Showing results by narrator "David deVries" in All Categories

Friends come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In Amos McGee's case, all sorts of species, too! Every day he spends a little bit of time with each of his friends at the zoo, running races with the tortoise, keeping the shy penguin company, and even reading bedtime stories to the owl. But when Amos is too sick to make it to the zoo, his animal friends decide it's time they returned the favor.

The spirit populace of Manhattan doesn't appreciate its well-deserved RIP being disturbed, and Department of Extraordinary Affairs Agent Simon Canderous is sent in to do damage control. Meanwhile, his vacationing partner Connor Christos is in a sorry state, and he tells Simon that each night he's being haunted by visions of his long-lost brother at his window. Simon is worried that his partner may be going crazy - or worse, maybe he's not.

Simon Canderous, of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, is used to fighting vampires and zombies. But the strange murder of a professor has everyone stumped. And it's making some people crazy. Literally.

It's been 737 days since the Department of Extraordinary Affair's last vampire incursion, but that streak appears to have ended when a boat full of dead lawyers is found in the Hudson River. Using the power of psychometry - the ability to divine the history of an object by touching it - agent Simon Canderous discovers that the booze cruise was crashed by something that sucked all the blood out of the litigators. Now, his workday may never end - until his life does.

Old Canhoon, the City of Wonders, is having a population explosion as refugees from Tyrne and Roathes alike try to escape the Sa'ba Taalor. All along the border between the Blasted Lands and the Fellein Empire, armies clash, and the most powerful empire in the world is pushed back toward the old capital. From the far east the Pilgrim gathers an army of the faithful, heading for Old Canhoon.

It’s an age-old question: Why do some great ideas or inventions take off and soar while others never get off the ground? Today, with more and more young entrepreneurs seeking to incorporate social justice, economic equity, climate concerns, and communal health into their endeavors, the need for practical-yet-think-big answers is great. Thibault Manekin has a few. 

Some locales seem to come with their own soundtrack. Don Ho and his tiny bubbles provide the background music for Hawaii, Edith Piaf for Paris. The reggae of Bob Marley evokes Jamaica. The soundtrack for Alabama is without question provided by our troubled troubadour Hank Williams. The 2016 biography Hank by Mark Ribowsky paints a dark picture of the musician's short, alcoholic, drug-filled life: a life of loneliness and pain. He goes so far as to call Hank's life story "noir-ish"....

Meet Mr. Gilly. He cleans up Trashy Town. There’s trash at the pizza parlor, trash at the school, and trash at every house. It’s a big job, but Mr. Gilly does it with a big truck, a big smile, and loads of style.

When well-mannered Elliot reluctantly visits the aquarium with his distractible father, he politely asks whether he can have a penguin--and then removes one from the penguin pool to his backpack. The fun of caring for a penguin in a New England Victorian house is followed by a surprise revelation by Elliot's father.

Dante the necromancer is the most reviled man in Sabria, indicted by for crimes against the living and the dead. He salves bitterness with a magical puzzle - a desperate soldier's dream of an imprisoned sorceress and a faceted glass that can grant one's utmost desires. But the dream is a seductive trap. Haunted, blind, driven to the verges of the world, Dante must risk everything he values to unravel a mystery of ancient magic, sacred legend, and the truth of the divine.

In the guise of political revolutionary Thomas Paine, bioengineer Peter Bernhardt brought down the corrupt and powerful Phoenix Club - and then turned revolution into evolution by becoming the first artificial human intelligence: Major Tom. In the two years since Major Tom revealed his digital existence and spread his freedom manifesto, he has been revered as a god and vilified as a demon. The United States and Europe have splintered into ideologically independent regions. Russia and China prepare to expand their empires.

The gray-skinned Sa'ba Taalor from the distant realm have come to Fellein. Since that moment, a war has been building. Swech is one of the Sa'ba Taalor, chosen by her gods to hide among the humans and do the will of her deities.

When a powerful client summons him for a midnight meeting, lawyer Chris Bruen knows something is very wrong. Zapper, the world's most popular search engine, has been compromised, and its most valuable asset - search algorithms - stolen. The company suspects that this most recent instance in a wave of high-tech crimes originated in China, and that the government itself is behind the systematic theft of US intellectual property.

For 500 years, the Porters have concealed the existence of magic from the world. Now, old enemies have revealed the Porters' secrets, and an even greater threat lurks in the shadows. The would-be queen Meridiana, banished for a thousand years, has returned in the body of a girl named Jeneta Aboderin. She seeks an artifact created by Pope Sylvester II, a bronze prison that would grant her the power to command an army of the dead.

Baffled by the stereotypes presented by Hollywood and much historical fiction, many other Americans find the contemporary American Indian an enigma. Compounding their confusion is the highly publicized struggle of the contemporary Indian for self-determination, lost land, cultural preservation, and fundamental human rights - a struggle dramatized both by public acts of protest and by precedent-setting legal actions. American Indians, American Justice explores the complexities of the present Indian situation, particularly with regard to legal and political rights.

For Portier de Savin-Duplais, failed student of magic, sorcery's decline into ambiguity and cheap illusion is but a culmination of life's bitter disappointments. Reduced to tending the library at Sabria's last collegia magica, he fights off despair with scholarship. But when the king of Sabria charges him to investigate an attempted murder that has disturbing magical resonances, Portier believes his dreams of a greater destiny might at last be fulfilled.

"Read this one with the lights on!"—Beth Revis, New York Times bestselling author of The Night of the Witch Knives Out meets The Hazel Wood in this twisty contemporary fantasy about an amusement park shrouded in dark secrets—and the family desperate to inherit it at any cost. Welcome to...

East Prussia, Nazi Germany, 1939. History professor Erik Mueller is a model citizen and a family man. He's also a decorated sergeant in the Gestapo. Proving his courage on the battlefields of Poland and the Soviet Union, and proud of the German army's victories across Europe, he embraces what he thinks is the righteousness of the Third Reich's cause. But his loyalties are soon tested when he crosses paths with his old university friend Trude Bensheim.

A new urban fantasy featuring a man working on the right side of the law - with talents that come from left field. Psychometry - the power to touch an object and divine information about its history - has meant a life of petty crime for Simon Canderous, but now he's gone over to the good side. At New York's underfunded and (mostly) secret Department of Extraordinary Affairs, he's learning about red tape, office politics, and the basics of paranormal investigation. But it's not the paperwork that has him breathless.

With disparate settings such as a Massachusetts farmhouse and the strange volcanic clime of the Enchanted Isles, this six-story anthology features some of Herman Melville’s most exceptional works. Included here is “Bartleby,” the dark tale of a Wall Street clerk who possesses a confounding and disarmingly passive insubordination; and “Benito Cereno,” in which the captain of a whaler boards a tattered Spanish slave ship in South America only to be drawn into an intricately plotted mutiny.