Showing results by narrator "Karen Peakes" in All Categories

Caught somewhere between love, hate, and indifference, Emily Bowen’s marriage is hanging on by a thread. After being let go from his job, her husband pulled away from her, and the distance continues to grow during their family’s sabbatical in Switzerland. With their relationship as cold as the wind baying outside, Emily finds unexpected warmth in a man from her past. As she contemplates seizing the connection she’s been craving, Emily must decide if she’s willing to sacrifice the life she’s built for an unseen future.

Laura Reese is losing control. Compassionate and conscientious, she excels as a post-op nurse, but her new supervisor doesn't care how much she needs time off. Although she's a selfless wife and mother, news of her husband's promotion only fills her with anxiety. The country-club lifestyle he craves triggers memories of the dysfunctional family she came from, and of her own mother's single-minded ambition to climb the social ladder.

Listeners will love this selection of three contemporary and three historical romance novellas.

After losing first her husband, then her daughter, 78-year-old grandmother Ruby wants to teach her risk-averse granddaughter, Tulsa, that some leaps are worth taking, no matter how high the potential fall. Tulsa loves her grandmother dearly, but she has a business to run and no time for romance - not even the paperback version. But when Ruby ropes her into a book club, Tulsa can't bring herself to disappoint the woman who raised her.

Late October, 1962. Wes Avery, a one-time air force tail-gunner, is living his version of the American Dream as loving husband to Sarah, doting father to 17-year-old Charlotte, and owner of a successful Texaco station along central Florida's busiest highway. But after President Kennedy announces that the Soviets have nuclear missiles in Cuba, army convoys clog the highways and the sky fills with fighter planes. Within days, Wes' carefully constructed life begins to unravel.

Samantha Reid, the brilliant Director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, is enjoying a rare evening away from Washington at a Florida charity ball when a bomb sends the well-heeled attendees stampeding into the night. Narrowly escaping the blast, Reid returns to the White House, where she has been trailing the massacres and illicit arms sales of a shadowy group of Russian oligarchs... all of whom want her dead.

Why I Run: 35 Progressive Candidates Who Are Changing Politics is a collection of original essays from women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and progressive allies who have recently run for office. Contributors like Stacey Abrams, Deb Haaland, Jason Kander, Andrea Jenkins, and Michelle Lujan Grisham share what inspired them to run, what it takes to win, and what lessons can be learned in the face of a loss.

Eric Brach's new book Double Lives: True Tales of the Criminals Next Door offers terrifying true stories about the criminals hidden among us and the banality of evil and crime, elevated by its frank discussion of the nation-wide criminal scourge of the moment: opioid addiction. Double Lives chronicles the very monsters who walk unnoticed among us - even serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or John Wayne Gacy. They are neighbors and students, professionals and friends living out criminal double lives.

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.

Putting out fires is what Lieutenant Charlie McMahon does best. The streets of Chicago keep him busy and provide a respite from his family's chaos. But everything changes when his rescue squad is called to a house where female victims are found chained to a wall and burned alive. The terror becomes personal as the women are identified, leaving Charlie to reel over one, haunting question: What have I done?