Showing results by narrator "Mia Chiaromonte" in All Categories

Sarah Matamoros can’t complain. After immigrating from Mexico when she was nine years old, she’s content with the life she’s made for herself in sunny San Diego. She works hard at her mother’s housecleaning service by day and spends the evenings with her quirky eight-year-old daughter, Grace. From a very young age, Emory Owen had several concepts drilled into her head. Success is everything. Be the best. Fight your way to the top. Expectations were high in the Owen household and the world was watching. Born into a high society family, Emory never wanted for anything...at least anything money could buy.

>In July of 1923, the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple travels to Henley-on-Thames to visit her aunt and uncle, as well as to work on her latest writing assignment: covering the Henley Royal Regatta for an American magazine. Daisy plans a simple trip researching her article, enjoying the races, and, come the weekend, having a pleasant time with her fiancé, Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard. But the tensions between the Ambrose team's coxswain, Horace Bott - a shopkeeper's son and scholarship student at Oxford - and rower Basil DeLancey - the younger son of an earl and all-around bounder - are constantly threatening to erupt into violence.

In the 1920s, in post - World War I England, the Honorable Daisy Dalrymple, newly engaged to Detective Inspector Alec Fletcher, is asked by her brother-in-law to discreetly investigate a series of poisoned pen letters that many of the local villagers have been receiving. When the pompous and unbearable brother of the local vicar is killed by a very large rock, dropped on his head from a great height, it seems clear to all that this campaign of gossip has escalated to murder.

On board the Flying Scotsman, the famous London-to-Edinburgh train, Daisy meets an old schoolfellow, Anne Bretton. Anne, along with all of her relatives, is en route to visit the deathbed of the family scion and notorious miser, Alistair McGowan. As it currently stands, Alistair's will leaves the entire family fortune to his brother Albert, and the rest of the family is rushing to his side, each hoping to convince him to change his will in their favor.

In spring a young man’s fancy will turn to love, and the Honorable Phillip Petrie is no exception. Daisy’s chum is totally smitten with Miss Gloria Arbuckle, daughter of a millionaire Yank. But before the enthusiastic suitor can pop the question, his beloved is abducted. As a distraught Mr. Arbuckle begins assembling the ransom, Phillip enlists Daisy to help him recover his missing sweetheart.

Lovely young Adriana Blackburn is grateful that her marriage to the Marquess of Chalford has taken her away from her drunken father and pinchpenny brother, but it has also taken her away from the social whirl she enjoys in Brighton and London. Although Joshua is kind and tender toward his bride, Adriana begins to believe that he wants her only as a mistress for his half-crumbling Thunderhill Castle in Kent - not as mistress of his heart. But how can she know what Joshua truly feels when nothing seems to disturb his unruffled calm?

Lady Marian Lawrence is in London to snare a rich husband to save her family from ruin - a difficult task given her biting wit and lack of beauty. Hiding her true self, Marian is about to win the wealthy and amiable Lord Darley - until the detestable Reginald Montague blocks their path to the altar. Reginald Montague has vowed to never marry and is determined to keep his bestfriend Darley from being snared by a fortune hunter.

Photojournalist Cache Calder lives to chase a great story. He's just returned from the Middle East after surviving a suicide bombing that left him injured and grief-stricken. The last thing he wants is to travel to the wilds of Alaska on a "Where Is She Now" Assignment. But when his editor informs him that his subject is former kidnapping victim, Amelia Bennett who jump-started his career 20 years earlier, he packs his bags.

Blessed with beauty, Mrs. Manners never bothered with the lesser skills of grammar and spelling. So, in order to entrap a second husband, namely the dashing duke of Denbigh, she needed Miss Verity Bascombe. Surely the modest chit would be honored to write her love letters. Poor Verity! Her old schoolmate was as selfish as ever. The lovely girl's gilded pen soon had the duke most intrigued by the poetic Mrs. Manners! But alas, what began as a tiny deception became troublesome indeed - for Verity soon found herself enamored by the handsome duke!

