Showing results by narrator "T. Ryder Smith" in All Categories

Only a very few rock bands that have had the longevity, success, and drama of The Doobie Brothers. Born out of late 1960s NoCal, they stood alongside their contemporaries The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, and many others as an iconic American rock band. The train was rolling along, hits were flowing like wine, and arenas were packed with fans who wanted to see them live...then Tom Johnston, the band’s front man and lead guitarist, almost died.

Angel, Kentucky: Just another one of America's forgotten places, where the opioid crisis has reached a fever pitch. When this small town is rocked by the vicious killing of an entire infamous local crime family, the bloody aftermath brings together three people already struggling with Angel's drug epidemic: Trey, a young medic-in-training with secrets to hide; Special Agent Casey Alexander, a DEA agent who won't let the local law or small-town way of doing things stand in her way; and Paul Mayfield, a former police chief who's had to watch his own young wife succumb to addiction.

Hidden far from sight, deep in the thick underbrush of the North Florida woods are the ghostly graves of more than 30 unidentified bodies, some of which are thought to be children who were beaten to death at the old Florida Industrial School for Boys at Marianna. It is suspected that many more bodies will be found in the fields and swamplands surrounding the institution.

Plenty of legends surround the infamous Boulder House in Whispering Bluffs, Wisconsin, but nobody takes them seriously. Certainly nobody believes that the original owner, Maxwell Cartwright Jr., cursed its construction - or that a murder of crows died upon its completion, their carcasses turning the land black. Five very different high school seniors on a field trip - Violet, Paul, Ashley, Dylan, and Gretchen - are separated from the group, and they discover that what lies within Boulder House is far more horrifying than any local folklore.

Captain Pausert just can’t catch a break! First, he became the mortal enemy of his fiancée, his home planet, the Empire - and even the Worm World, the darkest threat to mankind in all of space. All because he helped rescue three slave children from their masters. Of course, these three young women were the universally feared Witches of Karres - but how was he to know that?! And after he defeated the Worm World (with the help of the witches, of course), the Empress herself had sent him on a secret mission to stop a nanite plague that was raging across the galaxy.

David Binder is a young, successful writer living in Chicago and suffering from writer's block. He stares at the blank page, and the blank page stares back - until inspiration strikes in the form of a ghost story that captivated him as a child. With his pregnant wife and young daughter in tow, he sets out to explore the myth of Virginia Beale, Faery Queen of the Haunted Dell.

In this powerful work, Henning Mankell tells the story of a young African orphan adopted by a Swedish man and whisked away to his new father’s country. There the boy, dubbed Daniel, finds himself swallowed by a bizarre landscape of snow and mud. Always in his mind are thoughts of his murdered parents, calling him back to Africa. But Daniel’s path is marked by tragedy, and his homecoming seems an impossible dream.

The first book of James Thompson’s Inspector Vaara series won immediate critical acclaim for a sterling tale set in the brutal cold and soul-testing isolation of kaamos, Finland’s two weeks of utter darkness. Even as the unrelenting winter conditions tighten their grip on the residents of the Lapland town, a lovely Somali movie star is found murdered, a racial slur cut into her chest.

This collection of 11 stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form, as a group they are representative of his style, and touch on the central themes that surface in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Stories as different as "The Snowstorm", "Lucerne", "The Diary of a Madman", and "The Devil" are grounded in autobiographical experience. They deal with journeys of self-discovery and the moral and religious thought that characterizes Tolstoy's works of criticism and philosophy.

Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage, he replies to an ad and becomes a research subject in an experiment conducted by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia.

John Brandon has quickly become a critical darling thanks to his evocative prose and recognizable, yet quirky, characters. Citrus County introduces teenaged Shelby Register and her offbeat family. Moving to the swampy Citrus County region of Florida, Shelby is quickly confronted by life’s challenges and possibilities.

When the New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl published his widely read autobiographical essay “The Art of Dying” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and his oncologist had given him six months to live, but his experimental treatment was showing some improvement. “These extra months,” he wrote, “are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.” And he did. The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022 begins with that essay and collects all 46 pieces that he wrote for the magazine before his death in October 2022.

Jack Kerouac's archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped, adding depth to his lifework and our understanding of the man. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Jack's adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

If he’d known he was getting stuck with a pair of psi-wielding super-beings, even straitlaced do-gooder Captain Pausert might have thought twice about rescuing his two young “witch” charges from slavery on a dark planet. But what’s done is done - and with galactic peace once again threatened in the mysterious and pirate-ridden Chaladoor region, only a dangerous mission backward in time can save the present and - maybe - get stalwart-but-obtuse Pausert to see one of these young “witches” as more than just a friend.

After surviving one brutal night against a creature they call the obayifo, Cent and Torres are unexpectedly reunited when both are recruited by the mysterious billionaire Harold Campbell to join his fight against the creatures that lurk in the shadows. For Cent, it’s an easy decision: Find and kill the obayifo and rid the world of their scourge. For Torres, it’s a little more complicated. There are forces turning her against people she trusts, with her future—and those of the people she loves—in the balance.

Robert Jackson Bennett makes a stunning debut with this deliciously dark tale sure to hold readers in its menacing thrall. The grinding poverty brought on by the Great Depression is nowhere more apparent than in the untold thousands looking for work along America’s railroad system. But one man haunting the rail camps has been moved by an entirely different brand of desperation: revenge.

A girl walks home from school. She's tall for her age. She's wearing her winter coat. Her headphones are in. She's hurrying. She never makes it home. In the aftermath, while law enforcement tries to justify the response, one fact remains: A police officer has shot and killed an unarmed 13-year-old girl. The community is thrown into upheaval, leading to unrest, a growing movement to protest the senseless taking of black lives, and the arrival of white supremacist counter-demonstrators.

Cent and Torres have been trapped with evil before but this isn’t quite the same thing. Stuck on Harold Campbell’s island with nowhere to go and surrounded by a growing number of obayifo, they will have to find allies if they want to make it out. But not everyone can be trusted, and even those you think you can trust have ulterior motives. As the long night drags on, and with morning—and the promise of safety—still hours away, shadowy forces make their move, further complicating Cent and Torres’s plans.

In The Bible Salesman, Preston Clearwater is scoring cash working a car-theft ring in post-World War II North Carolina. When he picks up 19-year-old Bible salesman Henry Dampier, Preston convinces the kid that he's an FBI spy. And before Henry knows what's up, he finds himself in way over his head with no apparent way out.

When an agnostic archaeologist unearths the ossuary of a first-century high priest, he discovers compelling evidence of Christ's resurrection. But this incredible find soon pits him against Jewish factions, jealous rivals, frenzied media - and his own beliefs.