Showing results by narrator "Ryder Smith" in All Categories

Hailed as a "clever, chilling novel that takes crime writing to a new level" by London's Sunday Times, this psychological thriller from Guillermo Martínez will captivate mystery lovers and literature buffs alike. An extremely successful author named Kloster and an unnamed, up-andcoming writer have one thing in common - they've both employed a typist named Luciana. Now Luciana claims Kloster is killing off her family, and she desperately needs help.

A Tree or a Person or a Wall gives us Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and acute takes on the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell's previously published shorter fiction - the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby - along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.

In this powerful work, Henning Mankell tells the story of a young African orphan adopted by a Swedish man and whisked away to his new father’s country. There the boy, dubbed Daniel, finds himself swallowed by a bizarre landscape of snow and mud. Always in his mind are thoughts of his murdered parents, calling him back to Africa. But Daniel’s path is marked by tragedy, and his homecoming seems an impossible dream.

Plenty of legends surround the infamous Boulder House in Whispering Bluffs, Wisconsin, but nobody takes them seriously. Certainly nobody believes that the original owner, Maxwell Cartwright Jr., cursed its construction - or that a murder of crows died upon its completion, their carcasses turning the land black. Five very different high school seniors on a field trip - Violet, Paul, Ashley, Dylan, and Gretchen - are separated from the group, and they discover that what lies within Boulder House is far more horrifying than any local folklore.

Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage, he replies to an ad and becomes a research subject in an experiment conducted by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia.

A great collection of stories from the author of Fight Club. In 'Zombies', the best and brightest of a high school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. While in 'Tunnel of Love', a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients. And in 'Excursion', Fight Club fans will be thrilled to find a side of Tyler Durden never seen before.

The author of nine novels, Clyde Edgerton has built a reputation as a sage commentator on the American experience. In The Night Train, Edgerton weaves the ultimately uplifting tale of friends Dwayne, a James Brown-inspired crooner, and Larry, apprentice to a jazz musician. One black, one white, Dwayne and Larry face daunting challenges to their friendship - and futures - in 1960s America.

Nine physicists are dead. The medical examiner has determined that the victims died from drinking coffee laced with rat poison. The owner of the house, Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner, isn't suspected, but his claim that a piece of the debris from Roswell's 1947 UFO crash was hidden in Flagler might be true. Enter Luther "Luke" Stephens McWhorter, a Yale Divinity School-educated West Texas sheriff with all the right questions. Is the fragment real? If so, who's trying to locate it? And what has fueled the byzantine activities of Abbot County's two secret societies for the past 70 years?

Multiple Edgar Award nominee Thomas H. Cook is the author of dark, terrifying thrillers like Places in the Darkand Red Leaves. In Master of the Delta, it's 1954 down in Mississippi and Jack Branch has finally come home, taking a job as a high school teacher. He soon learns that one of his students is the son of a notorious local murderer, the Coed Killer. And as they say, like father, like son.

The best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars returns to his Pacific Northwest settings -and moves beyond them- in 10 sharply observed, funny, and wise new stories that explore the mysteries of love and unravel our complex desires to connect with others. Ranging from teenage to middle-age, the voices that inhabit Problems with People offer humorous or searing but always tightly focused accounts of the universal quest to understand one another - individually, and as part of our political and historical moment.

After a mysterious, silent child is found abandoned on the beach clutching a handheld video game, residents and tourists alike find themselves utterly unable to sleep. Exhaustion impairs judgment, delusions become hysteria, and mob rule explodes into shocking violence.

In moving verse, Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis gives new voice to seventeen heroes of civil rights. This commanding collection of poems invites the listener to hear in each verse the thunder that lies in every voice, no matter how small. Featuring civil rights luminaries Coretta Scott King, Harvey Milk, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Sylvia Mendez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mamie Carthan Till, Helen Zia, Josh Gibson, Dennis James Banks, Mitsuye Endo, Ellison Onizuka, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Yunus, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.

Set in a bitterly benighted, mine-polluted corner of Virginia, Nitro Mountain follows a group of people bound together by alcohol, small-time crime, and music. There's Leon, a hapless bass player who can embroil himself in trouble just by getting out of bed in the morning. And his would-be girlfriend, Jennifer, who's living with Arnett, the town's most dangerous thug - and hoping Leon will help poison him. And there's Arnett himself, a psychopath for the ages.

Your Believers is a powerful, cathartic story of casual evil and of how the worst things can be faced so that we might not only survive, but grow. A young woman goes missing, and her mother uproots her life to find her daughter. But it is not just the heartbreak or the deep mystery of the hunt for lost loved ones that Bradley so convincingly explores. Rather, with the help of an amazingly dedicated searcher, family and friends somehow learn to move past unspeakable horror and celebrate the tenacity of the human spirit.

With several acclaimed novels under her belt, Nanci Kincaid is praised for her raw, edgy Southern tales. Leaving their sleepy Mississippi home behind, brother and sister Truely and Courtney Noonan head west. There they drift apart, only to reunite, as they lay down new roots in Southern California.

From the acclaimed author of Every Secret Thing comes an imaginative novel sizzling with suspense. After a string of personal losses, Harry Sterling has hit rock bottom. He takes a teaching job at a small Florida college, but can't abandon his journalistic roots. So when he learns that a world-famous physicist may have stolen a revolutionary idea from a student, Harry launches an investigation - and soon finds himself in terrible danger.

Sonny and Clara Myers struggle on their Kansas farm in the late 1930s, a time the Lord gave up on: their land's gone dry, barren, and worthless; the bankers are greedy and hungry, trying to squeeze them and other farmers out of their homes; and, on top of that, their marriage is in trouble. The couple can struggle or surrender and hightail it to California like most of the others. Sonny refuses to abandon the family farm, so Clara takes off westward in their old battered truck. Alone on the farm and determined to get back Clara and the good old days, Sonny comes up with an idea....

Jodi Angel's new collection You Only Get Letters from Jail comes at listeners "with a voice dripping with sweat and Schlitz” ( Esquire magazine). These moving and beautifully written stories follow young men caught in the confusing space between boyhood and adulthood, in situations that nobody can possibly prepare you for....

Having garnered critical acclaim for his CBA bestselling tales of romance, mystery, and adventure, Travis Thrasher here wades into the edgy world of horrifying suspense. Laila has it all - love, family, and wealth. But when her faith crumbles, her world falls apart, and she begins living the precarious life of a Chicago call girl. After shooting and killing a client in self-defense, Laila finds herself caught in a spiral of guilt and emptiness. Little does she know she’s being hounded by something not of this world....

In this spare and powerful story set in the Old West, people in a small town live in constant worry of another visit from the Outlaw. Then the Outlaw suddenly and mysteriously disappears. Time passes, and one day a stranger rides into town. He takes it upon himself to fix everything that is in disrepair - the clapboard schoolhouse, the train station platform. He even builds a horse trough. But when someone recognizes him as the Outlaw, the crowd turns on him. It takes the courage of a small boy to change the course of events.