Showing results by narrator "Aaron Abano" in All Categories

Don DiMarco has a very good life - a family he loves, a comfortable lifestyle, passions and interests that keep him amused. He also thought he had time, but that turned out not to be the case. Faced with news that might have immediately felled most, Don now wonders if he has time enough.

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies. This collection, with voices of French and English writers, visits many neighborhoods and combines them into something that is, if not totally coherent, at least as coherent as the beautiful mess that is Montreal....

If he had only answered that last phone call from the World Trade Center.... Minutes before two jumbo jets changed US history, New York police officer Austin Finley ignored the call from his brother, who'd been bugging him for days. Trying to live with his one regret causes hatred and bitterness to consume Austin, and when counselor Mercy Samara recommends desk duty, Austin resigns. Haunted by her own memories of 9/11, Mercy takes a job as a school counselor in Baltimore.

Highly skilled Search and Rescue (SAR) team leader Honor Mackenzie works almost as hard at guarding the dark secrets of her past as she does when training SAR dogs. As for widowed Sun reporter Matt Phillips, not even his former SAR work is as important as protecting his 10-year-old twin boys. When a jumbo jet crashes outside Baltimore one cold night, their respective jobs put them face to face at the grisly scene.

Murray Whelan is in trouble. A disastrous election is looming, and his days as advisor to Angelo Agnelli, minister for transport, may be numbered. His son, on loan to his ex-wife, is missing and may be in danger. His ex-fling, Heather, is prowling for his inner prince. And on an icy Melbourne winter morning, he has a rendezvous with a renegade driver in the corrupt truckers union.

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

Lady Risa of the Morelands has already caught the eyes and won the hearts of many suitors. Not one of them, though, can gain the approval of her father, Lord Rygehil. When Risa discovers his secret - that he promised her to the necromancer Euberacon - she is furious, and terrified. Refusing to be a sacrifice, Risa runs away rather than submit to her fate. But Euberacon is determined to claim his bride, and Risa's raw courage and archery skills are no match for his magic. Lucky for her, she is not alone.

Long before Hank Crawford arrived in the waters of Ketchikan, his partners and compatriots were already in love with its shores. Following the final, crushing moments of World War II, Japanese officer Kiyoshi Tsurifune, Sergeant Jones Henry, and Resistance fighter Swede Scorden struggle to regain normalcy and any contact with the shimmering, fish-filled sea. Lost honor, fallen friends, their cultural identities gone in the wake of a nuclear blast - these fishermen-turned-soldiers have a long way to go till they regain the waters in which they feel most at home.

In Are Men Animals?, anthropologist Matthew Gutmann argues that predatory male behavior is in no way inevitable. Men behave the way they do because culture permits it, not because biology demands it. To prove this, he embarks on a global investigation of masculinity. Exploring everything from the gender-bending politics of American college campuses to the marriage markets of Shanghai and the women-only subway cars of Mexico City, Gutmann shows just how complicated masculinity can be.

Poxl West fled the Nazis' onslaught in Czechoslovakia. He escaped their clutches again in Holland. He pulled Londoners from the Blitz's rubble. He wooed intoxicating, unconventional beauties. He rained fire on Germany from his RAF bomber. Poxl West is the epitome of manhood and something of an idol to his teenage nephew, Eli Goldstein, who reveres him as a brave, singular Jewish war hero. Poxl fills Eli's head with electric accounts of his derring-do, adventures, and romances as he collects the best episodes from his storied life into a memoir.

A dragon's tears; Gilgamesh returned; lovers in space; gin, beer, blood; passion and heartbreak; wild legends, gritty truths - and one truly plucky realtor - you'll find all this and more in Eastlick and Other Stories. Shannon Page's kaleidoscopic collection of marvelous tales meanders from post-apocalyptic Cyprus, medieval Venice, and the Age of Legends, to the far reaches of outer space - and inner space too.

Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees writing on the body of everyone she meets - names, dates, details both banal and profound - and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank. When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see her name on his cheek. He's in Paris for the summer, studying a medieval pilgrimage to the rocky coast of Spain, where the body of Saint Jacques was said to have washed ashore, covered in scallop shells.

Old Silk Road is a prescient, powerful novel of the Afghan war by someone who's been there. Norman "Doc" Rodgers suspects he won't make it out of this one alive. He's a young combat medic in Afghanistan, eager to avenge his father's death in the World Trade Center and make sense of a new world that feels like it's fallen to pieces. Haunted by hallucinatory encounters, his only solace is a barely concealed addiction to the precious opiates he's supposed to dole out sparingly to those beyond aid.

When Murray Whelan, lovelorn political minder and part-time fitness fanatic, is recruited to massage Australia's bid for the Olympics, he has no idea how tough the going will get. Not even the sight of the gorgeous Holly Deloite in her taut blue leotard at the City Club can stop him diving head first into trouble. And, when the death of the young Aboriginal athlete Darcy Anderson proves that murder is a contact sport, Murray is soon breaking all the rules.

When treachery and violence destroy Elen’s homeland, a power begins to rise inside her. But it will take more than that untested magic to avenge her family, unite her people, and reclaim their land. Her enemy receives power from an evil source: the wicked sorceress Morgaine LeFay, who will stop at nothing to destroy King Arthur and his knights of Camelot. And she plans to use Elen to work for her own vile purpose.

A funny and poignant memoir that delves into the magic, fails, and meaning of fatherhood. Humorist and family man Jason Good is an only child with an atypical story to tell. His isn't the usual rant about how hard it is to be a modern father or a tale about a damaging relationship with his father. Jason grew up with a charismatic, communicative, affectionate, and frustrated political science professor for a father - a man who taught him most everything about how to be a dad, how to live.

De Moor has built her latest novel around the Kreutzersonate by the Czech composer, Leos Janácek, who, in turn, based his string quartet on the novel of the same name by Leo Tolstoy. In Tolstoy’s story, a man and a woman are playing the sonata Ludwig van Beethoven composed for the French violinist and composer Rudolphe Kreutzer. The two fall in love as they play, which poisons the husband’s mind with jealousy, so that he kills his wife.

Bart Schaneman spent five years living and working in South Korea, mostly as an editor for English newspapers. He also taught English for a spell. This Expat Life is a collection of essays on uprooting your life to travel the world, what it means to be ambitious, and finally discovering the right place to settle down. Peppered throughout are Bart's personal reflections on teaching and living as a foreigner in a foreign land.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is the center of the hipster universe, and the members of the Whole Sick Crew are its shining stars. The gang includes Wolfgang, a heavy metal musician and high school guidance counselor who supplies coke to his charges; Rad, a doctor obsessed with obscure new wave songs who has a bad habit of cutting himself when he's stressed; Beth Ann, the neighborhood's queen knitter who's slowly going blind and Harrison, a museum curator moonlighting as a writer of highly prized porn.

A back-alley murder carries André Derain from the streets of New Orleans to the sun-drenched hell of the Cayman Islands. It's quiet in the Garden District, and André Derain can't sleep. After a lifetime as a fashion photographer in New York and the French Quarter, he needs noise, excitement, action - and he's about to get more than he can handle. A call comes in from the New Orleans homicide department, tipping Derain off to a grisly shooting on Tchoupitoulas Street. He grabs his camera and charges out the door.