Showing results by narrator "Jane Oppenheimer" in All Categories

When two boys disappear from her hometown, Daphne Gauge sees eerie parallels to her brother’s disappearance 30 years earlier. What her husband dismisses as graffiti, Daphne fears are symbols harkening to an ancient Norse god. Digging more deeply, she uncovers evidence of the town’s belief that sacrifice endows wealth and power. Is this more than a bloodthirsty urban myth?

Maura Fielder looks like she has the perfect life: every expectation fulfilled. But under the illusory surface of perfection, Maura finds herself blindsided by what she discovers on her husband's computer. She has no emotional cubbyhole into which she can shove this ghost from her husband's past, so instead, Maura upends her life - thrashing her marriage, alienating her daughter, and eroding her own moral center. On the verge of sacrificing everything she holds dear to her own obsession, how does Maura manage to regain her equilibrium and reclaim her life?

Emily and Stan Remington's maiden voyage in their newly inherited, second-hand RV goes awry when a body falls off the top of their vehicle. The retired small town police officer and her husband, a retired history professor, find themselves at the center of a murder investigation involving a politician, a corporate executive, and a maverick priest.

You can’t choose your family or your destiny or your legacy. But once upon a time, a woman named Ava St. James had tried to build happiness upon the remains of her broken heart. For better or worse.

Tate Marsdon, MD, a successful Scottsdale plastic surgeon, shows up for dinner at the home of close friends Henry and Imogen Vine to find his host stabbed to death and his hostess in a state of psychosis. Arrested and jailed, Imogen undergoes treatment for traumatic memory loss, but her attorney, Erin Fitzgerald, Tate’s current romantic interest, starts to question her client’s guilt. Erin and Imogen’s closest friends work to uncover the truth behind the cold-blooded killing. But hiding deep within the shadows is someone determined to stop them—even if it means another death—this one closer to home than anyone imagines. When Tate finds himself targeted as a prime suspect, he, too, is drawn into the investigation.

It ought to be a joyful time for Dr. Sara Alderson. Her daughter, Lizzie, is about to graduate college, and marry her longtime boyfriend. But the family's happiness is shattered when a drunk driver seriously injures her teenage son in a hit-and-run accident. Now, instead of planning her daughter's wedding, Sara must fight to save her son's life. And when she discovers who the drunk driver was - someone she thought was a colleague and a friend - she has to fight her desire for revenge.

When 63-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with another woman, she's shocked and furious...at first. But by the time her head stops spinning, Sylvia realises she hates the retirement community she's living in - it's for old people. And she certainly doesn't feel old! So, she enlists the help of her best friend, glamorous 70-year-old widow Evie, and the pair flee to Manhattan to start a new life in the city that never sleeps. Sylvia's husband may have spent her life savings, but they're scrappy and determined - and they weren't born yesterday.

Coming to terms with advancing dementia, Mary has no choice other than to move into her daughter’s home. Her daughter, Kayla, caught between her cognitively impaired mother and her belligerent teenage son, soon finds caregiving is more challenging than she imagined. Sage, the family’s golden retriever, offers comfort and unconditional love, but she has her own problems, especially when it comes to dealing with Mary’s cat.

There is darkness sweeping across the stars. Most know Androma Racella as the Bloody Baroness: a powerful mercenary whose reign of terror stretches across the Mirabel Galaxy. To those aboard her fearsome glass starship, the Marauder, she's just Andi, their captain and protector. When a routine mission goes awry, the all-girl crew's resilience is tested as they find themselves in a most unfamiliar place: at the mercy of a powerful bounty hunter connected to Andi's past and a harrowing betrayal.

As her stultifying marriage is unravelling, and in the midst of mourning the loss of her creative self, Caro Tanner has a nightmare about Peter, an old love whom she hasn't seen in 20 years. She takes this as a sign he still needs her. With her three children safely off to summer camp, Caro embarks on a pre-Facebook pre-cell phone road trip to recapture who she once was and what she thinks she once had.

