Showing results by narrator "R.C. Bray" in All Categories

In the morning, Bram finds the bones of a murdered child. At noon, the murdered child begs for his help. And by nightfall, they have killed a man together and set off into the afterlife, where nothing is what it was, and death is only the beginning of punishment. An eerie story about the nature of death and the self, Midnight Picnic inhabits an American landscape made strange and unfamiliar.

From award-winning author Pamela Samuels Young, author of Anybody's Daughter! Featured in the anthology The Funeral, this fast-paced short story wastes no time pulling the reader into a fascinating whodunit. When a prominent L.A. lawyer is found dead in his office, the detectives assigned to solve the crime search high and low for clues. What they discover at the lawyer's funeral may well lead them to his killer. But will the murderer turn out to be among the usual suspects?

When Artemus Black is hired to investigate a series of suspicious accidents at LA's most prestigious modeling agency, he quickly discovers that brooding pouts and mascara can be as dangerous as guns or bombs. From LA to Mexico to Tahoe to NY, the story pokes fun at the world of high fashion as Black races to discover who's killing the models.

When a star running back is gunned down by a cop with a questionable history, the city of L.A. is on the verge of a racial explosion. Enter a lawyer who comes to the cop's defense...but a desire for justice has nothing to do with it.

Waverly Sloan is a down-on-his-luck lawyer. But just when he's about to hit rock bottom, he stumbles upon a business with the potential to solve all of his problems. In Waverly's new line of work, he comes to the aid of people in desperate need of cash. But there's a catch. His clients must be terminally ill and willing to sign over rights to their life insurance policies before they can collect a dime. Waverly then finds investors eager to advance them thousands of dollars - including a hefty broker's fee for himself.

On a rainy night in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, a woman throws a doll from the fifth-floor window of a gutted tenement, then leaps herself. From his own apartment a few blocks away, freelance photographer David Corman listens to the radio reports as they come over his headset. Corman is a man at the edge, threatened with eviction, besieged by his wife’s attempt to regain custody of their daughter, yet reluctant to give up the life that permits him to roam the night. In the woman’s dying fall, he sees the chance to sell a story....

From the introduction by Les Standiford: "The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city... We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century.

Poised to make partner at a high-powered L.A. law firm, Vernetta Henderson takes on what appears to be an open-and-shut case of sexual harassment. As the case proceeds, Vernetta soon begins to suspect that her corporate client may be involved in a far-reaching cover-up. The deeper she digs, the more the case spirals out of her control. Determined to find the truth, Vernetta eventually unravels a conspiracy of greed and violence that places her career - and her very life - at risk.

Two crooked lawyers who've stumbled upon a simple way to make some quick cash soon find that the easy money comes at a price. This new short by Pamela Samuels Young is a thrilling listen.

New York Times Bestseller and Wall Street Journal Bestseller! Bar Rescue's Jon Taffer presents a new guide to getting what you want in life and business--to stop making excuses so you can get back to winning. During his many years as an entrepreneur, consultant, and star of the Paramount...

Ten-year-old twins Ashlynne and Julian share a special ability: the power to enter each other's dreams. They call it "sharing" dreams. It's usually a great time...until one night when the twins find themselves stuck inside a dream that feels all too real. The pair must work together to find a way to wake up - and they need to hurry - because the dream is quickly turning into a nightmare, thanks to an ancient evil bent on ensuring they never escape....

For 10 years Bill Stokes was a roving reporter and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal. He has written reams of material about his vivid impressions of people, animals, events, personal activities, and "things in general". Bill Stokes obviously enjoys his role as Wisconsin's favorite journalist. In this delightful book he shares that fun with all.

Richard Lazar is advancing in years but regressing in life. After a career as a literary novelist that has ground to a halt and landed him in a trailer in Phoenix, Richard is surprised to find sudden success publishing a gritty memoir about his service in Vietnam. Sent on a book tour by his publishing house, Richard encounters his biggest (and really only) fan: an awkward, despondent student named Vance with issues of his own - an absentee father, a depressive mother, his own acute shyness.

After working to free his father from prison in Fox Is Framed, Leo has now left private practice and is working as a public defender in San Francisco. He and his cocounsel, Jordan Walker, are in the midst of trial, brilliantly defending Randall Rodrigues, a mentally ill homeless man whom they contend falsely confessed to the rape of a young San Francisco socialite. After their client is acquitted, Leo and Jordan fall into an intense relationship - until Jordan is found brutally raped and murdered in her apartment.

Jessup Burke, a lonely, naïve 16-year-old, has grown up without a father in a jobless, indifferent logging town. Out of high school a year early, he now bikes through the woods with his fishing gear, daydreaming of his sweetheart and their secret "home" in an abandoned farmhouse. When Reg, an embittered, paranoid recluse fresh out of jail for growing marijuana, encounters Jessup hitchhiking, he is at first drawn to the boy's easily manipulated naïveté, but the two soon become irreversibly bound.

The beautiful Bliss Fenton won't be winning any awards for Mother of the Year. Truth is, motherhood isn't nearly as important to Bliss as the cottage industry she's created: extorting wealthy men for the hefty child support she can collect. But Bliss' greed goes too far when she takes on Fletcher McClain. The handsome music industry mogul refuses to accept her conniving conduct lying down. He retains high-profile attorney Vernetta Henderson to sue Bliss for fraud.

With the literary chops of Bonfire of the Vanities and the dizzying decadence of The Wolf of Wall Street, The Fall of Princes takes listeners into a world of hedonistic highs and devastating lows, weaving a visceral tale about the lives of these young men, winners all...until someone changes the rules of the game. Goolrick paints a magnificently authentic portrait of an era, tense and stylish, perfectly mixing adrenaline and melancholy.

Faced with evidence of stunning prosecutorial misconduct, a San Francisco judge has ordered a new trial for the Maxwell brothers' father, Lawrence, who was convicted of killing their mother 21 years before. A prison snitch soon turns up dead, with Lawrence the only suspect, and Leo teams up with hotshot attorney Nina Schuyler to defend Lawrence against murder charges both old and new.

Brand-new stories by: Daniel Woodrell, Matthew Eck, Catherine Browder, Nancy Pickard, John Lutz, J. Malcolm Garcia, Kevin Prufer, Linda Rodriguez, Nadia Pflaum, Phong Nguyen, Andres Rodriguez, and others. Kansas City: where East and West collide, where naked ambition meets broken dreams, where blues and the night go together like rye whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. Yes, Kansas City is a surprising place of grit, gore, and betrayal, at least in the imaginations of our diverse lineup of contributors.

Lust, lies and the law collide in… Murder on the Down Low! Savvy L.A. attorney Vernetta Henderson takes center in a fast-paced legal thriller that erupts into a scandalous tale of lust, lies, and vengeance. Some of L.A.'s most prominent citizens are being gunned down, leaving police completely baffled. The victims are all quintessential family men. Well-educated. Attractive. