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Katherine Dean Mazerov - Summer Club
Murder meets the absurd in the sizzling thriller Summer Club, a new novel by award-winning journalist Katherine Dean Mazerov.
Normally, politics and parent drama, drunken soirees and sex-capades reign at Lydia Phillips’s swim and tennis club. Now, a strange car following the club manager, a break-in at Lydia’s home, and a shocking discovery on the club grounds have this stay-at-home mom dusting off her newspaper-reporting skills to unravel the mystery.
Then, a body surfaces in the river, and Lydia’s life gets a whole lot more complicated—and dangerous.
In one moment, readers of Summer Club will be laughing at the colorful characters’ outrageous antics. The next moment, they will be riveted as the story reveals a troubling, complex scheme involving fraud and murder.
Perfect for parents balancing career and family, Summer Club casts a beam of dark humor across the hidden reality that makes “domestic” life—raising children and volunteering for community and school groups—sometimes more harrowing than the most cutthroat of corporate jobs
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Jonathan Handel - Who Do You Want to Be?
29:22|What do you want to do when you grow up?One day my best friendSaid to meWho in the worldDo you wanna be?I thought and thoughtAnd thought and saidMaybe a firemanCuz their trucks are red?That’s not a great reason—but there are dozens of other possibilities in this lyrical, illustrated story. It’s an affirming book written for diverse kids aged 4-8 and their parents, but it just might appeal to anyone who isn’t sure what they want to do for work. (And, really, who is?)With large color illustrations on just about every page and rhymes throughout, it's a great gift for any young kid. We're contributing ten percent of the book’s revenue to The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization.This color, fixed-layout Kindle edition is best viewed on color tablets, laptops and desktop computers—and even cellphones.Timothy Jay Smith - Fire on the Island Audio
34:31|Set against the very real refugee crisis on the beautiful, sun-drenched Greek islands, Fire on the Island paints a nuanced and loving portrait of a community in crisis while shedding light on the challenges of life in contemporary Greece.After a string of mysterious fires breaks out on a small Greek island, undercover FBI agent Nick Damigos arrives to investigate, showing up just in time to save a beloved truffle-sniffing dog from the most recent inferno. But as Nick searches for the arsonist responsible, he finds himself navigating a community rife with conflicts, some of which go back generations. As the threat of the next fire looms, Nick begins to uncover the villagers’ countless buried secrets. But Nick has secrets too, and as he falls for a young bartender who becomes his prime suspect, he becomes entrenched in the very mystery he’s trying to solve. With time running out to prevent catastrophe, will Nick expose the truth and save the village, or will the island be engulfed in a blaze of vengeance and heartbreak?Ally Walker - The Light Runner
32:31|The first exciting installment in the Realities series!Things aren't as they appear to be at Bainbridge Psychiatric Hospital. Decorated war hero and politician Captain Oliver Haskell has voluntarily committed himself following the murder of his wife, scientist Hannah Haskell, in the parking lot of her workplace, Wellglad Pharmaceuticals. His case is assigned to Dr. Ella Kramer, a young psychiatrist just out of her residency with a troubled past of her own. After interviewing the captain, Ella starts to listen to her other patients at Bainbridge, who seem to be operating in another reality altogether. But it is when their reality bleeds into Captain Haskell's that Ella is forced to choose between the two worlds and learns to trust her gut about what really happened to Hannah Haskell that night. Detective Paul Moran who is investigating the murder smells a rat-or, perhaps, in this case, a rabbit-as he attempts to unravel what has taken place and its strange connection to the hospital's patients.The Light Runner, the first installment in the Realities series from debut author Ally Walker, is an edge-of-your-seat metaphysical thriller that will mesmerize and haunt you from the first page to its shocking end.Chad Dulac - Cogs of Legend Book 1: Awakening Fire
28:45|In a world powered by steam and ruled by corporations, one young woman’s discovery will ignite a revolution.Alice is a gifted but underappreciated tinkerer working the rail lines of Terra. During an unexpected train malfunction, she uncovers a long-lost ancient artifact buried in a forgotten cave—a fire cog capable of creating heat and light—seemingly from nothing.Could it be tied to one of the seven primordial Cogs of Legend?Worse, once the Steele Company learns of the cog's abilities, they stop at nothing to take it from Alice.Forced to flee, Alice teams up with her rough-edged mentor Rueger and quick-witted best friend Henry as they race to unravel the mystery of the fire cog. Along the way, Alice must master deadly new lore, survive on a mysterious island, and face truths about her long-lost family and the shadowy history of Terra itself.But with a host of steam-powered walkers closing in, time is running out. Can Alice unlock the cog’s power before it falls into the wrong hands?Awakening Fire is Book One in the Cogs of Legend series: a steampunk science-fantasy epic packed with immersive settings, sharp characters, slow-burn romance, and high-stakes adventure.Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth, Mistborn, and Mortal Engines.The gears are turning. The spark has been lit. The legend begins.Blair Kroeber - Partial in Blood
