Showing results by narrator "Karissa Vacker" in All Categories

Joy and Annie are friends and roommates whose thirty-something lives aren’t exactly what they’d imagined. To make ends meet, they decide to rent their extra bedroom to Theo, who charms Joy with his salt-and-pepper hair and adoration of their one-eyed cat. When Annie goes to live with her boyfriend, Theo and Joy settle into a comfortable domesticity. Then Theo brings home Celine, the girlfriend he’s never mentioned, who is possibly the most stunning woman Joy has ever seen. Joy resolves to do whatever it takes to hold on to him, falling deeper into a hellscape of her own making.

Maja Jensen is smart, stylish, and careful, the type of woman who considers every detail when building her dream home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The perfect house that would compensate for her failure to have a child, the house that was going to save her marriage. But when a group of reckless teenagers trash the newly built home just weeks before she moves in, her plans are shattered. Those teenagers, two months away from graduating high school, are the “good kids”—the ones on track to go to college and move on to the next stage of their privileged lives.

Born on Christmas, Angela Stark has always hated the holiday. Bad things always seem to happen and this year is no exception when she is fired and evicted on the first day of December. She was living and working as a maid in San Francisco. Who will hire her at this time of year, especially if they learn why she was fired? Her only option is to stay temporarily with her best friend Jane, but she is extremely allergic to cats. It's not ideal, but it doesn't look like she has a choice, until a certified letter arrives that changes everything.

Leading us through the wake of these changes is Nanny Goodman, a girl living in Marin County, California. A half-adult child among often childish adults, Nanny grows up with two spectacularly odd parents: a writer father and a mother who is a constant source of material. As she moves into her adolescence, so, it seems, does America. While grappling with her own coming of age, Nanny witnesses an entire culture's descent into drugs, the mass exodus of fathers from her town, and rapid real estate and technological developments that foreshadow a drastically different future.

Elisa Wright is a mom and wife, living a nice, quiet life in a nice, quiet town. She’s also convinced her brother-in-law is a murderer. Josh has one dead wife and one missing fiancée, and though he grieved for them he starts dating someone new. Elisa fears for that woman’s safety, and she desperately wants to know what happened to her friend, Josh’s missing fiancée.

Six hundred and fifty-seven days ago, Meg Kenyon's father left their home in France to fight for the Allies in World War II, and that was the last time Meg saw him. Recently, she heard he was being held prisoner by the Nazis, a terrible sentence from which Meg fears he'll never return. Suddenly, an impossible chance to save her father falls into Meg's lap. After following a trail of blood in the snow, Meggie finds an injured British spy hiding in her grandmother's barn.

On August 5th, 2003, Ryan Atwood found himself a long way from his home in Chino—he was in The O.C., an exclusive suburb full of beautiful girls, wealthy bullies, corrupt real-estate tycoons, and a new family helmed by his public defender, Sandy Cohen. Ryan soon warms up to his nerdy, indie band-loving new best friend Seth, and quickly falls for Marissa, the stunning girl next door who has secrets of her own. Completing the group is Summer, Seth’s dream girl and Marissa’s loyal—and fearless—best friend.

Inspired by the extraordinary true stories of World War II’s American Army nurses famously known as the Angels of Bataan and the unsung contributions of Filipinas of the resistance, this novel transports us to a remarkable era of hope, bravery, perseverance, and ultimately—victory.

When Ava Barnes’s boyfriend, Justin, proposes after a whirlwind romance, the young couple embarks on a quest that will test their love. For generations, engaged couples in Ava’s family have traveled into the Everglades to retrieve the egg of the magnificent frigate bird in order to bake it into a marriage cake. Those who succeed live happily ever after, while those who fail are destined for heartbreak. With Ava’s beloved grandmother gravely ill, never has the marriage tradition meant so much.

