Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.

Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidèle can be found all manner of con men, from those selling stock in failing companies and herbal cure-all "medicines" to those who are raising money for supposed charitable organizations and those who simply ask for money outright.

Orlando is the extraordinary biography of a young nobleman in the court of Elizabeth I who transforms into a woman and lives for over three centuries. In his youth, Orlando is a passionate lover and poet. He dotes on the Queen, serves King James faithfully, falls deeply in love with a Russian princess, and becomes an ambassador to Constantinople, but at his heart all Orlando ever wants to be is a great writer (and living at the same time as Marlowe, Donne, and Shakespeare, this is no easy thing). But while living in Constantinople, one evening Orlando is transformed into woman.

Can a priest, his brother, and the brother's girlfriend solve a murder case and see justice done - or will they be the murderer's latest victim? A Murder on Wall Street takes us inside the world of Captain O'Brian's Irish Pub and Cigar Bar in Manhattan, a legendary hotspot in the Financial District. Investigating the death are pub owners Joey Mancuso, fired from the New York Police Department for his unorthodox methods, and his brother Father Dominic, who isn't your typical priest.

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.

Here is the tumultuous, heartrending, true story of the Romanovs - at once an intimate portrait of Russia's last royal family and a gripping account of its undoing. Using captivating photos and compelling first person accounts, award-winning author Candace Fleming (Amelia Lost; The Lincolns) deftly maneuvers between the imperial family’s extravagant lives and the plight of Russia's poor masses, making this an utterly mesmerizing listen as well as a perfect resource for meeting Common Core standards.

Gideon Raintree, a homicide detective, can harness electricity and talk to ghosts. He will need to wield gifts he's kept hidden to solve his newest case, a relentless serial killer unleashed by the dark Ansara wizards. But first he must deal with his reaction to Hope Malory, his alluring new partner. He'd never planned on love in the midst of battle.

From Nebula Award winner Gregory Benford comes this ambitious hard SF anthology that collects five original novellas. Each one takes the very long view - all are set at least ten thousand years in the future. The authors take a rigorously scientific view of such grand panoramas, confronting the largest issues of cosmology, astronomy, evolution, and biology.

Detective stories existed for centuries before the concept of the detective itself—amateur or professional— was fully formulated, and tales of mystery and intrigue have been thrilling readers since ancient times. The Lock and Key Library is the classic overview of the history of the mystery genre, at once a rousing listen for fans of the unsolved and unknown as well as an essential literary resource for those seeking to understand the roots of modern pulp fiction. This volume is sure to delight and enthrall armchair detectives and fans of classic mysteries alike.

Billy Budd, an orphaned, illegitimate child suffused with innocence, openness, and natural charisma, has been impressed into service aboard the HMS Bellipotent. He is adored by the crew, but for unexplained reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship's Master-at-Arms John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny.

When Keith Stoner awoke, he found himself in a world changed almost beyond recognition. Eighteen years before, Stoner had been the American member of a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to capture an alien ship. The Soviets had to pull out, but Stoner persisted, and while on the strange ship, he fell into suspended animation.

Far out in the Pacific, among the sunny islands of Hawaii, a dark, venomous plot is engineered by a rogue agent, an angel-faced man called the Monk, who has a special fondness for high explosives. His target is an American troopship with 3,000 US soldiers scheduled to blow sky high - unless Matt Helm can stop him. But first Helm has to trust the beautiful stranger who claims to be his sister-in-law and insists that his former "wife" had just willed him half a million dollars.

From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives, including reports from Mussolini’s spies inside the highest levels of the Church, will forever change our understanding of the Vatican’s role in the rise of Fascism in Europe.

It's obvious that Cletus Graeme - limping, mild-mannered scholarly - doesn't belong on a battle field, but instead at a desk working on his fourth book on battle strategy and tactics. But Bakhalla has more battlefields than libraries, and Graeme sees his small force of Dorsai - soldiers of fortune - as the perfect opportunity to test his theories. But if his theories or his belief in the Dorsai lead him astray, he's a dead man.

After a long and lonely silence from Cody Coleman, Bailey Flanigan begins to spend more and more time with her Hollywood co-star Brandon Paul. Nights on the town in New York City and long talks on the balcony of Brandon's Malibu Beach home make Bailey dizzy with new feelings and cause her to wonder if her days with Cody are over forever. Meanwhile, Cody's work coaching a small-town football team has brought him and his players national attention. In the midst of the celebration and success, Cody finds himself much closer to a woman who seems to better understand him and his new life.

This two-story compiliation, read by Stefan Rudnicki, offers two stories from David Drake's popular Hammer's Slammers series. In At Any Price, Col. Alois Hammer's indomitable Slammers are called in to support human colonists against a native uprising in this novel-length adventure. But even though the natives' off-world weapons are no match for the Slammers, their ability to teleport gives them a frightening advantage! In Rolling Hot, the battle-crazed troop of recruits and vets, led by Captain Ranson, must cover 300 miles of hostile enemy territory.

Few writers have successful blended hard science and speculation with fully realized characters as Gregory Benford has in his critically acclaimed novels. Now he draws us into a vortex of mystery and danger at the heart of the galaxy in his dazzling epic drama, Furious Gulf.

A quiet mission of assassination is no sweat for legendary agent Matt Helm - until a shapely foreign agent he never got around to finishing off lures him into a strange trek in the wilds of Northern Mexico. And when a Russian missile is smuggled out of Cuba, it falls into the hands of a political fanatic much too close to home.

In the style of Alan Furst, this suspenseful thriller - based on real events - places an idealistic American diplomat in a turbulent, US-hating Tehran in the days leading up to the Iranian Revolution. Backed by the CIA, and trailed by a beautiful and engaging French journalist he suspects is a spy, David Weiseman’s mission is to ease the Shah of Iran out of power and find the best alternative between the military, religious extremists, and the political ruling class - many of whom are simultaneously trying to kill him.

If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the Russian KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the 20th century.