Showing results by narrator "Gary Dikeos" in All Categories

Jack Veeder is dying. Soon. And that impending event brings his son Jimmy back to the Imperial Valley of southern California just north of the Calexico/Mexicali border. Jimmy hopes he can spend what time his father has left laughing and reminiscing. But Jack’s got one dying request. He needs Jimmy to find a Mexican prostitute named Yolanda. Enlisting the help of his boyhood friend Bobby Maves, the pair stumbles through the violent, the exploited, and the corrupted of Mexicali.

San Francisco jazz pianist Evan Horne takes a gig in Los Angeles, where he’s offered his most unusual job yet. Movie megastar Ryan Stiles hires Evan to teach him to look like he’s playing piano for an upcoming role. Evan stays at Stiles’ lush Malibu home for the tutoring, but things suddenly go wrong for the arrogant, spoiled star. Stiles’ adversarial relationship with the paparazzi explodes when a photographer is killed. Was it an accident, or is Stiles himself a suspect? Evan wants out.

From roots to canopy, a lush, verdant history of the making of California. California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It’s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities.

Considered a master of the short story, Saki was best known for his witty and mischievous stories that satirized the culture and society of Edwardian England. In "The Open Window" his best-known vignette, a teenage girl regales the tale of an eerie family tragedy to a high-strung visitor, who receives something of a shock.

Twelve-year-old Daniel, the new kid in town, soon learns the truth about his nice - but odd - new friends: one can fly, another can turn invisible, yet another controls electricity. Incredible. The superkids use their powers to secretly do good in the town, but they’re haunted by the fact that the moment they turn thirteen, their abilities will disappear - along with any memory that they ever had them. Is a memory-stealing supervillain sapping their powers?

Blood isn't always thicker than water. Mason Fitzgerald recently discovered a world hidden within our own that was filled with fae, sheers, vampires, and werewolves. While his friends and family help him search for the person responsible for his parents' deaths, he discovers that someone he thought he could trust has been working against him the entire time. He's lost some of his allies, but has gained some unlikely new ones. Will Mason be able to avenge his parents' deaths, or will he lose everything and everyone he loves?

The Rossi family received only a handful of letters after their son shipped out on the supertanker Aurora Victorious. The first dispatches were from Harold himself, describing the blend of tedium and excitement that defined life onboard the ship. The last communication came from the ship's owners: four brief sentences informing them that their son had died and been buried at sea.

Pittsburgh has recently (and more than once) been called the most livable city in America; yet the old image of smoky skies and steel mills spewing forth grit has never quite disappeared. Its history as a dirty industrial center is a part of its residents, a part of their toughness. The people of the steel city fight.

A millennium’s worth of evil plans are about to bear fruit for the dark wizard Gád. Niðergeard lies exposed, and at long last it is time for the dragons to be awakened and the gates between worlds to be thrown open.A terrifying army of giants, dragons, trolls, and yfelgópes, assembled by Gád over centuries, awaits the wizard’s order to invade Niðergeard. The end of the underground country - and life as we know it on the surface - is near.

The powerful story of an unlikely friendship and a doctor’s re-education on the battlefields of the Vietnam War. Fresh out of medical school and planning to enter academia, David pragmatically applies to serve in the US Army, thinking he would rather work in a stateside military hospital than get drafted. But when he gets reassigned to Southeast Asia, he suddenly finds himself on a base in Vietnam. He joins a civilian aid mission on a supposedly secure plateau, and spends his days dispensing pills to villagers.

A haunting debut novel about a psychically shattered patrician New England family and one of its sons, implicated in the mysterious death of his alcoholic father. The time is the 1990s. Simon Curtis, in his mid-thirties, is a painter, a yearning, troubled loner still burdened with the unfinished business of childhood. He seeks refuge for the summer in his family’s house in Maine, and then, for the fall, in their place in Massachusetts - despite his father’s insistence that he is not welcome.

Wrecker is an abandoned child for whom life turns around in most unexpected ways. It's June of 1965 when Wrecker enters the world. The war is raging in Vietnam, San Francisco is tripping toward flower power, and Lisa Fay, Wrecker's birth mother, is knocked nearly sideways by life as a single parent in a city she can barely manage to navigate on her own. Three years later, she's in prison, and Wrecker is left to bounce around in the system before he's shipped off to live with distant relatives in the wilds of Humboldt County, California.

After a lifetime intertwined with the Aspinalls, one of Canada’s wealthiest families, Andy Kronk has finally forged a clean break. Mere months pass, however, before his past returns in the form of Trudy Clark. She’s writing a tell-all biography of the Aspinall family and wants Andy’s perspective. Over the course of a weekend, Andy unravels his knotted mess of a life and begins to wonder if he’s revealed too much information.

Deep beneath the streets of England lies another realm...one few in our modern world know exists. Daniel and Freya, however, know it all too well. Eight years ago, these friends first journeyed through portals into the hidden land of Niðergeard - discovering a city filled with stones, secrets, and sleeping knights that serve to protect the world they call home. But Niðergeard has fallen to dark forces, overrun by its enemies. Gates are being opened between the worlds that should have been kept closed. The battle lines for the war at the end of time have been drawn.

El Arte de la Guerra es el mejor libro de estrategia de todos los tiempos. Inspiró a Napoleón, Maquiavelo, Mao Tse Tung, y muchas más figuras históricas. Este libro de dos mil quinientos años de antigüedad es uno de los más importantes textos clásicos Chinos, en el que, a pesar del tiempo transcurrido, ninguna de sus máximas ha quedado anticuada, ni hay un solo consejo que hoy no sea útil. Pero la obra del general Sun-tzu no es únicamente un libro de práctica militar....

The crumbling summerhouse called Wild Fell, soaring above the desolate shores of Blackmore Island, has weathered the violence of the seasons for more than a century. Built for his family by a 19th-century politician of impeccable rectitude, the house has kept its terrible secrets and its darkness sealed within its walls. For a hundred years, the townspeople of Alvina have prayed that the darkness inside Wild Fell would stay there, locked away from the light. Jameson Browning, a man well acquainted with suffering, has purchased Wild Fell with the intention of beginning a new life, of letting in the light.

Ancient legend tells of an army of knights that will remain sleeping until the last days. The knights are waking up. A homeless man is stalked by a pale, wraithlike creature with a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. Maimed animals and a host of suicides cluster around a mountain in Scotland. And deep beneath the cobbled streets of Oxford, a malicious hoard besieges a hidden city. Freya Reynolds is a university student with a touch of OCD and an obsession with myth and folklore.