Showing results by narrator "Joel Richard" in All Categories

Anna Draekus has harbored a shadowy secret all her life - a secret that she's trained for years to conceal from her king and fellow military officers. Anna belongs to an elite, underground guard charged with protecting the royal family at all costs. This sworn responsibility is one that must never be discovered - not even by King Jared himself. But when her superior officer, Nevin Daniels, uncovers her membership in the circle of protectors thought to be extinct, Anna finds herself in treacherous territory.

Why do politicians engage in nasty politics? Why do they use insult, accusations, intimidation, and in rare cases violence against their domestic political opponents? In Nasty Politics, Thomas Zeitzoff answers these questions by examining this global political trend in the US, Ukraine, and Israel and looking at how key leaders such as Trump, Zelensky, and Netanyahu use it. Nasty Politics highlights how it influences the kinds of politicians who run for office and deepens our understanding for why so many politicians now rely on outsized anger and withering insults for political gain.

"...measured first person narrative is packed with interesting details about investigative work and about his home life with Sherry and their young daughters: a refreshing rarity in the genre." ( Kirkus Reviews)

Unlike her brother, Saracasi Ocaitchi has always known that her loyalties belong to the ideals of freedom and democracy, not the government of the Alliance, and that protecting those ideals would require a fight. But now that the rebellion she has dreamed about has finally begun, she must come to terms with what that truly means: for herself, for her brother, and for all of the people who will die in the coming war.

Two friends develop a dangerous performance. McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco.

Two creatures found in the woods are taken in by a troubled couple. McSweeney's is a literary journal based in San Francisco.

In The Safety of the Kingdom, J. Michael Martinez takes up the question of how the United States government has responded to terrorist attacks and, in the absence of an attack, the fear of foreign and subversive elements that may harm the nation. In some cases the government “overreaction” led to a series of abuses that amplified the severity of the original threat.

A traveler is murdered in Rio for the sake of a stuffed snake. The man in white has money to fly, but he boards a bus instead. It takes hours for the rickety old bus to snake down the Brazilian coast, and the man arrives in Rio de Janeiro well after midnight. He is on his way to make his fortune when he spots the killers following him and knows is life is through. A few hours after dawn, the man in white is brought to the city morgue.

A gang of assassins draw Da Silva into Brazil's rugged interior. George Chaney may have been raised in the roughest neighborhoods of the United States, but he's never been anywhere quite as dangerous as Paraíso. Although booming with petrodollars, this rugged city in the Brazilian wastelands is still a frontier town at heart. On the run from the mob, Chaney comes here in search of sanctuary. He will find that though the city's name means paradise, its reality is much closer to hell.

A quartet of kidnappers make the mistake of hiring Da Silva as their driver. Chico Xavier needs cash. His father has cut off his allowance, and for a university student with expensive taste - and an even more expensive girlfriend - this is a death sentence. And so he and his friends arrange to kidnap one of their school chums: a fellow dilettante who lets himself be taken in exchange for a cut of the ransom. Two days of criminal behavior, Chico thinks, and they'll all live happily ever after - or die in the Rio sand.

At an international summit, Da Silva searches for an assassin. Off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, a freighter battles the waves. The steward has been stricken with appendicitis, but the sea is too rough for the ship to dock. A coast guard helicopter brings him to shore, where he is put in an ambulance and rushed the hospital. But when the ambulance arrives, the patient has disappeared. He was never sick, and he is not a sailor. He is an assassin, and he's vanished into thin air.

When a daffy young American comes to Rio de Janeiro in search of her missing brother, Captain José Da Silva does his best to stay out of it. But when her search draws her into the mystery of the bridge that went nowhere, Da Silva will have to risk a jungle expedition of his own to save her life.

Chace, a teenage orphan with the power to see the future, saves people anonymously by leaving them a letter to find in their moment of crisis. When his friends are in danger, he is there. He saves them but cannot predict the consequences. He can see their future, but he cannot see his own. Chase is interrupted while writing to save his best friend, Sarah. With an incomplete letter, her rescue feels equally incomplete inside. Sarah cannot rest until she speaks to the one person who helped her want to go on living.

The thought of missing Christmas has little Calvin quaking in his roots. The smallest tree on his famous farm, his branches get all ruffled when a grumpy old coot says he isn't strong enough for ornaments. But he's thrilled when he's finally pulled from the ground and put on sale just in time for Christmas Eve!

In Bearing Witness, John Carpenter explores how across the world, those who experienced the war tried to make sense of it both during and in its immediate aftermath. The digestion of a cataclysmic event can take generations. But in this fascinating audiobook, Carpenter brings together all those who did their best to communicate what they saw in the moment so that it could never be lost.

Myron enters the Jonesbridge Industrial Complex as a worker, a prisoner, commanded to harvest the scant resources that enable the powers that be to continue waging an unwinnable war. When Sindra - a fellow prisoner and a spirited fighter - joins him at the salvage line, he finds a new reason to live and to escape. Even though any attempt to leave will lead to execution, Myron and Sindra plan a daring escape.

Buzz Martin, “the singing logger,” was the symbol of logging culture. Then that culture died.

For almost sixty years, the weekly St. Louis Evening Whirl brazenly attacked criminals, exposed the sexual peccadilloes of the black bourgeoisie, and racked up millions in libel claims—most of the time in iambic, rhyming couplets.

Freud, Dora (no, not that Dora), and surfing’s secret Austro-Hungarian roots.

For generations, the Sandcrane men have served their tribe as the keepers of the Sacred Arrows. When the time comes for Seth Sandcrane to pass the responsibility on to his son Tom, he waits with pride for his son to assume his place among the elders of the tribe. But Tom wants nothing to do with Sacred Arrows, ancient traditions, and the mystical heritage of the Cheyenne. It is 1896; the nation is growing, and Tom wants a place in the white man’s world.