Showing results by narrator "Susan Ericksen" in All Categories

Rainey Bliss Adams desperately needed a new start when she and her daughter Ariel relocated from St. Louis to Old Gate and settled into the house where the Bliss family had lived for over a century. Rainey's husband had been killed in a freak explosion that left her 14 year-old daughter Ariel scarred and disfigured. At the grand housewarming party, Bliss House begins to reveal itself again.

Some refer to it as the Colony. To others, it’s a cult. But few locals in the Oregon coastal hamlet of Deception Bay have ever been invited to the inner sanctum of Siren Song. Even the sisters who live here, far from strangers who might recoil at their unnerving psychic abilities, don’t know all the terrors buried within its walls....

Empathy has become a gaping fault line in American culture. Pioneering programs aim to infuse our legal and educational systems with more empathic thinking, even as pundits argue over whether we should bother empathizing with our political opposites at all. Meanwhile, we are inundated with the buzzily termed "empathic marketing" - which may very well be a contradiction in terms. In I Feel You, Cris Beam carves through the noise with a revelatory exploration of how we perform empathy, how it is learned, what it can do - indeed, what empathy is in the first place.

After the tragic death of her son and the seeming collapse of her marriage, Charlotte Napier flees to Portugal in the hopes of finding guidance from her mentor: her mother-in-law, Violet. Instead, she finds solace in the letters of Mariana Alcoforado, a seventeenth-century nun. Charlotte and Mariana's stories may be different in origin, but they share the same inner turmoil. As she reads the letters, Mariana's spiritual journey sheds light on Charlotte's own crisis.

Hallie Knight is summoned to a historic seaport town by Nicholas Trench, the critically ill grandfather of her former college roommate. Months earlier, Trench's granddaughter Susan mysteriously disappeared from his home and all attempts to learn her fate have failed. He feels that if anyone can find Susan, it will be this woman who was his granddaughter's closest friend.

Have you ever heard of the “Mercury 13” women? Did you know that nearly twenty years before the first women were let into NASA’s astronaut program, there were others who tried? What are the requirements for being shot into space, piloting a hunk of metal while carrying the hopes and fears of your nation? Mastery of flying, as well as courage, intelligence, resistance to stress, and fitness – any checklist would certainly include these. But when America created NASA in 1958, there was an unspoken rule in place....

The Wilde sisters dove headfirst into this world on fire with life and expectation. With hair black as midnight and eyes blazing blue, they grow into truly irresistible women. But as well as being blessed with beauty and determination, the Wilde sisters are cursed with equal tastes for mischief and bad men. And both of these appetites always lead to trouble. Love either lifts a woman up or drags her down. When a Wilde woman dies, they don't have to dig a hole.

Best friends Tracie and Jonny meet for coffee each Sunday night to discuss their forlorn love lives. Tracie loves boys with an affinity for leather jackets and poetry; Jonny falls for girls who never like him in that way until Jonny convinces Tracie to teach him some tricks of the trade. After a wardrobe makeover, learning to return from a dinner date with another phone number scrawled on his hand, scope for women at the airport baggage claim, and always carry a motorcycle helmet, Jonny becomes a heartbreaker.

Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine's leading public intellectual, is called upon to make sense of the unthinkable reality of our times. In this breathtaking short story collection, she turns the concept of truth over in her hands like a beautifully crafted pair of gloves. From the triumph of the Orange Revolution, which marked the start of the twenty-first century, to domestic victories in matchmaking, sibling rivalry, and even tennis, Zabuzhko - manages to shock the listener by juxtaposing things as they are.

Anna O’Shea has failed at marriage, shed her job at a law firm, and she’s trying to re-create herself when she and her recalcitrant nephew are summoned to the past in a manner that nearly destroys them. Her twenty-first-century skills pale as she struggles to find her nephew in nineteenth-century Ireland. For one of them, the past is brutally difficult, filled with hunger and struggle. For the other, the past is filled with privilege, status, and a reprieve from the crushing pain of present-day life. For both Anna and her nephew, the past offers them a chance at love.

When tweens in Chicago’s Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago’s most powerful families: the grandfather of one, Chaim Salanter, is among the world’s wealthiest men; the mother of another, Sophy Durango, is running for the United States Senate. V. I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers.

The brilliant V. I. Warshawski returns in another hard-hitting entry, combining razor-sharp plotting and compelling characters with a heady mix of timely political and social themes.“Both Paretsky and the sharp-tongued justice-seeker, V. I. Warshawski, remain formidable.

Nicolette Stallings - Nick - sees an attractive stranger across a restaurant. When their eyes meet, Nick can tell he's trying to figure out a way to connect. What she doesn't know is that this time she'll meet a man who'll flaunt her rules, violate her anonymity. Pushed to the brink, he'll take Nick with him. And when he's gone, she will stand alone...suspected of murder.

In the midst of a sudden spring snowstorm, an unknown man armed with a gun walks into an elementary school classroom. Outside the school, the town of Broken Branch watches and waits. Officer Meg Barrett holds the responsibility for the town’s children in her hands. As tension mounts with each passing minute, the hidden fears and grudges of the small town are revealed as the people of Broken Branch race to uncover the identity of the stranger who holds their children hostage.

V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, Chicago’s edgiest nightspot, where a woman known as the Body Artist turns her naked body into a canvas for the audience to paint on. The show attracts all kinds of people, from a menacing off-duty cop to Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war vets - and V.I.’s impetuous cousin, Petra. A tormented young painter shows up, too, and the intricate designs she creates on the Body Artist drive one of the vets into a violent rage. But the vet’s family hires V.I. to clear his name....

A six-year-old boy goes to spend the summer with his grandmother, Alida, in a small Minnesota town. With the men all gone off to fight, the women are left to run the farms. There’s plenty for the boy to do - trying to help with the chores; getting to know the dog and the horses, cows, pigs, and chickens. But when his cousin Kristina goes into labor, he can’t do a thing. Instead, the house fills with women come to help and to wait, and to work on the quilt together

Angie DeSaria has spent years of her life trying to have a child. Now, her marriage has crumbled under the strain. Adrift and alone, she returns to her childhood home, a small coastal town in the Pacific Northwest, to help try and rescue the beloved, failing family business. Lauren Ribido is a senior in high school. She dreams of an Ivy League education, escaping her hometown and her troubled mother.

"Why do we write?" With this question Joyce Carol Oates, in this new collection of seminal essays and criticism, begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer's inspiration - do subjects haunt those who might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer's best work?

Starting not with the United States but with the Corsican constitution of 1755, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen moves through every continent, disrupting accepted narratives. Both monarchs and radicals play a role, from Catherine the Great of Russia, with her remarkable Nakaz, to Sierra Leone's James Africanus Horton, to Tunisia's Khayr-al-Din, a creator of the first modern Islamic constitution. Throughout, Colley demonstrates how constitutions evolved in tandem with warfare, and how they have functioned to advance empire as well as promote nations.

Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has returned to Virginia as the chief medical examiner. She and her husband, Benton, are headquartered five miles from the Pentagon, in a post-pandemic world that's been torn apart by civil and political unrest. Just weeks into the job, Scarpetta is called to investigate a woman's body that has been shockingly displayed on railroad tracks. As Scarpetta follows the trail, it leads unnervingly close to her own neighborhood....