Wonderfully wide-ranging, original, and enjoyable, The Emotional Embodiment of Stars contains 27 award-winning short stories like "Mortimer", in which an unwanted guest secretly follows a family through their heartbreaking sorrows, and "Crossroads", in which a budding writer is finally preparing to meet the man she happens to exchange greetings with every morning on the way to her office.

Stan and Emily pack up the RV and head to Boston for some R & R with the grandkids and a chance to immerse themselves in colonial history. But their Fourth of July celebration comes to an abrupt halt when they stumble over a body on the Boston Esplanade and then another hanging in the tower of the Old North Church. Now the couple must unravel a tangle of forged clues and flush out the perpetrator before their own untimely epitaphs are written onto the historical landscape.

Social misfit Mari Caldwell desperately wants to get on with her life. If only she could get there faster - specifically to Yale - and leave behind all the things that make her anxious: driving a car, crossing bridges, her peers, her parents' divorce. When Mari comes across an old scrapbook of her mother's, she discovers her white-collar parents were once blue-denim hippies.

In a whirlwind romance, a lovely New York socialite marries a fêted, debonair author. But beneath the charm is a cheating husband addicted to hashish. Her dream marriage turns sour and the simplicity of her life runs amok when a handsome stranger, her husband's business partner, threatens her staunch loyalty to her wayward husband. When she faces the ugly truth about her marriage, her need to finalize her divorce sends her on a mad chase across the wilds of 19th century America.

Dr. Sara Alderson isn’t used to her patients dying for no reason. When a young boy succumbs to a mysterious illness that defies all her efforts to treat it, she refuses to accept defeat. After two months of questions, Sara has attracted the attention of powerful people who don’t want their secrets uncovered, and will go to any lengths to make sure they stay hidden. Now, time is running out for Sara to unravel the mystery before anyone else falls victim to the illness. And before her career, her family and her freedom are taken from her by enemies she doesn’t even know she has.

When a severed finger shows up on her doorstep in a seedy section of Las Vegas, Helen Taylor does not freak out. She’s already crazy, as evidenced by her junk-stuffed house and its ever-growing population of cats. There’s also Bobby, her long-dead husband. Helen talks to him regularly, and Bobby talks back. The finger and the brutal murder it reveals are more than a hoarding cat lady with a phantom husband can ignore. Helen’s a suspect, and she ends up in jail. It takes power beyond the ordinary to bring the truth to light.

When two boys disappear from her hometown, Daphne Gauge sees eerie parallels to her brother’s disappearance 30 years earlier. What her husband dismisses as graffiti, Daphne fears are symbols harkening to an ancient Norse god. Digging more deeply, she uncovers evidence of the town’s belief that sacrifice endows wealth and power. Is this more than a bloodthirsty urban myth? When no one believes her, she considers giving in to the F.B.I.’s request that someone in Daphne’s family go on record about what happened in 1988.

You can’t choose your family or your destiny or your legacy. But once upon a time, a woman named Ava St. James had tried to build happiness upon the remains of her broken heart. For better or worse. Decades later, the Bakers are headed for a perfect family vacation. A full month at a house by the lake; the house passed down from a mysterious aunt no one ever talks about. Love and good intentions aside, what begins like a relaxing vacation turns into a nightmare as each of the Bakers’ nerves slowly but steadily begin to wear away at the edges.

Marie Michaels had a perfect life - a happy marriage to her college sweetheart, mother to two beautiful teenage children, and the owner of a successful business. Her life was everything she had imagined, until the day she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. After undergoing several medical treatments, she loses her ability to hear, making communication with her family and friends challenging.

The women of The Homegrown Café Book Club are over 40, single, and loving it. Fate, however, has a different plan with a younger man, for every last one of them. CPA Deacon Jeffries has carried a torch for his favorite client for over a year, but she would probably sooner light him with it than return his affection. She makes an offer he can’t refuse to save her farm, one that makes his wish come true and gives his daughters the mother they need...