Showing results by narrator "Emily Sutton Smith" in All Categories

When a rainmaker is bludgeoned to death in the pitch-blackness of a colossal dust storm, small-town sheriff Temple Jennings shoulders yet another burden in the hard times of the 1930s Dust Bowl. The killing only magnifies Temple's ongoing troubles: a formidable opponent in the upcoming election, the repugnant burden of enforcing farm foreclosures, and his wife's lingering grief over the loss of their eight-year-old son. As the sheriff and his young deputy investigate the murder, their suspicions focus on a teenager, Carmine, serving with the Civilian Conservation Corps.

We want to raise well-rounded human beings—we're just not quite sure how best to do it. Confounded by rapidly changing gender norms, today's parents are attempting to raise kind, compassionate, emotionally sensitive boys in a society that simultaneously rewards stereotypical masculinity and is increasingly hostile to boys. Written by an in-the-trenches #boymom who intimately understands male development and the challenges currently facing boys and their families, Building Boys offers ten rules that parents can use to guide their parenting choices throughout their sons' lives.

Lee Reston has a fulfilling life imbued with the love of her three wonderful children. Then a shattering event - the loss of her oldest son, Greg - tears her world apart. In her anguish, she turns to police officer Christopher Lallek, Greg's best friend. Their shared mourning develops into friendship, and then something deeper. But life is never simple. The family that was once the core of her existence becomes a mixed blessing, as Lee explores where family ties end - and her needs as a woman begin.

High school principal Tom Gardner feels a sense of shock when he sees Kent Arens, a new transfer student. With one glance, Tom can see that this teenager is the son he never knew he had - the result of a one-night stand on the eve of his wedding years before, now grown into an intelligent, athletic, and polite young man. But the boy's presence has a devastating effect on Tom's family.

Now the director of the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security, Brooke Fairfax has one objective: stay on top of all threats to the people and property of the Commonwealth. The position is thankless and never-ending. It even pulls her out of Declan O'Roark's bed in the middle of the night.

Can a stack of long-hidden love letters from a WWII war hero inspire a heartbroken woman to love again?Reeling from a bitter divorce, Adrienne Carter abandons Chicago and retreats to the sun, sand, and beauty of Southern Florida, throwing herself into the restoration of a dilapidated old Victorian beach house. Early into the renovations, she discovers a tin box hidden away in the attic that reveals the emotional letters from a WWII paratrooper to a young woman who lived in the house more than a half-century earlier.

Eager to retell the narrative of her own family and her coming-of-age, Patti Davis casts aside misperceptions that defined her in the past. Far from being the enfant terrible, Dear Mom and Dad reveals young Patti as a sensitive child, who was not able to be the public person her family demanded. Davis casts an empathetic yet honest eye on her parents—on her father, the eternal lifeguard, who saved seventy-seven people, yet failed to create a coherent AIDS policy, and her mother, who never escaped her own tortured youth.

Bess Curran, 40, is an interior designer in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, still lonely and bitter after her traumatic divorce six years earlier. Her adult daughter, Lisa, anxious for her parents to reconcile, arranges a surprise dinner meeting where she informs them that she is pregnant and about to marry. Bess and former husband, Michael (he left her for another woman, who, in turn, has just left him), can barely control their mutual animosity yet must come to grips with the startling news.

“Lindsay Harrel has penned a charming story that is sure to touch the hearts of her readers. Through the stories of Megan and her sister Crystal, readers get a glimpse of adventure, restoration, conquered fears, and realized dreams. Lindsay will no doubt win readers with this heartfelt story...

When mail-order bride Juniper’s husband vanishes, she writes to him—but fears she's waiting for a ghost in a ghost town. A century later, Johnny Sutherland discovers her letters while restoring her abandoned farmhouse. Can her loving words from the distant past change his present? 1902: Upon...

A heartbroken and humiliated Ricky Graves took the life of a classmate and himself. Five months later, the sleepy community is still in shock and mourning. Ricky's sister, Alyssa, returns to confront her shattered, withdrawn mother and her guilt over the brother she left adrift. Mark McVitry, the lone survivor of the deadly outburst sparked by his own cruelty, is tormented by visions of Ricky's vengeful spirit. Ricky's surrogate older brother, Corky Meeks, grapples with doubts about the fragile boy he tried to protect but may have doomed instead.

How to Trust Your Inner Voice doesn't offer routines to add to your already busy schedule. Instead, it offers a simple and accessible explanation for how our mind blocks us from accessing our own personal GPS system, the soul. The soul knows what to do, always. But the events and conditioning from our childhood, the dominant values of our culture, and our habitual thought patterns pull us away, creating depression and anxiety and making it hard for us to hear our inner guidance. You don't have to live this way!

Fleeing an abusive marriage and tormented by her past, Alexandra Turner finds solace in a small coastal town on Puget Sound and a job with a local marine biologist studying orcas. After befriending a group of locals, Alex learns that she has moved to a place that has a reputation of being the "most haunted town in Washington." Such superstitions would be easy to dismiss...if Alex wasn’t already on edge. Haunted by shreds of memories of her days with her husband, Alex can’t keep from looking over her shoulder.

When Carthenne Rel first came to Nyaesh, she feared the A'ras. Now she trains with them, struggling to use the magic they teach, and cut off from the shadow blessing within her. Isolated for her differences, she has only a few friends among the other students. When the strange and powerful Master Invar offers to teach her to access the powers warring within her, Carth is isolated even more.

The A'ras of Nyaesh have a terrifying reputation: skilled swordsmen, owners of powerful magic, and ruthless killers. When they kill her parents, Carth discovers her parents had trained her for magic she never knew she possessed. She must use the skills they taught to stay alive, discover a way to find answers, and avenge them if she can. Only the discovery of a greater threat than the A'ras forces her to risk herself, for new friends and a home she never wanted.

Clare Campbell has worked hard to create distance between herself and her troubled family. But when she receives news of her parents' murder, she's forced to return to the quiet town of Clarkeston, Maine, to arrange their funeral and take legal guardianship of her unpredictable and mentally ill brother, Wes. While Clare struggles to come to grips with the death of her parents, a terrifying pathogen outbreak overtakes the town.

Even the most incorruptible juror can be unwittingly influenced by others' opinions in the digital age, but more sinister forces are at work: Jury tampering has reached all-time highs. Unexpected verdicts are coming down more and more often, indicating that shadowy groups may be blackmailing jurors - and leaving the American justice system in shambles. Is impartiality even possible anymore?

She knows her name is Amelia, but after waking up in a hospital battered and bruised with just the clothes on her back, it's all she knows. Unable to piece together her shattered memory, she's haunted by a vision: menacing faces and voices implying her nightmare is far from over. Relying only on her wits and her will to live, Amelia becomes a fugitive from a mysterious man, and a life she can't even remember.

When professional missing-persons investigator Rachel Scott receives an anonymous tip that her own missing daughter, Mallory, is alive and living with a family in Atlanta, she wastes no time in pursuing the lead. When she arrives to find a house that has been hastily abandoned, she begins to suspect just how frighteningly organized the plot behind her daughter's kidnapping really is.

No birth announcement could top the headlines from the day Janie and Jack Perkins entered the world. As twins born to a mother in a coma - courtesy of a bullet from their father - the sensational story of their birth never quite died down. While Jack still craves the flash of a camera, Janie seeks sanctuary behind the lens - as a crime scene photographer.