possibilities. But when the librarian and his girlfriend must travel to Tijuana, the Kingdom of Fire and Water, they experience a series of strange encounters.

In 1912, John Wade and his brother, William - children of the American consul - were kidnapped off the street in Chungking, China, and raised in the house of Eunuch Chang, the city's master criminal. Twenty-five years later, John is the eunuch's most valuable ward, a trained assassin and swindler, and William has become a talented forger. On the brink of World War II, China is in chaos. When William betrays Eunuch Chang and escapes to central China, a place of ferocious warlords and bandits, John begins a desperate search to save his brother.

Joe Navarro spent a quarter century with the FBI, pursuing spies and other dangerous criminals across the globe. In his line of work, successful leadership was quite literally a matter of life or death. Now he brings his hard-earned lessons to you.Be Exceptional is the culmination of Joe Navarro’s decades spent analysing human behaviour, conducting more than 10,000 interviews in the field and making high-stakes behavioural assessments.

Conventional “wisdom” holds that the most successful entrepreneurs in the world are born with a genius for starting companies, experience one lightning-bolt moment of inspiration after another, follow a tried-and-true process to scale to a billion dollars, and attract deep-pocketed investors at every turn.

Jason Guthrie has no time for entanglements - between helping out his widowed brother and teenage nephew and getting his hometown back on its feet, his days are spoken for. But his nights are another story.... And when his lovely new neighbor, Honor Brown, reluctantly accepts his help in remodeling her house, Jason finds himself wishing his handyman skills could knock down the defenses she keeps building around herself.

Andrew Falcon Jr. is the youngest hedge-fund manager to make partner at a powerful investment bank on Wall Street. His career is soaring, and his financial future is secured. But with fortune comes a high price. Just as Falcon thought life couldn't get better, his niece Claire is kidnapped - yet her abductors have no interest in money. They want information. In exchange for Claire's safe return, Falcon must dig deep into his firm's affairs, uncovering secrets worse than he could ever imagine.

Hollywood's latest blockbuster is all set to premiere - until a faded superstar claims the script was stolen from her. To defend the studio, in steps the Harold Firm, one of Los Angeles's top entertainment litigation firms and as much a part of the glamorous scene as the studios themselves. As a newly minted partner, it's Rory Calburton's case, and his career, to win or lose.

Single dad Hogan Guthrie is getting his life back on track, and working as the "barbecue master" at a local diner is just a temporary detour. He and restaurant owner Violet Shaw constantly butt heads - until one night they end up mingling other parts instead. Hogan thought he had the recipe for happiness all figured out. But loyal, carefree Violet is daring him to trust his impulses...and see just how sweet small-town living - and loving - can be.

Everyone always told me it wasn’t as though a woman was going to land on my doorstep and fall in love with me. Well, never say never. Now this woman literally crashes into my life, but she doesn’t remember a thing about what happened before she got here. She’s beautiful and a little sassy. The longer she’s here, the more I feel like she’s the missing piece of a puzzle I didn’t even know I was trying to solve.