Showing results by narrator "Stephen Hoye" in All Categories

"It's okay to love me, Joey. But don't be in love with me." New York, 1941. Joey El Bueno is just a smart-aleck kid, confounding the nuns and bullies at St. Stephen's School on East 28th Street, when he first meets Jane Bent, a freckle-faced girl with red pigtails and yellow smiley-face barrettes, who seems to know him better than he knows himself. A magical afternoon at the movies, watching Carey Grant in Gunga Din, is the beginning of a puzzling friendship that soon leaves Joey baffled and bewildered.

The scene is perplexingly always the same: the home of a single woman, no signs of forced entry, no evidence of an intruder, and no victim - only a bathtub filled with blood. Newly promoted homicide detective Angel Alves wants to make his mark in the department and a difference on the streets.

The man is found on the icy streets of Boston, vomit in his beard, alcohol in his system, and ice in his veins. The police assume he is just another in the dozens of derelicts whom the urban winter claims each year, but Brady Coyne knows better. Attorney to New England's upper crust, he was the dead man's lawyer, and he knows that Stuart Carver was no bum: He was a senator's nephew.

After losing both parents to a flu pandemic that seriously threatens his own life as well, 13-year-old Cole Vining is sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a small town in southern Indiana. There, Cole feels sheltered and loved but never as if he truly belongs. Everything about his new home is vastly different from the secular world in which he was raised.

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who, like David and Diana's father, is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason's condition.

In late 1971 John Lennon left London behind and moved to New York, eager to join a youth movement rallying for social justice and an end to the Vietnam War. Lennon was quickly embraced by radicals and revolutionaries, the hippies and Yippies at odds with the establishment. Settling in Greenwich Village, the heart of Manhattan's counterculture, the former Beatle was soon on the frontlines of the antiwar movement and championing a range of causes and issues.

Kevin's dad, Jerry, is a crook. And he taught his son every trick in the book. Masters of identity theft, Kevin and Jerry move from one seedy motel to another, always trying for the big score. Colette is a runaway who dreams of conning her way into the upper echelons of high society. Just a teenager, she's already a tough and talented grifter, and soon becomes Jerry's girlfriend and accomplice.

When a priest with radical ideas and a parish council with traditional values lock horns over the beliefs they hold most sacred, there's bound to be controversy, and consequences. But murder crosses the line between committing a sin and committing a crime, turning a battle over faith into a battle for justice. And smack in the middle of the explosive case is Tulsa attorney Ben Kincaid.

From the co-creator and executive producer of the television show Cold Case Files, a fast-paced, stylish murder mystery featuring a tough-talking Irish cop turned private investigator who does for the city of Chicago what Elmore Leonard did for Detroit and Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles.

A woman is shot as she waits for her train to work. An hour later, a second woman is gunned down as she rides an elevated train through the Loop. Two hours after that, a church becomes the target of a chemical weapons attack. The city of Chicago is under siege, and Michael Kelly, cynical cop turned private investigator, just happens to be on the scene when all hell breaks loose. Kelly is initially drawn into the case by the killers themselves, then tasked by Chicago’s mayor and the FBI to hunt down the bad guys and, all things being equal, put a bullet in them.

Vienna, 1770: Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen unveils a strange and amazing invention: the Mechanical Turk, a sensational and unbeatable chess-playing automaton. But what the Habsburg court hails as the greatest innovation of the century is really nothing more than a brilliant illusion. The chess machine is secretly operated from inside by the Italian dwarf Tibor, a God-fearing social outcast whose chess-playing abilities and diminutive size make him the perfect accomplice in this grand hoax.

In 1964, Martha and the Vandellas recorded "Dancing in the Street." at Motown's Hitsville USA Studio. By the summer, the sixties were in full swing. As the country grew more radicalized in those few months, "Dancing in the Street" gained currency as an activist anthem. Told by the writer who is legendary for finding the big story in unlikely places, Ready for a Brand New Beat chronicles that extraordinary summer of 1964 and showcases the momentous role that a simple song about dancing played in history.

When PI Michael Kelly is hired by an ex-flame to tail her abusive husband, he expects trouble of a domestic rather than a historical nature. Life, however, is not so simple. The tail leads Kelly to an old house on Chicago's North Side. Inside it, the private investigator finds a body and, perhaps, the answer to one of Chicago's most enduring mysteries: who started the Great Chicago Fire and why.

Martin Fletcher doesn't claim to be a hero. Yet he didn't flinch, either. During three decades covering wars, revolutions, and natural disasters, Fletcher worked his way from news agency cameraman to top network correspondent, facing down his own fears while facing up to mass killers, warlords, and murderers.

President Franklin Blake survives a terrorist attack at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. The First Lady isn't so lucky.

John Thinnes, a detective on the Chicago police force, and Jack Caleb, a well-known psychiatrist, were friends - unlikely friends, maybe, with very different lives, but men who liked and respected each other. And they had one significant experience in common: Both had been "in country" in Vietnam during the war.

In the Fall of 1970, at the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford wearing Frye boots, with long blond hair and a passion for his students that was as intense as it was rebellious. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin competing for the attention and affection of his parents. He had a burning need to feel special. The new teacher supplied that need.

January 2, 1972: Men in tuxedos rob the Pierre, a New York hotel. They get away with $11 million worth of cash and jewelry. The police are baffled by how large-scale a heist could go off so smoothly. The answer was in the leader of the thieves, a man by the name of Bobby Comfort. Comfort took to crime from a young age, card sharping, petty theft, and eventually robbery. Taking money from the rich, though, was where he excelled.

In stories like "A Night in the Cemetery," "Night of Horror," and "Murder," not only will Chekhov's dark humor and twisted crimes satisfy even the most hardboiled of mystery fans, but readers will again appreciate the penetrating, absurdist insight into the human condition that only Chekhov can bring. Whether it is the death of a young amateur playwright at the hands of an editor who hates bad writing, or a drunken civil servant who ends up trapped in a graveyard, these stories overflow with the unforgettable characters and unique sensibility that will forever make Chekhov one of the most fascinating figures in literature.

When Iggy Corso gets kicked out of high school, there's no one for him to tell. His mother has gone off, his father is stoned on the couch, and because the phone's been disconnected, even the social worker can't get through. So he leaves a note and goes out to make something of his life, but that's not so easy when you're 16, living in public housing, have no skills, and your only friend is a law-school dropout who's thinking about joining the Hare Krishnas.