Showing results by narrator "Amy McFadden" in All Categories

We are all improvisers! The principle of "yes, and..." in improvisational theater has produced a lot of great comedy. But it also offers an invigo­rating approach to life in general, and the spiritual life in particular...Pastor, speaker, and improv aficionada MaryAnn McKibben Dana here blends scripture, psychology, theology, and pop culture in a wise, funny, down-to-earth guide to improv as a practice for life.

Marnie Baranuik is confident that her new psychic detective agency will be a great success, and she has eight million business cards to prove it. But before the paint even dries on her open for business sign, she's summoned to face the Demon King Asmodeus in His own playground, the revenant court, home of the undead nobility, to participate in a conclave of the most powerful immortals on Earth.

On the wrong end of a bad business deal, Honor Knight tries to flee the US and instead finds herself the victim of a kidnapping. Judd Raven has been hired by Honor's father and brother to bring her home. He's been warned that she's a pathological liar and Honor must convince him that the men who hired him are cold-hearted killers. Can she crack Judd's rock-hard exterior before it's too late?

Marnie MacGraw wants an ordinary life - a husband, kids, and a minivan in the suburbs. Now that she’s marrying the man of her dreams, she’s sure this is the life she’ll get. Then Marnie meets Blix Holliday, her fiancé’s irascible matchmaking great-aunt who’s dying, and everything changes - just as Blix told her it would. When her marriage ends after two miserable weeks, Marnie is understandably shocked.

It’s been thirteen years since doctors declared Libby Ross-Velasquez a goner. Yet here she is - cancer-free. So why doesn’t she feel more alive? Sure, Libby’s husband, Shiloh, has been distant. One of their daughters has a serious health condition. And her father’s death hovers over Libby like a rain cloud. Still, this eternal optimist knows she’s the winner of the existential lottery. But when her forced cheer isn’t enough to keep her family from catching her blahs, she decides to fly them all to Vieques. The Puerto Rican island is where she and Shiloh fell in love.

Special Agent Wyatt Tanner has always worked undercover. He thrives in the dark of the night. He survives by turning himself into someone else. But living so long in the shadows can make a man forget who he really is. When people start dying, when he finds blood on his own hands, he questions the choices he has made, the people he is with. Can he find his way back to the light? Can he trust the beautiful woman who needs his help? Or does she also have a secret life? He'll have to make one desperate play to find out...

Welcome to a place of unconditional love and unexpected blessings. When widow Rose Schrock turns her Amish farmhouse into a bed and breakfast, she expects there might be problems. The reaction of her cantankerous mother-in-law for one. Disapproval from the church for another. But what she doesn’t expect is that the guests at the Inn at Eagle Hill will spill their problems into her life and into her heart. She also never expects the kind of help and support she gets from Galen King, the quiet and rugged horse trainer next door. Love, Rose discovers, can bloom in the most unexpected ways.

Would you betray your friends to save them? It has been months since Lily Singer’s harrowing adventure in England, yet there has still been no word of her father or Morgan le Fay. Far from being able to relax, Lily has been kept busy doing the last thing in the world she ever imagined: dating Sebastian Blackwell.

After her scandalous May-December romance comes to an end, baby of the family Lilly Callaghan returns home to Trillium Bay braced for the torrent of “I told you sos” from her sisters and the rest of the tiny island community. Floundering both personally and professionally, she’s at an emotional crossroads but determined to figure out her next best steps. When a surprise job offer from her house-flipping sister reacquaints Lilly with handsome, free-spirited Wenniway Island transplant Matt Eastman, Lilly wonders if she’s ready for a new romance.

Git O'Rourke is from the wrong side of the tracks - even if, in the depressed Rust Belt town of Baxter, it's not always clear where that designation begins. A single mother, she works hard to support her daughter, Charlie, but still finds time to cut loose every once in a while, to go to a local bar, drink martinis, and find a companion for the night. Which is exactly how she ends up in a hotel room with a strange man passed out on heroin and how she comes to possess the bag of money and guns that he left open as he got his fix.

I'm madly in love with my best friend. That right there—that's my secret. Trevor and I grew up next door to one another. Yes. He's the boy next door. Even now, we rent opposite sides of a duplex, and we work across the aisle from one another at The Corn Corners Tribune. Basically, there isn't a part of my life Trevor hasn't touched. I take that back. He hasn't touched me. He's made it clear we're in the friend zone, and whatever feelings he had for me were a passing thing for him, whereas mine keep growing like a Chia pet on a humid summer day in the Midwest.

Just because her husband's naked, dead, and in a hotel bed . . . it might not be what it seems. But there's that scarf in his mouth.... Given the situation, Kiki Lowenstein can't help remembering that her (late) husband got her pregnant while cheating on his girlfriend. True, he did the right thing at the time, and their much-loved daughter Anya is now eleven years old. But suddenly he's dead, and Kiki's financially embarrassed—that jerk disinherited his own family!

In the near future, to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth, the world’s elite flock to Atopia, an enormous corporate-owned artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. It is there that Dr. Patricia Killiam rushes to perfect the ultimate in virtual reality: a program to save the ravaged Earth from mankind’s insatiable appetite for natural resources.

When tourist season ends, the next one begins...and hurricane season is never easy in the Keys. Especially when the winds have blown in a man who threatens everything Beck has built over the last few months in Coconut Key. The newest arrival might be the contractor Beck’s been longing to find...but he’s also a man from her past. With his attention on her as much as the B&B renovation, this new twist is equal parts thrilling and terrifying.

Mary Kildare knows how to read people. It's both why she makes a great therapist and why she refuses to trust the average bachelor. Staying fiercely independent has been her primary relationship strategy - until wealthy playboy pilot (and commitmentphobe) Glen Fairchild reappears in her life. After a yearlong teasing tug-of-war, Mary and Glen test the waters of attraction, only to find that their physical chemistry runs deeper than flirtation.

When Amy Shannon enters The Serpent, a seedy island bar, she immediately catches the eye of Jase Lassiter. He knows she doesn't belong in his little hole in the wall, but he will do whatever it takes to keep her there.

It's been twenty years since the night Jake Marcott was brutally murdered at St. Elizabeth High School. It's a night that shattered the lives of Lindsay Farrell, Kirsten Daniels, and Rachel Alsace. It's a night they'll never forget. A killer will make sure of that....

My mother's New Year's resolution for me was simple: make a serious effort at putting myself out there and dating again and do it for one full year. Or, until I fell in love. Whichever came first. How hard could one year of swipes and matches and awkward first dates be? In a word: bad. In nine words: bad and also hilarious, demoralizing, exhausting, and ridiculously amusing.

Teacher Misery perfectly encapsulates the comical misery that has become the teaching profession. Jane Morris's strange, funny, and sometimes unbelievable teaching experiences are told through a collection of short stories, essays, and artifacts including real emails from parents, students, and administrators. From the parents who blame their son's act of arson on the teacher for causing him low self-esteem to the student who offers to teach the teacher how to sell drugs so she can pay her bills, one story is more shocking than the next.

The dead carry their secrets with them.... At least until they end up at Riley Smith's door. Her latest spectral visitor is a murdered bride with a need for revenge, and not necessarily for the person who killed her. Never mind that killer is about to strike again. Riley's determined to help, but is missing Hayden, the hot, ghostly boy who's always had her back. Living, breathing Hayden is awake, which means his spirit isn't around to flirt with Riley anymore. Worse yet, the "real" Hayden doesn't remember her.