It has been 10 years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all visible evidence of her small-town roots. Now working as an environmental lawyer in Chicago, she has a thriving career, a modern apartment, and her pick of meaningless one-night stands. But when a new case takes her back home to Barrens, Indiana, the life Abby painstakingly created begins to crack. Tasked with investigating Optimal Plastics, the town’s most high-profile company and economic heart, Abby begins to find strange connections to Barrens’s biggest scandal from more than a decade ago,

Book your visit to the Beach Plum Cove Inn today...meet widow Lisa Hodges and her four adult children, friends, and visitors to the newly opened waterfront bed and breakfast. In the first book, The Nantucket Inn, Lisa learned that her deceased husband had a hidden gambling addiction and had blown through their retirement savings. Since she'd been raising four children and hadn't worked in years, she had no employable skills. Her only option if she wanted to stay on the island near her loved ones, was to rent out her second floor rooms.

Vivvy Bouchet, daughter of a known psychic, was ten when she saved a boy’s life by making an impossible prediction. Now she’s an astrophysicist in Texas, devoted to science, but the boy she saved has become a cop who continues to believe she can see things no one else can. When he begs for help on the high-profile cold case of a kidnapped girl, Vivvy steps back into the ocean of voices that once nearly drowned her.

Stephanie Ketterman has been doing her level best to find a new normal since her beloved husband's tragic death two years ago, but it's been a real struggle. After nearly three decades of wedded bliss with Paul, filling the gaping hole he left behind seems impossible. How can she look forward to her future when her heart is firmly stuck in the past? But when she begins to find evidence of secret trysts and cryptic notes written shortly before his death, she's forced to reexamine everything. What if perfect wasn't so perfect after all?

After a treacherous journey and a life-shattering introduction to a twin neither knew she had, sisters Haidee and Odessa expected to emerge from the Great Abyss to a world set right. But though the planet is turning once again, the creatures of the abyss refuse to rest without another goddess’s sacrifice. To break the cycle, Haidee and Odessa need answers that lie beyond the seven gates of the underworld, within the Cruel Kingdom itself.

The exceptionally twisty - and twisted - new thriller from the author of Rules for Perfect Murders. After a whirlwind, fairytale romance, Abigail Baskin marries freshly minted Silicon Valley millionaire Bruce Lamb. For their honeymoon, he whisks her away to an exclusive retreat at a friend's resort off the Maine coast on Heart Pond Island. But once there, Abigail's perfect new life threatens to crash down around her as she recognises one of their fellow guests as the good looking, charismatic stranger who weeks earlier had seduced her at her own bachelorette party....

Janie needs a break: her baby won’t sleep, she’s struggling with motherhood, and a secret from her past threatens to tear her new family apart. So when her partner, Max, offers to do their baby’s feedings that night so she can finally get some sleep, she jumps at the chance. But when Janie wakes up at three a.m., her daughter is screaming alone in her bassinet…Max has vanished. Alone with a newborn and desperate for answers, Janie searches for Max, but the more she learns about the man she loves, the more she wonders how well she knew him at all.

Chloe Davis’s father is a serial killer. He was convicted and jailed when she was 12, but the bodies of the girls were never found, seemingly lost in the surrounding Louisiana swamps. The case became notorious, and Chloe’s family was destroyed. Now Chloe has rebuilt her life. She’s a respected psychologist in Baton Rouge and has a loving fiancé. But she just can’t shake a tick-tick-tick of paranoia that it might all come crashing down. It is the anniversary of her father’s crimes and Chloe is about to see her worst fears come true—a girl she knows goes missing.

Claire’s grown up triple-checking locks. Counting her steps. Second-guessing every decision. It’s just how she’s wired—her worst-case scenarios never actually come true. Until she arrives at an off-the-grid summer camp to find a blackened, burned husk instead of a lodge—and no survivors, except her and two other late arrivals: Reyva and Mariana. When the three girls find a dead body in the woods, they realize none of this is an accident. Someone, something, is hunting them. Something that hides in the shadows.

Acclaimed author Elise Hooper explores the gripping, real-life history of female athletes, members of the first integrated women’s Olympic team, and their journeys to the 1936 summer games in Berlin, Nazi Germany. In the 1928 Olympics, Chicago’s Betty Robinson competes as a member of the first-ever women’s delegation in track and field. Destined for further glory, she returns home feted as America’s golden girl until a nearly fatal airplane crash threatens to end everything.

As CEO of the Herd, an elite women-only coworking space, Eleanor Walsh seems to have it all: close friends, a sweet husband, and the most glamorous and successful female-empowerment-based company in New York City. Then she vanishes on the night of a glitzy press conference—and the police suspect foul play.