Showing results by narrator "Tom Taylorson" in All Categories

Liam Brady has no chill. He’s a guy who irons his underwear and checks people’s math for a living. When his family business hires a creative writer for a marketing project, he is not prepared to spend time with a woman who keeps candy in her pockets and asks uncomfortable questions. Laid off from her long-term newspaper job, Maddie Parker’s desperate for health insurance. Insulin’s expensive, and when Maddie’s friend Nicole lands her a job writing about a group of grouchy engineers, Maddie signs on the dotted line. As Liam shows her the ropes, Maddie pushes all his buttons.

En route to the Galapagos Islands for a deep-sea diving trip with a group of international college students under his care, marine biologist Chris Black leaves his research vessel for a single night to enjoy dinner with friends. When he returns, the ship has vanished. With crew and passengers on board. Modern-day pirates hijacked the boat, hoping to collect a lucrative ransom.

Orla Brady is tired of people asking her how hard it is to be a woman in engineering. Her career is the least of her worries. Dealing with her family and personal relationships? That’s the hard part. She propositions a hottie, just to tune it all out for a bit. The fling blows her mind, but leaves her with unexpected consequences.

Mass violence committed by young people is now an epidemic. The reasons behind this escalating violence and the cultural forces that have impugned a generation is the subject of this important new book. The Spiral Notebook is full of interviews with Generation Z, a group dogged by big pharma and antidepressants and ADHD drugs, by a doomsday/apocalyptic mentality present since birth, and by an entertainment industry that has turned violence into parlor games.

Kathy Kelly's world was shattered when a plane carrying her husband - an Iraq War veteran and devoted father - and her two children vanished from the sky one night. No trace of the plane was ever found. Eight years later, Kathy has struggled to rebuild her life, but then wreckage of his plane is found in the wilderness of Great Smoky Mountains National Park - hundreds of miles from where her husband's plane should have been. The pilot perished in the crash, but there is no sign of Jack or the children.

After years spent surviving in the wastelands, a young woman returns to the city to find answers about her past. Instead she discovers a violently shifting landscape of betrayal and a power-hungry man who, if given control, might be unstoppable. Wicker City is no place for a lone wolf. Will she choose a side in the city’s constant power struggle? Or will she forge her own path?

Robert, a rugged Oakland cop, still can't let go of Suzy, the mysterious Vietnamese wife who left him. Now she's disappeared from her new husband, Sonny, a violent Vietnamese smuggler and gambler who blackmails Robert into finding her for him. Pursuing Suzy through the glitzy, sleazy gambling dens of Las Vegas, Robert finds himself chasing the past that haunts Suzy - one that extends back to a refugee camp in Malaysia after the fall of Saigon.

A school shooting in snowbound Vermont; an American journalist beheaded in war-torn Syria; a passenger jet exploding in the Thai jungle - everything connects to Kate Swift, CIA assassin turned whistle-blower, on the run from a sinister intelligence unit. With her six-year-old daughter, Suzie, she flees across the Canadian border to begin a perilous journey to Berlin and then Thailand in search of the only man who can keep them alive: Harry Hook, a disgraced ex-CIA case officer living rough in the wilderness, battling the bottle and ghosts from his past.

For today's 20-somethings, the possibilities and opportunities are exhilarating, limitless, and sometimes confusing, with no clear-cut paths for the major life choices one must make after college graduation. In this new gift book, inspired by a commencement speech she gave in 2014, former first lady of Massachusetts Ann Romney puts forth eight key life lessons - the pieces of advice she wishes someone had given her when she graduated from college.

Less than a hundred years in the future, pollution, economic disaster, and the rapacious greed of the corporate oligarchy have brought America to its knees and created dystopian urban nightmares, of which Los Angeles may be the worst. Curtis, Japh, and Jool are film extras, who - with the help of a couple of very gutsy women - survived being anonymous players in a "live-action" film in which death on-screen meant death in real life. Surviving the shoot made them rich enough to escape the post-apocalyptic hell that LA has become.

