Showing results by narrator "Peter Berkrot" in All Categories

USA Today bestselling author of Nine Jan Burke delivers chills, suspense, shockers, and sharp wit in eighteen works of short fiction sure to satisfy longtime fans and newcomers alike. This positively addictive anthology is full of surprises—a patchwork of settings and characters not soon forgotten, and mysterious twists and revelations not quickly shaken!

Kosh did not feel courageous. Looking at the disko, it was all he could do not to collapse into a quaking, blubbering puddle of terror. He was half certain he was going to die. But the alternative — leaving Emma in the hands of Gheen without even trying to rescue her — was unthinkable. He would not want to live if he had to live with that. In present-day Hopewell, an adult Kosh Feye discovers a sweet and painful piece of his past when he’s rescued by the Lamb Emma.

1937. The gears of world war have begun to grind, but Inky Lautman, star point guard for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, America’s greatest basketball team, is dealing with his own problems. His coach has unwittingly incurred a massive gambling debt to the Bund, a group of American Nazis. His main basketball rival is self-righteously leading public protests against homegrown American fascism. It’s more than Inky can deliver.

Everyone knows that Salton's Sink is the driest patch of greasewood in the whole damned Colorado Desert. So when a slick land syndicate promises cheap water to a pack of greenhorn settlers, Stringer is more than a mite suspicious.

They say Judge Roy Bean's been up to some legal tomfoolery again. And it's MacKail's job to get the scoop on the infamous "hanging judge." But someone is out to stop Stringer…dead.

He's making news with his fists, his gun…and the ladies. The San Francisco Sun's freelance field stringer Stuart "Stringer" MacKail needs a new story to sell to pay the bills. His editor sends him back to MacKail's home town in Calaveras County for an update on an old legend about a stagecoach robbery by "Sulky Jack" and its missing treasure. Stringer's feet barely hit the ground when the bullets begin flying and it quickly becomes clear that folks are still trying to find the treasure and will stop anyone who gets in their way.

Cheyenne, Wyoming. A town that's leaping into the 20th century spurs first. Pretty soon Cheyenne will be just as newfangled fancy as any Eastern city-but the folks there still know how to have fun. First the rodeo…and then the hanging. It's the rodeo that Stringer's been sent out to write about. However, before he knows it, he's up to his neck in the West's most notorious murder case. They're fixin' to hang Tom Horn…but something in town smells worse than a stableboy's boots, and Stringer aims to find out what.

The train robbery was bad. It cost Stringer 30 dollars. But when the Wild Bunch gives MacKail a .45 caliber invite to hear their side of what a nice bunch of boys they really are, it's an offer he can't refuse. After all, they're all mothers' sons, even if they would cut a man's throat for his boots. Even so, when Stringer decides to ride along, it has less to do with an exclusive than the gun pointed at his back. And when the shooting starts, MacKail's caught between the crossfire of a rabid posse and the meanest bunch of murdering, lying, cheating hombres to ever draw breath.…

Sheriff Commodore Perry Owens just lost his first election in 17 years. Maybe folks in the Arizona Territory were ready for a change…and then again, maybe Stringer ought to go have a look-see. The trouble is, Perry's vanished and everyone who knew him is either dead or vanished too. But when hot lead and hard knuckles start flying, Stringer's belt-buckle deep in ghostly mystery and willing women. And even if the ghosts may be hokum, the women are flesh-and-blood beauties!

Stringer was just doing his job when he went to hear Teddy Roosevelt speak at a railway stop in Granger, Wyoming. But Stringer's job is to write about the speech - not get shot at! So suddenly a certain reporter has a powerful curiosity about who wants him six feet under. There's just one hitch: Stringer can't be sure if the bullet was meant for him or old Teddy. Now all MacKail has to do is dodge a pack of hired killers, swap lead with a few train robbers, match wits with a renegade Shoshoni, and bed a few lusty ladies on a trail that can end on the front page - or the obituaries….

On a crowded train from Pusan to Seoul, the brutal rape of a young mother sparks rage on the powder-keg peninsula of Korea, pitting Koreans against Americans and the 8th Army brass against the truth. Eyewitness accounts indicate the culprit was most likely a U.S. serviceman, but by the time Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, U.S. Army investigators, are called in, the rapist has disappeared and anti-American fervor in this proud Asian country is threatening to explode.

