Showing results by narrator "Kevin Kenerly" in All Categories

It is easy to be depressed if you live in a neighborhood that has few supportive resources available or is marred by gun violence. We are able to diagnose people with depression, but how does one heal a neighborhood? This City Is Killing Me brings policy and psychology together. Through case studies, Jonathan Foiles opens up his therapy door to allow us to overhear the stories of individual poor Chicagoans. Through statistics and the example of Chicago, he teaches us how policy decisions have contributed to these individuals’ suffering.

In Shadow Lab, a brilliant roster of speculative fiction writers pulls listeners into a diverse and genre-bending collection of stories, each as irresistible as the last.

As a DEA agent caught in an unwinnable drug war, Abel has spent his life with the ugliest side of humanity. It’s no wonder he’s given in to corruption, bribery, and an illegal side-hustle that has him on the run from some of the most dangerous men in South America. Then he stumbles on a deadly, abandoned alien girl who has made a home under the green canopy of the deepest part of the jungle. Her space craft crash-landed a decade ago; his life crashed and burned well before that.

Organizational psychologist Dr. Waters is a happily solitary guy with a few deep attachments, including to his boss Paresh Rajput, the owner of a thriving hi-tech aerospace company. Until something really bad happens to CEO Rajput, which throws Waters into a lunatic swirl of murderous stalkers, corporate intrigue, amorous female executives, and crafty cops who see the inscrutable psychologist as murder suspect number one.

Willie Black knew he had a father, even if he didn't know where he was buried. It wasn't like Artie Lee gave his son anything but his genes. He died when Willie was 15 months old, and Artie and Peggy never married. They couldn't have, in the segregated commonwealth of Virginia in 1960. Then, in January of 2018, Artie Lee, dead almost 57 years, reinserts himself into his son's life. Philomena Slade calls Willie, the mixed-race night-cops reporter for the local daily rag, to her death bed to ask him a favor he can't refuse: Keep Artie's grave clean.

A familiar name piques Willie Black’s interest on a slow news day: Scuffletown Park. He and the first of his four wives lived next to the pocket park when they were young and still on speaking terms. Now, Scuffletown is the site of a crime scene, one that doesn’t fit the usual modus operandi for Richmond. For one thing, there’s plenty of blood but no body. Also, it seems that a knife was involved - a rarity in Willie’s gun-happy city. And Scuffletown is in the heart of the Fan, where violence is a blessedly rare occurrence.

In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy’s most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. Within this book, you’ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakable and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime.

Zohar, an ancient land of sand and splendor, rallies for its last stand. The genocidal Aelarian Empire sends its legions to destroy the small desert kingdom. King Epher and his band of rebels stand against a fire they cannot extinguish. And it is Claudia herself, once Epher's paramour, who leads the legions tasked with killing him. Across the sea, in the Empire's capital, a cruel new emperor has seized power. Atalia Sela, once the leader of a barbarian horde, now fights in the arena as a gladiator. Ofeer Sela, once a concubine and now a rebel, seeks to free her sister.

Reporter Willie Black has squandered many things in his life, including a cushy job covering - and partying with - the politicians at the capitol. Now he’s back on the night cops beat, right where he started almost 30 years ago. But the thing Willie’s always had going for him is grit. When a coed at the local university is murdered, the alleged killer is arrested within days. Everyone seems to think the case is closed - except Willie. Embarking on a one-man crusade to get the story, he runs afoul of David Junior Shiflett.

When a twin-engine Beechcraft crashes into one of Richmond’s watering holes and turns happy hour into Hell, theories run rampant. Was it terrorists who, for some reason, decided to vent their spleens on unsuspecting Richmond? Was it a statement by homegrown killers less-than-thrilled that the city still, in the 21st century, chooses to honor Confederate leaders on its most prominent avenue? The obvious answers, though, just don’t pan out. Hard-charging reporter Willie Black’s search for the truth eventually leads him to a small town on the Chesapeake....

Life is cheap on the poor side of town. For more than two decades, young black kids have been disappearing from Richmond’s East End. No bodies have ever been found, and the missing boys haven’t received much attention from police or the media. When the uncle of the latest missing kid takes matters into his own hands and holds the daily newspaper’s publisher hostage in the paper’s lobby, Willie Black gets involved, and things start to change.

A down-to-earth forensics expert has just discovered a crime scene that is out of this world. In criminal forensics they train you to uncover evidence, no matter how brutal or bizarre the murder. But what if one night you encounter a crime scene so terrifying that no one on earth can explain it? It begins deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, at the site of a reported shoot-out. Investigator Colin Cellars cannot find a trace of perpetrator or victim - or even confirm that anyone has been killed.

Cotton, or the silver fleece, could be the answer to all of Zora and Bles’ problems in overcoming poverty. But being African American at the dawn of the twentieth century has disadvantages. White aristocracy is determined to control the resource and monopolize the market. Can the two lovers overcome their obstacles?

The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the ensuing trial of Derek Chauvin for murder a year later has rubbed raw the bloodiest stain on the United States’ history and its world reputation. The nine minutes and 29 seconds during which Chauvin’s knee crushed the spark of life out of Floyd was not unusual in the history of the United States. In roughly two centuries, Blacks have achieved nominal freedom. But, as this book’s opening chapter and expert essays that follow indicate, freedom has been conditional based on inequity of wealth, social, and legal discrimination.

Having won his emancipation after fighting on the side of the colonies during the American Revolution, Salem Hawley is a free man. Only a handful of years after the end of British rule, Hawley finds himself drawn into a new war unlike anything he has ever seen. New York City is on the cusp of a new revolution as the science of medicine advances, but procuring bodies for study is still illegal. Bands of resurrectionists are stealing corpses from New York cemeteries, and women of the night are disappearing from the streets, only to meet grisly ends elsewhere.

For the first time in a thousand years, Americans are experiencing a reversal in lifespan. Despite living in one of the safest and most secure eras in human history, one in five adults suffers from anxiety as does one-third of adolescents. Nearly half of the US population is overweight or obese and one-third of Americans suffer from chronic pain - the highest level in the world.

Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. In the wake of Chicago Noir, Twin Cities Noir, and Kansas City Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest Midwest installment, St. Louis Noir. Masterfully curated by Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest (adapted for film, starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton), this volume will chill the listener with heartland menace.

Family means safety. Family means protection. Until it doesn't. Eleven-year-old Kate Whitby, the youngest member of her odd family, leads an invisible life. They live in their historic small-town hotel, where she is an expert at keeping everyone's secrets: Her sister's a thief, her great-grandmother isn't as crazy as people think, her mother lives in the past, and her beloved grandfather might have killed his best friend.

Richmond is in a panic. For the fourth time in eighteen months, a young girl or woman has been brutalized and murdered. This time the body of a fourteen-year-old girl is found in Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom train station. On her ankle is the same perversely cartoonish tattoo that has led the cops and newspapers to dub the perpetrator the Tweety Bird killer.

Eddie Piron thinks that performing in jazz clubs in Nazi-occupied Paris is bad enough, but when the drummer in his band is found face down in the Seine and the police start asking questions, he realizes that his trouble is just beginning. Paris, 1941. American jazz musician Eddie Piron has lived in the City of Light since before the war began. But Paris under occupation is not what it once was, and things are looking a lot darker for a man like Eddie.