33:03|Allegra Tarot has an uncanny knack for becoming anyone she wants.Depending on the job, she can transform the carriage of her body or the cadence of her speech. With the pop of a collar or the tousle of her hair, she can dupe your perceptions.As a former T.V. actress, she’s got chameleon abilities, no doubt, and they come in handy now that she straps a Diamondback 9mm and prowls the gritty backstreets of working-class Hollywood, running the grind as a skip tracer.If you want to follow along on her investigations, you better lock in. It’s bound to get your blood thumping, your adrenaline spiking.Partial in Blood is a propulsive, character-driven crime thriller rife with twisty turns and piquant humor. Tag along with Allegra as she leverages her performance chops to investigate the disappearance of a troubled young woman, in the process uncovering a brutal shadow world of corruption and deception.Judy Penz Sheluk - Midnight Schemers & Daydream Believers
35:44|Desire or desperation, revenge or retribution—how far would you go to realize a dream? The twenty-two authors in this collection explore the possibilities, with predictably unpredictable results.Featuring stories by Pam Barnsley, Linda Bennett, Clark Boyd, C.W. Blackwell, Amanda Capper, Susan Daly, James Patrick Focarile, Rand Gaynor, Gina X. Grant, Julie Hastrup, Beth Irish, Charlie Kondek, Edward Lodi, Bethany Maines, Jim McDonald, donalee Moulton, Michael Penncavage, Judy Penz Sheluk, KM Rockwood, Peggy Rothschild, Debra Bliss Saenger, and Joseph S. Walker.Ross Halperin - Bear Witness
30:41|The vast majority of Hondurans would have never dared to set foot in Nueva Suyapa, a mountainside barrio that was under the thumb of a gang whose bravado and cruelty were the stuff of legend. But that is precisely where Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, chose to raise their families. Kurt and Carlos were best friends who had committed their lives to helping the poor, and when they accepted that nobody else—not the police, not the prosecutors, not the NGOs—was ever going to protect their neighbors from the incessant violence they suffered, they decided to take matters into their own hands.In magnetic prose, journalist Ross Halperin chronicles how these two do-gooders became quasi-vigilantes and charged into a series of life-and-death battles, not just with this one gang, but also with forces far more dangerous, including a notorious tycoon who commanded about a thousand armed men and a police force whose wickedness defied credulity. Kurt and Carlos would eventually get catapulted from obscurity to being famous power players who had access to the backrooms where legislators, ambassadors, and presidents pulled strings. Their efforts made some of the most violent neighborhoods on earth safer and arguably improved a profoundly corrupt government. But they were forced to compromise their principles in order to make all that happen, and furthermore, they acquired a large number of outraged critics and precipitated some heartbreaking collateral damage.A remarkable and dangerous feat of reportage, Bear Witness shows what happens when altruism, faith, and an obsession with justice are pushed to the extreme.Julie Clark - The Ghostwriter
23:02|"Expertly plotted and exquisitely twisted… Julie Clark masterfully weaves together a daughter's long-held suspicions and her father's deadly secrets with the tragic events from the past. The Ghostwriter kept me turning pages in this suspenseful search for the truth." — Ashley Elston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of First Lie WinsFrom the instant New York Times bestselling author of The Last Flight and The Lies I Tell comes a dazzling new thriller.June, 1975. The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets. Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she's offered a job to ghostwrite her father's last book. What she doesn't know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it's not another horror novel he wants her to write. After fifty years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975.Megan Abbott - El Dorado Drive
34:04|From the New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout comes a simmering, atmospheric novel of friendship and betrayal, following a women-led pyramid scheme in suburban Detroit."Abbott is a superstar of the suspense genre." —NPRAll I want is to be innocent again. But that's not how it works. Especially not after the Wheel.The three Bishop sisters grew up in privilege in the moneyed suburbs of Detroit. But as the auto industry declined, so did their fortunes. Harper, the youngest, is barely making ends meet when her beloved, charismatic sister Pam—currently in the middle of a contentious battle with her ex-husband—and her eldest sister, Debra, approach her about joining an exciting new club.The Wheel offers women like themselves—middle-aged and of declining means—a way to make their own money, independent of husbands or families. Quickly, however, the Wheel’s success, and their own addiction to it, leads to greater and greater risks—and a crime so shocking it threatens to bring everything down with it.Megan Abbott turns her keen eye toward women and money in El Dorado Drive, a riveting story about power, vulnerability, and how desperation draws out our most destructive impulses.