Showing results by narrator "Steve Carlson" in All Categories

John's wine reviews are part history lesson, part personal epiphany, part peep show, part discovery, and they are always peppered with a dash of enthusiastic admiration. You see, John doesn't write reviews for wines he doesn't like. He leaves that for the professionals. John only reviews wines he loves, and his reviews reflect that in an especially clear way. For John these reviews are personal.

Jean Claude "Skeeter" Johanson has never caught a break. Bouncing from a messed-up childhood into prison and back to his dying small-town home; he scrapes by as a low-level drug dealer. On a day that starts bad and pushes him toward a desperate end, he encounters a mystical stranger on a lonely road who saves him in more ways than one.

Young lawyer Ed Davis sits in his boss' fancy office, sure he is about to be fired. After two years of gradually slipping into addiction, he has finally hit bottom, and pretty much knows it. Instead though, Ed is offered a mission to an exotic island and a promise of redemption. Find fugitive gambler Orleans Moss and save his career? Seems easy enough. But Ed's personal ghosts follow him to remote Panglao island, where nothing, including himself, is what it seems.

Not on my watch! So declared Montana Senator Beauregard Bryant when the small town of Twin Rivers, Montana, sought a lucrative federal contract to house Guantanamo Bay prisoners in its languishing prison. Undaunted, newly elected town Mayor Phoenix Jamborsky hires local lawyer Gabriel Lantagne to help secure the controversial contract against the wishes of the powers that be in Montana.

While the big bad corporation has often been the offender in many of the world’s greatest environmental disasters, in the case of the mass poisoning at Camp Lejeune the culprit is a revered institution: The US Marine Corps. For two decades now, revelations have steadily emerged about pervasive contamination, associated clusters of illness and death among the Marine families stationed there, and military stonewalling and failure to act.

At the heart of this comprehensive resource is a practical approach to innovation based on specific timetables, compensation structures, and financial investments. Respected thought leaders in lean startup methodologies, the authors cover successful enterprise development, development innovation labs, corporate venture arms, and acquisition and integration of startups.

Larry was invited by the Navy Labor Board to work in Hawaii, while he took time off from Ohio State University, to earn the finances needed for his junior year. On his first Sunday morning in Oahu, he planned to meet with his brother, who was stationed at Pearl Harbor. Waiting there at the Navy Yard, Dry Dock No. 1, taking in the sights of the harbor and the USS Pennsylvania, the scene changed astonishingly as Pearl Harbor was brutally attacked before his own eyes.

When he's in a funk, Adam the immortal man mostly just wants a place to drink and the occasional drinking buddy. When that buddy turns out to be Santa Claus, Adam is forced to face one of the biggest challenges of extremely long life: Christmas cheer. Will Santa break him out of his bad mood? Or will he be responsible for depressing the most positive man on the planet?

I knew she was bad news the minute she walked into the bar. She was a redhead. I always had a thing for redheads. One in particular, actually. She was dead, but that didn't mean I wasn't holding my breath for a second or two every time I saw another girl with red hair. This one was very much alive, and once she walked in she was also the life of the room.

Evan and Caris St. John own a beach house on isolated Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. After a hurricane strikes the island, Caris and their three children discover a mysterious treasure chest in its wake. Unbeknownst to them, the chest has been sealed for nearly a century and a half. A mysterious Gullah woman rumored to be a witch predicted decades earlier that the family would break the seal and awaken the magic inside. The unbelievable begins to happen.

"Winston!" "Oh, hey," Chip said lamely, spinning on his heel. "I didn't think you were still here." Seeing Brenden's confused look, he clarified. "No limo." "Oh, yeah." Brenden looked down at his boots, the brown leather just scuffed enough to be fashionable. "I hopped an Uber over. I thought maybe you'd give me a ride back to the hotel so we could talk."

Self-improvement can be slow. Mastery takes years. But you don't have to be a master to be good. "Good" is good enough to greatly improve your life. And you can be good at anything, fast. Defy the monotony of the status quo. Find freedom in being good at anything. Good At Anything, Fast! gives you a framework for getting consistently better, faster. If you want to be the best version of yourself, faster than you ever thought possible, then this book is for you!

Peter lives in a silent world. Thirteen, deaf, and tormented by neighborhood bullies, Peter seeks solace in summertime snorkeling outings with his eccentric Viking-horn-helmeted Uncle Sverrir. But after a dangerous encounter with a giant hammerhead predator, Peter discovers he has a unique gift: He can talk to sharks.

As he takes his final trip home, Samuel Wrightman thinks about the life he left behind in Bloomsdale, Georgia. Home. The memories, a mix of happiness and pain, are all he has left of the quiet little town. His mom, dad, and friends are all gone now. And Annie. Beautiful Annie is never far from his mind.

Songs of the Deliverer is a re-imagining of the Gospel stories of the Bible written for teens and young adults. The novel and the reflections on the Songs of the Deliverer website provide a perfect way for young people to learn more about Christ and the faith to which we are called.

In an ancient civilization that spans Earth's galaxy, only those with strength of purpose and razor-sharp cunning can survive the wrath of the lustful and the craven. The Time Treasure: Insidious Inheritance is an enthralling, wildly inventive science fiction odyssey by Mark Fulcher and Annet Libeau, which pits the ruthless against the righteous in an epic galactic battle royale that could transform the universe as we know it.

What if, after you die, your life just continues in exactly the same manner as when you were alive? In this riveting and often humorous novel by Robert Rahula, an American expat wakes up dead in Toledo, Spain, and discovers that nothing has changed, except that he is dead. He continues to interact with all his old friends, and they with him. Only he alone knows that he’s dead. In his journey through this afterlife, he ponders the choices he made during his life, the nature of consciousness, the nonexistence of free will, the flow of time, and existence of multiple universes.

A troubled woman marches west across the great, barren prairie. Suffering from a mental trauma, she's barely aware of the grim changes that have consumed the world around her. She avoids the dead, hides from people, and wanders westward in a daze. Hungry and tired, she finds her way to Montana, where she is taken prisoner on an Indian reservation run by a man with an iron fist and a cold heart.

We return to the story of Seth and Melinda, siblings who've fallen in with the likes of Noone Tompkins, a bad man with a fast gun and a cruel disposition. The group's journey south, to a promised oasis in the New Mexico desert, is interrupted by a war between the citizens of Billings, Montana and the scattered survivors of the Crow Nation.

When the CIA asks 36-year-old public defender Malcom X Heinlein to represent a minor co-defendant at the trial of Saddam Hussein, he thinks he is being chosen because of his murky history with 30-year-old Ayesha Qaddafi, trial counsel for Saddam and daughter of President Qaddafi. Malcom and his partner Sofia soon learn that their client, a former Saddam body double, wants desperately to testify against the tyrant in exchange for freedom for himself and his family in America.