Showing results by narrator "Cindy Kay" in All Categories

Lana and Anna May can’t imagine things getting any better until they learn their aunt has yet another surprise in store for them―a swanky cocktail party hosted for the freelancers of Southern California. But on the night of the party, things go south when a close journalist friend of Grace’s mysteriously plunges from the roof top of the hotel. Even more suspicious is the fact that Aunt Grace’s friend is the same journalist Lana saw getting into a screaming match with the fortune cookie vendor at the convention.

A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, she must choose her allies carefully. Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

Olive Cobin Zang has . . . issues. And they mostly aren’t her fault. (No, really!) Though she often slips under the radar, problems have a knack for finding her. So, imagine her doubts when she’s suddenly dropped off at the strangest boarding school ever: a former castle turned prison that's now a “reforming arts school”!

The Cleric Chih accompanies a beautiful young bride to her wedding to the aging ruler of a crumbling estate situated at the crossroads of dead empires. The bride's party is welcomed with elaborate courtesies and extravagant banquets, but between the frightened servants and the cryptic warnings of the lord's mad son, they quickly realize that something is haunting the shadowed halls.

Dorothy Moy breaks her own heart for a living. As Washington’s former poet laureate, that’s how she describes channeling her dissociative episodes and mental health struggles into her art. But when her five-year-old daughter exhibits similar behavior and begins remembering things from the lives of their ancestors, Dorothy believes the past has come to haunt her. Fearing that her child is predestined to endure the same debilitating depression that has marked her own life, Dorothy seeks radical help.

After reuniting with their friends in Qin, Jia and Eui are welcomed to the Spiritual Flowing Purewater Sect as honored guests, but their peaceful reprieve is not to last. Yan Yue's upcoming wedding has drawn the attention of Qin's ruling class, who are using the gathering as a pretense to hold a summit to determine the future of the empire.

Five thousand years in the future, humankind has spread across thousands of worlds, and more than a dozen different governments exist in an uneasy truce. But human beings have found no signs of other life anywhere approaching human intelligence. This changes when scientists discover a sunless planet they name Danann, traveling the void just beyond the edge of the galaxy at such a high speed that it cannot be natural. Its continents and oceans have been sculpted and shaped, with but a single megaplex upon it - close to perfectly preserved.

Father Zan insists Chao and Huifen venture north. Ancient ruins await. A divine spire there stands. Their identities must remain hidden. The Divine Flying Tiger Clan's Trials are in two short years.

I fell in love with my best friend's dad when I was seventeen. He seemed like some kind of heathen god, big enough to kill a man with his bare hands, tattooed with bright, bold images, and weathered by time and a short stint in prison. Blind to the consequences, I made a mistake that ran him out of town and ruined his life. Now, he's back after all these years––hating me more than the day he left.

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.

The new book censor hasn't slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish-allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians.

Walk down the streets of Chinatown in any American or western European city and look around. She is there. Walk through the downtown streets, look in a shop window. She is there. Go to any city in China and open your eyes. She is there, too. Kuan Yin is the most ubiquitous Chinese deity - and the most loved. She is the living expression of compassion whose gentle face and elegant figure form the center of devotion in most Chinese homes and workplaces. Until relatively recently, she was barely known in the West, and few studies had been made of her.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

The year is 1927, and Shanghai teeters on the edge of revolution. After sacrificing her relationship with Roma to protect him from the blood feud, Juliette has been a girl on the warpath. One wrong move, and her cousin will step in to usurp her place as the Scarlet Gang's heir. The only way to save the boy she loves from the wrath of the Scarlets is to have him want her dead for murdering his best friend in cold blood. If Juliette were actually guilty of the crime Roma believes she committed, his rejection might sting less.

In the fourth in Vivien Chien's Noodle Shop delicious mystery series, Ho-Lee Noodle House is ready to take the Cleveland night market by storm―until a brand-new food venue literally explodes onto the scene.

Since Peaches woke up in a fantasy world full of monsters and fae, she’s been treated like a piece of tasty human meat. After six years as a blood slave to vampires and the evil Unseelie queen—beholden to all, and master of none—there’s nothing left but a broken shell with a fractured soul. Until a deadly warrior turns up unannounced in her room. Vampire Haze is the muscle of the Fae Guardians elite cadre of 12. He is a spy, a protector of the weak, hammer and sword, a rigid enforcer of rules. He allows no one close to his heart, lest they see the shame driving him.

Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a White American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details - language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was 15, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia. Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia.

Numbers rule Dr. Mei Sharpe’s life. She has no husband, one friend, two daughters, and three random meetings with the same woman within four weeks. Once is chance, twice is coincidence, but upon the third meeting, even Mei in all her empirical rigidness must admit that perhaps the universe is giving her a nudge. A nudge that lands her directly in the path of Lieutenant Morgan Kelly—an affable, charming detective for the Sheriff Department’s brand-new cold case team working down the hall from Mei’s morgue.

The Brotherhood of Assassins has been all but eradicated by the Chinese Emperor. Restoring the Order to its former glory is no easy feat, but it is Shao Jun's duty, and her best chance of survival. When she learns that an old foe has acquired a powerful artifact with which he intends to lure remaining assassins to their deaths, Shao Jun hastens to Mongolia. There, intrigue between Mongolian royalty, an exiled prince, and tensions between Mongolia and China draw her into their web. When she discovers an even more sinister actor, Shao Jun vows to do everything in her power to stop it.

Xia, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigates the impacts of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved our contemporary coastline—and foretell even greater changes to our shores. From the beaches of the Mexican border up to the sheer-cliffed North Coast, the voices of Indigenous leaders, community activists, small-town mayors, urban engineers, and environmental scientists commingle. Together, they chronicle the challenges and urgency of forging a climate-wise future.