Showing results by narrator "Vanessa Johansson" in All Categories

Growing up, Gwen and Iris were the best of friends, even if they couldn’t have been more different. Now, Gwen is living her hometown dream, or so she reminds herself while juggling endless parenting drama, an unemployed husband, and a neighborhood pyramid scheme. Never mind that at age 39, her social circle still resembles middle school. Her life is everything she ever wanted it to be, but nothing like she had planned.

Cari Porter's in France. She's hoping that her former apartment holds some answers in helping her to remember who she used to be. And maybe she's found something. There's a name, a passport, and a bank account. But is it actually hers? Or is it something that Dark Sky has planted in her apartment, hoping to draw her into a trap?

Before the long drive home from vacation on Cape Cod, Emily Parker made a quick run to the grocery store... and disappeared. When her car is found abandoned in the parking lot, her husband, Will, turns to a retired FBI profiler named John Geary for help. As her family scours the Cape for her, Emily's thoughts are not on her own safety. Kept helpless in a madman's lair, she watches him prepare a five-day countdown that will bring him to his real victim - her young son.

As children, Lexie and Annie were incredibly close. Bonded by the death of their father and their mother's swift remarriage, they weathered the storms of life together. When Lexie leaves home to follow her dream, Annie is forced to turn to her leather-bound journal to confide her deepest secrets and fears. As adults, sisters Lexie and Annie could not be more different. Lexie is a successful doctor and happily married. Annie is addicted to heroin - a thief, a liar, and unable to remain clean despite being pregnant.

Tate Willow is pretty and nice, and most people think she’s smart. But Tate doesn’t feel smart…until she falls into an old well in the backyard and her mind starts working double-time. She sails through her homework and can read a book in minutes. But keeping Tate in line is becoming a full-time job for her brothers and sister. She’s strangely attracted to water of all sorts - streams, sprinklers, waterfalls. Can they get her wild water magic under control?

With a POP! and a puff of smoke, the Willows' lawn mower calls it quits. A new mower will cost their parents a lot of money, money Derek had hoped to borrow for a train ticket to visit a friend. Luckily Derek and his brother and sisters find a rusty push mower tucked away in the shed. It doesn't look like much, but it turns out that it's been soaking up magic for years. And it's hungry for grass!

Brooke Sinclair’s dream of being a published author derailed when she was expelled from the University of Edinburgh seven years ago. Now a ghostwriter, she sticks to other people’s stories. But when her college mentor, Mhairi McCallister, needs a cowriter for her memoir about Scotland’s most challenging trek, Brooke will do anything for the opportunity—including agreeing to hike the rugged Skye Trail for authenticity’s sake. What she doesn't know is that the nature photographer who’ll join her is Jack Sutherland, the teaching assistant who shattered Brooke’s writing career—and her heart.

After exploring the Eastern Caribbean for several years on their 34-foot Creekmore, Connie McBride, her husband, and their 16-year-old son sailed away from their adopted home of St. Croix, west across the Caribbean to Bocas del Toro, Panama. What they found there will delight the reader as the archipelago comes alive in Eurisko Sails West: A Year in Panama. Howler monkeys, red frogs, and sloths in the jungle are accompanied by a symphony of parrots, oro pendula, toucans, and macaws.

It starts innocently enough. Julie Hayes and her husband have just returned to Manhattan from a month in Paris. Julie looks forward to spending quality time with Jeff, whose career as a journalist takes him away from home for months on end. Now if they could just find the perfect work of art to hang over their mantel. Julie's quest takes her to a trendy SoHo gallery where she meets an itinerant artist named Ralph Abel.

The life Olivia Harper always dreamed of isn’t so dreamy these days. The long work days are unfulfilling and so are things with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. So, when her mother has an accident and needs help recuperating, and looking after Olivia’s orphaned niece, Olivia heads home to Sea Glass Cottage. Cape Sanctuary on the Northern Californian coast is a beautiful town, but one that holds painful memories for Olivia, Juliet and Caitlin Harper.

