Showing results by narrator "Christopher Lane" in All Categories

Fallen star journalist Matt Pittman holds a gun in his hand, ready to commit suicide… until he’s abruptly interrupted by a phone call and a bizarre assignment: to write the obituary of a man who is not yet dead. Suddenly, clinging desperately to a life he’d so recently been eager to discard, Matt is thrust into the heart of a global conspiracy whose sinister machinations promise a terrifying endgame. He will find himself both a murder suspect by the police and a target for murder by invisible assassins determined to destroy him. Now Matt Pittman is on a desperate, great final story....

Chicago lawyer Ben Corbin has just launched his private practice when Dr. Mikhail Ivanovsky, a mysterious Russian scientist, hires him to sue for possession of a safe deposit box. But when the box's owner enlists the city's highest-powered lawyer - and then turns up dead - the Russian confesses: inside the box is an old Soviet biowarfare formula for the deadliest disease known to humankind.

In The Smartest Places on Earth, van Agtmael and Bakker present a truly hopeful and inspiring investigation into the emerging sources of a new era of competitiveness for America and Europe that are coming from unlikely places - those cities and areas once known as "rustbelts" that have, from an economic perspective, been written off.

As a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, Nick Angel has seen a lot. But now he sees almost nothing after being struck with PTSD-related blindness resulting from the trauma of his last tour. In an attempt to put the past behind him, he travels to Venice, Italy, with his fiancée, Grace, to recover, reconnect, and rekindle their love. Despite his physical and emotional setbacks, Nick senses something dangerously amiss in Venice, and his hunch proves right when Grace is abducted right in front of him.

When a black South American soccer star signs on to a team in the country’s racist south, headlines blare. And when he falls for the sensual Desmerelda, a stunning white pop singer and daughter of a wealthy politician, their sudden and controversial marriage propels the pair to centre stage, where they burn in the media spotlight. But celebrity attracts enemies; some very close to home. And its dazzle reaches into the city’s hidden corners, exposing a life of grit and desperation the glitterati could never imagine.

For the McWilliams children, life is forever altered the day a terrorist bomb blast rips through the train carrying them across Italy, instantly killing their parents. Dazed and frightened, Charlotte, Oliver, and baby Julia cling to oldest brother Sam, who - only seven at the time - is haunted by every detail.

His ex-wife is out to ruin him, his kids hate him, and he’s flipping burgers at a McDonald’s. Ken Richmond hits his breaking point when he puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger. When his plan misfires - literally - he interprets the failed suicide as his calling to a higher purpose. Fueled by long-simmering hatred, Ken sets out on a murderous mission - but in order to get away with it, he’ll have to leave a trail of blood through the city. Detectives Dick Van Endel and Phil Nelson start chasing Ken toward a special spot in hell. But can the detectives put an end to the fiend’s sprees for good, before more bodies pile up?

A serial killer is on the loose in Providence, Rhode Island, and he’s killing women who, in life, were anything but angels. Yet when homicide detective Danny Martell arrives on the scene, he finds the victims have been elaborately made up, with fabric wings attached to their lifeless bodies. The papers have dubbed the killings “the Angel Murders” - but it isn’t long before the crime wave drags Danny into his own personal hell.

A Jewish teenager on the hunt for black-market tight pants and rock records, Svyatoslav somehow fails to develop his undying love for Lyuba into a happy ending. He finds work in a mental institution, runs off to Kiev with one of the patients, marries a few times, has a son, becomes a professor, and halfheartedly runs interference for the KGB.

The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles - worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client - all in the same instant?

Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer, provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women's increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era - the belief in self-actualization and expression - being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one's existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.

It's been two months since Travis' family moved from their shabby old house to a development so new that it seems totally unreal. There's one place, though, where Travis can still connect with his old life: the Salinas library. Travis and his family used to go there together every Saturday, but now he bikes to it alone, re-reading his favorite books. Suddenly, Travis is seeing John Steinbeck's characters spring to life.

Corporate auditor Sam Keller, careful to a fault, has decided to live it up for a change. And what better spot for business-class hedonism than the boomtown of Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slopes of a shopping mall. But when a colleague is murdered during a night on the town, Sam soon finds himself waist-deep in a bewildering, lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, and crooked cops.

Cybersecurity expert Theresa Payton tells battlefront stories from the global war being conducted through clicks, swipes, internet access, technical backdoors and massive espionage schemes. She investigates the cyberwarriors who are planning tomorrow’s attacks, weaving a fascinating yet bone-chilling tale of Artificial Intelligent mutations carrying out attacks without human intervention, “deepfake” videos that look real to the naked eye, and chatbots that beget other chatbots.

A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer whose victims included three husbands and six of her own children. A Gilded Age “Bluebeard” who did away with as many as fifty wives throughout the country. A decorated World War I hero who orchestrated a murder that stunned Jazz Age America.

I thought the day my younger brother waltzed back into my life was the day everything changed. I couldn’t have been more wrong. That didn’t happen until the night of July 4, 2016. That was the night the lights went out and stayed out. That fateful night was only the beginning of 10 months and 1,200 miles through hell. Jason Sterling, my brother, told you his story. My name is Braden Sterling. It’s my turn to tell you the tale of our journey from a tiny town in Kansas to Elko, Nevada, and The Ranch.

In the dead gray cold of Starkfield, Massachusetts, farmer Ethan Frome is struggling to scrape out a living. His duties are to his wife, Zeena - an ungrateful, soul-sick hypochondriac as frigid as the New England winter. When Zeena’s cousin Mattie arrives to help with the farm, the ethereal, gentle-natured beauty brings a light and a fugitive affection into Ethan’s life. Yet for Ethan and Mattie, daring to be happy - and together - will have its consequences.