August, 1944: US Army detective Billy Boyle is assigned to track down a French traitor, code-named Atlantik, who is delivering classified Allied plans to German leaders in occupied Paris. The Resistance is also hot on his trail and out for blood, after Atlantik’s previous betrayals led to the death of many of their members. But the plans Atlantik carries were leaked on purpose, a ruse devised to obscure the Allied army’s real intentions to bypass Paris in a race to the German border. 

In the second volume of her Northern Trilogy, Sarah Stonich reassembles characters that endeared Vacationland to so many fans: Retired union miner and widower Alpo Lahti is about to wed his charming and lively bride, Sissy Pavola, but, with Rauri unaccounted for, celebration seems premature. Alpo's son Pete struggles to find his straight and narrow, then struggles to stay on it, and even Sissy might be having second thoughts.

Washed-up celebrity ghostwriter Stewart “Hoagy” Hoag has finally rediscovered his voice and is making progress on what he hopes will be his long-awaited second novel. Burrowed up in his less-than-luxurious, sweltering fifth floor walk-up, he tries not to think of the disparities between himself and his ex-wife, celebrity actress Merilee Nash, who is sifting through film offers - and also her fickle feelings for Hoagy - from her elegant eight-room apartment looking over Central Park.

In remote pockets of the Third World, a deadly virus is quietly sweeping through impoverished farming villages with frightening speed and potency. Meanwhile, in Washington, a three-word message left in a safe-deposit box may be the key to stopping the crisis - if, that is, Charles Mallory, a private intelligence contractor and former CIA operative, can decipher the puzzle before time runs out. What Mallory begins to discover are the traces of a secret war with a bold objective - to create a new, technologically advanced society.

In the late Fifties and Sixties, iconoclastic young rebels in Chicago opened two tiny theaters—The Compass and The Second City—where they satirized politics, religion, and sex. Developing scenes by improvising based on audience suggestions turned out to be a fine way to develop great actors, directors, and writers. Alumni went on to create such groundbreaking works as The Graduate, Groundhog Day, and Don't Look Up. Many of them also became stars on Saturday Night Live. Something Wonderful Right Away features the pioneers who founded the empire that transformed American comedy.

Secrets trail an American soldier from his Depression upbringing to the cold winter battles in the Ardennes Forest in the last months of World War II, and through the postwar decades, as he struggles to keep his family from being torn apart while keeping the truth buried close to his heart. Clay Brock, proprietor of Jake's Tavern, has endured terrible losses throughout his life. In 1964, he is working to build a life for his wife and son, only to see everything he's worked for threatened by forces beyond his control.

Being a University of Michigan football fan should be joyful. Michigan is an elite academic institution whose football team boasts 43 Big Ten championships. But these days, college football is complicated. The NCAA is corrupt and exploitative, and Michigan keeps losing to Ohio State. It’s hard not to wonder, as Ben Mathis-Lilley does in this book: why are we doing this? The Hot Seat is a chronicle of one of the wildest years in Michigan football history, but also a search for the truth about fandom, from the pages of history books to the wilderness of online forums.

Benjamin Wilder grew up with sparse shelter, infested provisions, and constant abuse dealt to him by his stepfather: Jessup — a.k.a. the Rabid Dog. Without a sober mother to defend him from the Rabid Dog’s wrath, Ben finds reprieve and adventure in a club of misfit boys called the Black Machetes. But the world as Ben knows it comes to an end when he witnesses an act so psychologically appalling that it forces him to run for his life.

UFOhs! Mysteries in the Sky is the first book to explore the strange, exciting, and unknown world of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena for kids. UFOhs! cuts through speculation and pseudo-science to describe real phenomena as observed and documented by pilots, ship captains, scientists, and ordinary men, women, and children from around the world. Playful and probing, UFOhs! Mysteries in the Sky prompts kids and their parents to talk about the moon, the stars, the planets, and all the things they see in the sky, and to wonder about those we can't yet explain.