Showing results by narrator "Emily Durante" in All Categories

Griffins lounged all around them, inscrutable as cats, brazen as summer. They turned their heads to look at Kes out of fierce, inhuman eyes.... Little ever happens in the quiet villages of peaceful Feierabiand. The course of Kes' life seems set: she'll grow up to be an herb-woman and healer for the village of Minas Ford, never quite fitting in but always more or less accepted. And she's content with that path - or she thinks she is. Until the day the griffins come down from the mountains....

Archaeologist Gabby Knight has been living under an assumed identity to steer clear of her mobster father's enemies. But when she suspects her father of plotting to steal a priceless statue buried in New Mexico, she risks everything and sets out for the desert to beat him to it - and to save him from making a grave mistake. Breaking into a secluded cabin to wait out a blizzard, she's not worried about visitors. It's not like anyone would be traveling in this kind of weather...right?

Kendall Holbrook is determined to make it to the top, even with the challenge of being a woman on the male-dominated racing circuit. She doesn't have time for romance-especially not with racing rival Evan Monroe, the man who nearly crushed her dream years ago. Tricked into meeting him, Kendall is experiencing all those old feelings again-and she can't deny that they still have enough chemistry to set fire to the track.

When Grace's estranged sister, Liza, shows up on her doorstep, the timing couldn't be worse. Grace's beloved boss and benefactor, Bennett Marshfield, has finally gotten her to agree to a DNA test to establish if he is, in fact, her uncle. If so, Grace would move from being the trusted curator and manager of Marshfield Manor to Bennett's heir. And her duplicitous sister would be right behind her in the line of inheritance.

When Ruby returns to the small coastal town she'd left twenty years ago, she's overwhelmed with melancholy. After all, it's where her fiance dumped her at the altar. That's why all Ruby wants to do while in town is settle up and leave. But things get dangerous when Ruby's ex-fiance is found dead in his office. Ruby is the prime suspect and must solve the case in order to clear her name. Fortunately, she's not alone. Her feline familiar Rumpus is there to back Ruby up to the hilt. If only he could avoid making snarky comments and one liners while they do it!

What does it mean to be young today?

In the summer of 2010, Robin Marantz Henig wrote a provocative article for the New York Times Magazine called "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" It generated enormous reader response and started a conversation that included both millennials and baby boomers. Now, working with her millennial daughter Samantha, she expands the project to give us a full portrait of what it means to be in your 20s today.

Blood, Powder, and Residue goes inside a metropolitan crime laboratory to shed light on the complex social forces that underlie the analysis of forensic evidence. Blood, Powder, and Residue offers a vivid and sometimes harrowing picture of the lives of highly trained experts tasked with translating their knowledge for others who depend on it to deliver justice.

Originally published in 1985, Solstice is the gripping story of Monica Jensen and Sheila Trask, two young women who are complete opposites yet find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other. Monica is a shy, modest, and recently divorced school teacher while Sheila is a worldly, sophisticated, and nocturnal painter driven by the needs of her art. Over the months, their friendship deepens, first to love and then to a near-fatal obsession. Engaging, dark, and mysterious, Solstice is Joyce Carol Oates’s psychological masterpiece of friendship and fixation.

A heart-warming contemporary romance set in the Flint Hills of Kansas, where a former rodeo queen abandons her dreams in order to care for her deceased father's ranch and her two half-siblings, only to realize with the help of a young new pastor that God can turn even the most dire circumstances into seeds of hope.

151 Quick Ideas to Improve Your People Skills is constructed to help everyone do a better, more effective job of working with others. These ideas are culled from the study of human behavior, relationships, and communication. Everything here will help you be more effective, efficient, and in control of your relationships with people.

Since the age of 12, McKenzie Arnold has spent every summer at Albany Beach, Delaware, with her best friends, Aurora, Janine, and Lilly. The seaside house teems with 30 years of memories - some wonderful, others painful - and secrets never divulged beyond its walls. This summer may be the last they spend together, as Janine contemplates selling her family cottage.

Two years after her best friend was involved in a car accident that caused a traumatic brain injury, Lottie Anders is ready to move on. Her plans come to a screeching halt when both brothers responsible for the accident end up back in her life again. Zack is cruel, selfish and constantly rubbing what happened to her friend in Lottie's face. Zan is different. He listens to her awkward ramblings, and his dark eyes are irresistible. The trouble is, Zan was the driver in the accident, and now Lottie's discovered he lied to her about what happened that night.

As performance lags in the midst of economic cycles, many companies turn to magic bullets such as EVA, Kaizen, or Six Sigma. Unfortunately, these initiatives - along with how they're implemented - often deliver only short-term positive impact or cause more pain than the preexisting condition. Returning to competitive health and profitability in the face of economic downturns requires a dynamic realignment of business strategies, organizational design, and talent management.

Mist lives a normal life. She has a normal job, a normal boyfriend, and a normal apartment in San Francisco. She never thinks about her past if she can help it. She survived. That's the end of it. But then a snowy winter descends upon San Francisco. In June. And in quick succession, Mist is attacked by a frost giant in a public park and runs into an elf disguised as a homeless person on the streets...and then the man Mist believed was her mortal boyfriend reveals himself to be the trickster god Loki, alive and well after all these years.

In Rising, Wood reflects on the 70 days she spent on Everest and on the pivotal experiences and influences that brought her to that staggeringly beautiful and austere corner of the world. Beyond the physical hardships, she faced personal challenges as an outlier in the male bastion of Himalayan climbing. These were compounded by the vexing presence of her past mentor and lover with his new girlfriend on the American team climbing on the same side of the mountain.

The epic conclusion of Sasha Urban's story. I found my family, I found my heart, I found myself. But it’s not over. No matter how many allies I have, there's no escaping destiny. The end of the world is coming, and I'm the only one who can stop it.

Molly has arrived home from Vassar to reveal that she has an important announcement to make. Her mother, Suzanne, is convinced that Molly’s news is history repeating herself and that she’s about to become a 36-year-old grandmother. Suzanne’s mother, Ava, develops a case of impending great-grandmother fever - that is, when she’s not spying on the new next-door neighbor, Buddy McKinley, who turns out to be a blast from her past.

Were it not for Tessa Carlson, Special Agent Henry Miller’s daughter would have been abducted. But rescuing the little girl has thrust Tessa - a woman in hiding - into the media’s spotlight...and into a criminal’s crosshairs. Now her survival depends upon putting her faith in widowed single father Henry if she wants to live to see another day.

Coercion examines the critical issue of coercion in the 21st century, with a particular focus on new actors, strategies, and objectives in this very old bargaining game. The chapters in this volume examine intrastate, interstate, and transnational coercion and deterrence as well as both military and nonmilitary instruments of persuasion, thus expanding our understanding of coercion for conflict in the 21st century.

Way back in high school, golden boy Cade Gallari publicly revealed he'd slept with "fat girl" Ava Spencer to win a bet. Now a decade older and a head turner with her own concierge business, Ava isn't the gullible dreamer she once was - and she plans to prove it when Cade, hotter than ever, breezes back into town with an offer she can't refuse.