Showing results by narrator "Renée Raudman" in All Categories

It's been a brutal year for rookie New Orleans cop Maureen Coughlin. Her first arrests, her first black eye, and, after a stinging brush with the corrupt heart of her adopted city, her first suspension. As she waits out the suspension, hoping to save her badge, Maureen finds increasingly dark and dangerous ways to pass the time. Justice, she tells herself, is being served. No need for the NOPD to know what she's doing.

Kate Gilbert is a woman without a past — or even a passport — to tie her down. Raised by smugglers, she lives by her wits, relishing the sense of freedom that only the life of the open sea can provide. All she knows of love she has learned from classic literature. Nothing she’s read in Shakespeare, however, could have prepared her for Beau Lantry.

Kicking off her final week of field training, Maureen takes a punch from a panicked suspect bursting out of an apartment. Her training officer laughs it off, and the incident even yields a small victory: the cops recover a stash of pot and guns. But out on the street, on the fringes of the action, Maureen sees something sinister transpire between two neighborhood boys that leaves her shaken, and she knows there’s more to the story than she’s seen. As we follow Maureen’s dangerous hunt for answers, Loehfelm leads us around New Orleans’ most hidden corners and into its darkest outposts.

Paula and John met in Italy, fell in love, and married in Rome four years later. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and, while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although he recovered from his physical wounds in less than a year, the process of healing had just begun. Unable to regain his equilibrium, he sank into a deep sadness that reverberated throughout their relationship.

In the second Tale from the Five Kingdoms, the green-tongued witch, Truda Hangnail, sets her sights on Queen Bluebell’s throne, enlisting the kingdom’s rats and shrinking the good witches of Wadingburn to pave her way. Luckily, a sweet-natured orphan named Loobly is witness to Truda’s evil spells and sets off to fetch some familiar help. Will the combined strengths, smarts, and charms of Trueheart Gracie Gillypot, Prince Marcus, Marlon the bat, and Gubble the troll be enough to defeat the Deep Magic of Truda Hangnail?

When Rebekah Kettle takes stock of her life, she isn't happy with what she finds. It's time to take action. She starts a relationship with a quirky paparazzo with whom she's suspiciously compatible, and she befriends an eccentric older woman who needs her companionship. It seems things are looking up. But, unexpectedly, Rebekah discovers that Mrs. Williams' apartment has a view straight into Arthur Weeman's town house, where she can watch the object of her obsession's life displayed like a silent movie.

For many years, Davidson earned a living as a successful journalist and screenwriter, but in her 50s she saw her life come apart: she could no longer find work, she endured a break-up with her partner, and her children left for college. For the first time ever, she had nothing to do. She felt adrift, but she found that she was not alone. In Leap!, Davidson sets out on a passionate quest to learn how to do the coming years well.

Christine Benvenuto had been married for more than twenty years - with three young children - when her husband turned to her one night in bed and said, "I'm thinking constantly about my gender." Unhappy in his body, he wanted to become a woman. Part memoir, part voyeur's look into a marriage, Sex Changes is a journey through the end of a marriage and out the other side.

On Thanksgiving Day 2007, three generations of the Olson family gather. Eleanor and Gavin worry about their daughter, Ginny, an unmarried academic in her 30s, a newly adopted Indian daughter, and about their son, Douglas, who has recently been caught in the imploding real-estate bubble. But Ginny and Douglas, determined to have a perfect holiday, keep their troubles secret, a skill they have learned from their parents.

The bones reveal a more recent murder, with her deceased uncle leading the suspect list. As Tai struggles to clear Dexter's name - and save the business he left her - she uncovers deadly secrets also buried in the red Georgia clay and realizes there's a live murderer on the loose, a clever killer who has tried to conceal the crimes of the present in the stories of the past.

Even while Randall was speaking, it was Pietro I saw, the tenderness in his dark eyes looking at me, the caress in his soft voice. In Randall's voice there was not a shred of emotion; nor was there any in his expression. How should I respond? What should I say? I knew this was the hardest decision I would ever have to make. Either choice would demand a different price. Was I prepared to pay it? Was love enough in the one to bridge all the other differences of nationality, religion, and heritage?

In 1870, Blythe Dorman, the high-spirited daughter of a prosperous Western rancher, falls hopelessly in love with a mysterious stranger , where instead of the happiness she anticipated, Blythe finds only disillusionment and loneliness. The unselfish commitment and undiscouragable love that Blythe expends in her gallant struggles to heal a star-crossed marriage frame the poignant plot of Gallant Bride.

Sidney Westerbrook has always studied darkness and damnation from a sensible distance. Now, to earn his place as a league Bookkeeper, he must discover why Chicago is such a battleground of soul-linked warriors. But the research becomes personal when he finds himself over his head and under attack—and at the mercy of a waif with demon-lit eyes and a deep yearning in her heart.

Possession by a demon cost Jonah Walker his faith, his humanity, and his wife. Once a righteous missionary, he endures immortality with nothing but a body for battle and a bent for retribution. But his last devastating fight left him wounded beyond healing, and his only chance to redeem his soul lies with a fallen woman.

Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen's wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidently hits and kills a girl on a dark, country road. For the next 25 years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one another and their victim. As one character says, "When you add us up, you always have to carry the one."

Cerise Mar and her unruly clan are cash poor but land rich, claiming a large swathe of the Mire, the Edge swamplands between the state of Louisiana and the Weird. When her parents vanish, her clan's long-time rivals are suspect number one. But all is not as it seems. Two nations of the Weird are waging a cold war fought by feint and espionage, and their conflict is about to spill over into the Edge - and Cerise's life.

Reckoning and ruin. That's what Savannah is to private eye Tai Randolph, who has gladly rebooted her life in Atlanta and is celebrating several landmarks: A year running the Confederate-themed gun shop she inherited with its busy schedule of reenactments. A year with her sexy, ex-SWAT lover, Trey, now working a corporate security gig, who's having to reboot his own life and brain after a terrible auto accident. A year of confronting a checkered list of ruffians and outright villains, mostly now put behind bars.

The dog days of summer have arrived, and Tai Randolph is feeling the heat. Running her uncle’s gun shop is more demanding than she had ever imagined. Her best friend, Rico, is competing for a national slam poetry title, and Atlanta is overrun with hundreds of fame-hungry performance poets clogging all the good bars.

"Why, Cara, why did you do it?" "Maybe no one wants to see me as I really am. Maybe in this family it isn't all right to be different. And I am different, Kitty, whether anyone wants to admit it or not." "But, Cara,--it just seems like tonight you set out deliberately to cause trouble." "Even you don’t understand, do you, Kitty?" "I do, I mean I'm trying to. You're my twin, I want to understand!" "Yes, I know we're twins, but who am I?" demanded Cara hotly.

Mary DeMuth, an acclaimed author and advocate who has been featured in Christianity Today, CNN, and The Washington Post, brings a uniquely empathetic voice to her storytelling. In Daisy Chain, DeMuth draws on her understanding of brokenness and redemption to craft an achingly beautiful coming-of-age story that delves into human frailty and God's surprising redemption.