Showing results by narrator "Christine Williams" in All Categories

In 1904, the future best-selling writer Edna Ferber, then a 19-year-old fledgling reporter in Wisconsin, teams up with famed escape artist Harry Houdini to solve the baffling murder of a girl who has mysteriously disappeared from a locked room at the local high school.

Silver Screen Kisses is a collection of stories inspired by movies that are on every favorite-movie list. Written by award-winning and best-selling authors, these contemporary romances take the listener back to Echo Ridge in the spring, when the promise of new love is budding just like the tulips around the Emerald Inn Bed & Breakfast.

An eccentric boarding house denizen winds up dead; his presumed killer, a fellow boarder, has vanished. The baffling case unfolds through the testimony of witnesses, who are themselves suspect.

Chicago, 1881. The idea of a female detective is virtually unheard of. But when famed crime buster Allan Pinkerton opens his agency's doors to a handful of women, one intrepid actress with her own troubled past is driven to defy convention and take on a new and dangerous role. Since the age of 11, when her mother was murdered, the life of the theater is all Lilly Long has known. Now 22, she has blossomed into an accomplished Shakespearean actress.

Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness and determination. She used those attributes to survive a divorce in 1940s America with two children and to claw her way out of poverty, becoming a successful businesswoman. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to her monstrous daughter.

A starlet's plot to blackmail a film-studio executive results in her murder. Only the "trouble chaser" can clear her volatile lover and solve the crime.

It would seem that the end of every war has been followed inthe United States by social and moral changes, mostly for the worse. Zane Greycertainly felt that way about the effects of the Great War, and to show thesechanges and how to cope with them became the impulse behind what he called TheWater Hole. However, before magazine publication, changes were made in histext, including the names of all the characters. Fortunately Grey's originalhandwritten manuscript has survived, so now this story can be told with hischaracters named and presented as he intended them to be.

In 1925 widowed businessman Elijah Winters brings hisdaughter, Cherry, from Long Island to stay at a trading post in a remote areasome distance from Flagstaff, Arizona. Removed from the country clubs andspeakeasies, Cherry is at first bored with simple ranch life, and to entertainherself she flirts with several of the cowboys, not realizing they are verydifferent from the young men she knew back east. Also very different is StephenHeftral, a young archaeologist who is searching for an ancient and lost kiva ofa primitive Indian tribe that disappeared centuries before in what became theland of the Navajos.

Heftral believes that this lost kiva is most probablyin a desert fastness called Beckyshibeta, the Navajo word for waterhole. Elijah colludes with Heftral to awaken Cherry to a new and healthier wayof life by taking her, by force if necessary, to the site. Cherry resents being kidnapped but comes to forget theluxury of her past in the beauty and dangers of the canyons - and in the thrillof making an important archaeological discovery.

Chicago, 1881. Assigned to her second case as a Pinkerton, Lilly still needs to prove herself - both as a detective and as a woman in a man's world. Ordered to again work with Lilly, Cade needs to redeem himself for conduct unbecoming to a Pinkerton - a grief-driven drunken brawl. As if their forced partnership wasn't bad enough, the agents must pose as husband and wife servants in the troubled household of a wealthy New Orleans family. An acting challenge if ever there was one.

Set during the chaotic years of World War II, The General's Women tells the story of the conflicted relationship between General Dwight Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, his Irish driver/aide, and the impact of that relationship on Mamie Eisenhower and her life in Washington during the war. Told from three alternating points of view (Kay's, Ike's, and Mamie's), the novel charts the deepening of the relationship as Ike and Kay move from England to North Africa to England, France, and Germany before and after the Normandy landing.

A sweltering July in Chicago, 1923. Edna Ferber, now a famous short-story writer, is supposed to be researching the novel that will become So Big, her Pulitzer-Prize winner. With her mother, Julia, she spends the week visiting her mother's old childhood friend, Esther Newmann, who lives with her family on the edge of the bustling Maxwell Street Jewish marketplace. But the awful specter of a scandalous murder 15 years before suddenly haunts Edna.

In this semiautobiographical portrait of a young artist, Willa Cather takes us into the heart of a woman coming to know her deepest self. Thea Kronborg, a minister’s daughter in a provincial Colorado town, has dreams and gifts that her hometown will not satisfy. With the support of a few allies who recognize her rare qualities, she follows her ambitions to the city, determined to be an opera diva. As she moves through a series of music teachers in Chicago, Thea finds that the attitudes and standards of those around her rarely match her own.

Jill Fryman (Friday to her friends) is a line supervisor at a truck manufacturing plant in a small southern Indiana town. Life on the assembly line is almost as predictable as her love life. When it comes to matters of the heart, Friday always seems to be making the wrong choices. Things go from bad to worse when El, a sultry labor organizer from the UAW, sweeps into town to unionize the plant right after it's been bought out by a Japanese firm.

A Manhattan gumshoe pursues a convict to St. Louis, where he gets mixed up in a cop killing and nearly loses his own life at the hands of a B girl.

When the town drunk ends up dead in a hit-and-run, FBI special agent Cate Wilde expects that solving the case will be cut and dried. But evidence quickly surfaces that the victim was involved with another crime. A crime that has gone cold for twenty years. A crime of personal importance to Cate. Cate’s best friend, Samantha, went missing at fourteen, leaving behind nothing except a jacket and an island full of unanswered questions. Samantha’s disappearance has haunted Cate for more than half her life, and she might finally be able to find some closure.

An informed biography on a leading intellectual and educational pioneer of the early 20th century. An icon of philosophy and psychology during the first half of the 20th century, Dewey is known as the father of functional psychology and a pivotal figure of the pragmatist movement, as well as the progressive movement in education. This concise and critical look at Dewey's work examines his unique take on art and religion, his naturalistic approach to science and psychology, and his contribution to political thought.

What’s wrong with buying regular coffee? Does fair trade necessarily mean ethical trade? What impact can consumers have on global economics? Fair trade means more than just bananas, coffee, and chocolate. Author and activist Jacqueline DeCarlo explains the principles behind fair trade and its development into a powerful economic tool. Packed with inspiring ways to make a difference, this audiobook will encourage readers of all backgrounds to help end poverty, environmental destruction, and human exploitation.

Born to Create is an inspirational autobiography chronicling Dr. Rosalie H. Contino's professional transition from successful seventh-grade English teacher to a newfound career in the arts. While most 40-year-old professionals are busy building upon the foundation that several years of hard work produced, Contino made the bold decision to quench the burning desire within to pursue the passion to create.

In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought. On April 22, at Ypres, German canisters spewed poison gas at French and Canadian soldiers in their trenches; on May 7, the German submarine U-20, without warning, torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians; and on May 31, a German Zeppelin began the first aerial bombardment of London and its inhabitants.

The Confessions of Frances Godwin is the fictional memoir of a retired high school Latin teacher looking back on a life of trying to do her best amidst transgressions - starting with her affair with Paul, whom she later marries. Now that Paul is dead and she’s retired, Frances Godwin thinks her story is over - but of course the rest of her life is full of surprises, including the truly shocking turn of events that occurs when she takes matters into her own hands after her daughter Stella’s husband grows increasingly abusive.

Laure Dugas is a champagne baby, born into a family of winemakers from two storied regions of France: Champagne and the Rhône Valley. But Laure wants little to do with the family business. It is only at age 23, when her uncle offers to send her to New York City to learn English and represent his wines to the American market, that Laure bids adieu to her boyfriend and begins her journey of discovery.