Unbeknownst to food critic Sheila Himmel-as she reviewed exotic cuisines from bistro to brasserie- her daughter, Lisa, was at home starving herself. Before Sheila fully grasped what was happening, her 14-year-old with a thirst for life and a palate for the flavors of Vietnam and Afghanistan was replaced by a weight-obsessed, antisocial, 100 pound 19-year-old.

He's a wolf without a pack... Graphic novelist, Aidan Harte, writes about the kind of heroes he knows he'll never be. He's returned to the forgotten gold mining town of Chatanika, Alaska, to scatter his father's ashes and close out the bastard's life. He plans to get in and get out without seeing a soul. That is, until things take a deadly turn. She's a raven who's clipped her wings... Raven Maiski's thrilled Old Man Harte is dead.

She baited a cop and hooked a killer. She crosses the line… Sonya Savonski has something to prove as the only female drift boat captain fishing the deadly depths of the Bering Sea. She stirs the waters, luring a murderer to the surface, and gets the unwanted attention of an Alaska State Trooper. He tows the line… "Fish cops" don’t mix with fisherman, but if Alaska State Trooper Garrett Hunt can reel Sonya in - before a killer uses her for bait - she could be the catch of his life.

Gallery owner Tern Maiski has always had a way with men, but the one she gave her heart to disappeared without a word. Now he's competing alongside her and four others in a high-tech treasure hunt, and her pride isn't the only thing on the line. So is her life. He doesn't play by the rules... Geophysicist Gage Fallon's relationship with Tern has been cataclysmic from the beginning. He cared too much, too fast, and their passion threatened to consume him.

A teenage girl has been murdered in the sand dunes just outside the house of Dr. Peter Hamilton. The victim is his daughter. Among those looking on as the police investigate is 17-year-old neighbor Amy Lund, a gifted, home-schooled student almost certain of admission to Harvard. Yet she has a secret - and is torn between keeping quiet about what she knows and divulging information that would destroy her own reputation.

Sick of feeling heartbroken over her most recent breakup and underwhelmed by the rest of her life, Tiffany Peón decided to embark on a social experiment. Over the course of one year, she used 14 different online dating sites including Craigslist, speed dating, and The Atlasphere, a site for fans of Ayn Rand. Through drunken interactions with strangers, she learned the ins and outs of the online dating world and eventually found her way back to the relationship that started it all.

It’s the summer of 1974 and 21-year-old Dawn Emerson has only three things she wants to do: compete one last time in the Ellensburg Rodeo, win back her ex-boyfriend Ryan, and become the best damn music journalist at Central Washington State College. But all her plans are left in the dust when she’s contacted by Creem magazine to go on the road with one of her favorite groups, the up-and-coming metal band Hybrid.

Shadow Conspiracy II revisits the shared Victorian world of transferable souls and intelligent machines. Judith Tarr’s irrepressible Emma Rigby prances through a new adventure with automata. Nancy Jane Moore brings us more missions for the mysterious warrior woman, Jane Freemantle. We have new characters to play with, too. Chris Dolley brings to life a wonderful parody reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse. Then there are the historical characters who keep popping into our works of fiction.

It begins in an old tenement with a horrifying crime. It continues after midnight, when a young boy, held captive in a basement, is filled with unearthly visions of fantastic and frightening worlds. How could his kidnappers know that the ransom would be their own souls? For, as the hours pass, the boy's nightmares invade his captors like parasites - and soon, they become real.

There are places in America where a scar, physical or emotional, speaks louder than a badge or a pulpit or a diploma ever could. In 2008, Caheri Gutierrez, a young model from one of Oakland's most dangerous neighborhoods, was shot in her beautiful face and nearly killed in a drive-by. Until You Bleed tells the story of her journey from troubled youth to traumatized victim to community leader seeking to heal herself and her city.

Louisa May Alcott, author of the classic Little Women, consort of Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, beloved icon of professors of American 19th-century literature and perhaps less loved by their legions of students, had a lusty side that was less academic, and more...transcendental than any of us knew.