In an effort to cure an ailing relative, Dr. Kat Odgers makes a revolutionary new drug - and powerful new enemies. She has no idea what her latest concoction is capable of, but Jake Isaacs knows. And Jake must get to Kat before someone else does. Her safety is his mission, but the assignment gets complicated when a strong mutual attraction threatens to throw him off course.

Porter, with the help of some new friends, escapes from the grasp of the police, and immediately seeks to find Evan again. And she won’t stop until she frees him from the clutches of Dark Sky. Before she’s able to do that, and disappear again, she’s going to have to contend with Dark Sky agents, as well as several traps that are set for her to step into.

Lieutenant Sully Jax saved his unit during an IED attack, but he couldn't save his marriage. He can't even remember it. Recovered from his injuries, he's come home to the family and friends he knows-and an ex-wife who's a stranger to him. Lucy Crabtree was heartbroken last Christmas when Sully announced his plan to go on one last tour of duty, and devastated when he asked for a divorce after he awoke in the hospital with no memory of her.

Julie Hayes is finally making it as a reporter - with a column at the New York Dailyunder her own byline - when her husband, Jeff, tells her he has fallen in love with another woman and wants a divorce. Blinded by anger and hurt, she flees their Chelsea apartment. Before the night is over, she will be lying bound and gagged on the floor of a trailer, the victim of a sexual assault by two masked men. Now a tabloid headline herself, Julie tries to help the police search for her assailants. But she is not the same woman anymore.

With her strange black eyes and even stranger fainting spells, Haelewise is shunned by her village, and her only solace lies in the stories her mother tells of child-stealing witches, of princes in wolf-skins, of an ancient tower cloaked in mist where women will find shelter if they are brave enough to seek it. But when her mother dies, Haelewise is left unmoored. With nothing left for her in her village, she sets out to find the tower of legend-a place called Gothel, where Haelewise meets a wise woman willing to take her under her wing.

In her debut novel, Let's Hope for the Best, Carolina Setterwall recounts the intensity of falling in love with her partner Aksel, and the shock of finding him dead in bed one morning. Carolina and Aksel meet at a party, and their passionate first encounter leads to months of courtship during which Carolina struggles to find her place. While Aksel prefers to take things slow, Carolina is eager to advance their relationship - moving in together, getting a cat, and finally having a child.

Stella and Violet are best friends and from the moment they met in college, they knew their roles. Beautiful, privileged and reckless Stella lives in the spotlight. Hardworking, laser-focused Violet stays behind the scenes, always ready to clean up the mess that Stella inevitably leaves in her wake. Stella might be the one with the rich family and the right friends, but Violet isn't giving up so easily. As she and Stella strive for success, each reveals just how far she'll go to get what she wants – even if it means destroying the other person along the way.

Julie Hayes has come up in the world. Her days as a starving actress behind her, she is married to a globe-trotting journalist, keeping up with her friends from her fortune-telling days, and celebrating a year of gainful employment at the New York Daily. But one of her colleagues is found shot dead in his office - and Julie may have been the last person to see him alive. With a reporter's nose for a scoop, Julie investigates the violent death of one of New York's most infamous - and despised - gossip columnists.

An editor at a small Manhattan publishing house, Frances Girard, is plagued with the curse of self-awareness. She knows she will never write a book and is resigned to living a dull, sensible life in which people like her "are not allowed to have a nervous breakdown". But she secretly envies those with creative aspirations. When she meets Paul Treat - the man fated to change her life - the avant-garde theater director is clad only in a towel. Frances is instantly attracted to his unpredictable, larger-than-life persona. They act out scenes from plays and embark on an erotic relationship like nothing Frances has ever known.

When you’ve already died, there should be nothing left to fear... When Adam Ramsdell pulls Elle’s half-frozen body from the surf on a lonely California beach, she has no memory of how she ended up there, what her full name is and how she got those terrible bruises on her throat.