New York City has seen its share of disasters: Terrorist attacks, blackouts, hurricanes, floods. But nothing has prepared the Big Apple for the biggest earthquake to ever hit the United States - 9.0 on the Richter scale. Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs are a smoldering catastrophe, plunging New York into terrifying chaos. Skyscrapers and bridges have collapsed, killing hundreds of thousands. For a handful of survivors, the nightmare is just beginning.

Chris Black has spent two decades searching for answers deep within the world’s oceans and is no stranger to the risks of undersea life. Alongside Mac Johnson, his childhood friend and former Navy SEAL, Chris has cheated death above and below the ocean’s surface more times than he can count. But nothing has prepared him for the violence he and his team encounter in their own backyard of Carmel-by-the-Sea, violence which will change the team forever.

When Benjamin's wife kicks him out of their house, he returns to his childhood home in Connecticut to live with his widowed father. Lost, lonely, and doubting everything he felt he knew about marriage and love - even as his 80-year-old father begins to date again - Benjamin is trying to put his life back together when he recognizes someone down the street: his high school crush, the untouchable Audrey Martin.

Our screens offer us connection, especially now in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are certain depths of connection our screens can’t offer - to ourselves, to the natural world, and to each other. In this personal exploration of digital life’s impact on how we see the world, Howard Axelrod marshals science, philosophy, art criticism, pop culture, and his own experience of returning from two years of living in solitude in Northern Vermont. The Stars in Our Pockets is a timely reminder of the world around us and the worlds within us.

Indomitable marine biologist Chris Black is looking forward to six quiet months of scientific research off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. But when on a routine dive Chris discovers the wreck of a fishing vessel that disappeared during a storm decades earlier, he inadvertently clashes with the ghost of South Africa’s Apartheid.

In the midst of a brutally cold winter in Pittsburgh, Daniel Rinaldi is asked to treat Lyle Barnes, a retired FBI profiler whose terrifying nocturnal visions cause him to wake up screaming. Barnes, after 20 years spent inside the minds of the nation’s worst serial killers, is not only falling apart psychologically but also finds himself the target of an unknown assassin, whose mounting list of victims is paralyzing the city. Hidden for his own protection by his former bureau colleagues, Barnes secretly escapes, drawing Daniel and a joint task force of the FBI and the Pittsburgh Police Department into a desperate manhunt. They must try to find the missing agent before the killer does.

Elizabeth Burns feels like she's waking up from a 20-year sleep. Decades of infertility, then raising an autistic teen, have taken their toll, and when Elizabeth realizes her distant husband is also a dirtbag, she shakes off the fog and heads for a new home and a new life. Elizabeth and her son move into a cute house in a cute neighborhood...directly across from her high school boyfriend. But Kellen Brady is a man now. A man with as much baggage as she's got. Can the two of them wade through these muddy waters together without risking heartbreak?

Returning from a research dive off the coast of picturesque Carmel-by-the-Sea, marine biologist Chris Black is attacked viciously. No stranger to physical altercations, Chris is able to defend himself and hold one of his assailants captive. He learns that the goon has been sent to intimidate him: Stop diving or else....

The hilarious tale of a newly full-time dad and awards-show "plus one" whose TV-writer wife has hit the big time. Christopher Noxon's debut novel Plus One is a comedic take on breadwinning women and caretaking men in contemporary Los Angeles. Alex Sherman-Zicklin is a mid-level marketing executive whose wife's 14th attempt at a television pilot is produced, ordered to series, and awarded an Emmy.

Psychologist Dr. Daniel Rinaldi consults with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police. His specialty is treating victims of violent crime - those who've survived an armed robbery, kidnapping, or sexual assault, but whose traumatic experience still haunts them. Head Wounds picks up where Rinaldi's investigation in Phantom Limb left off, turning the tables on him as he himself becomes the target of a vicious killer.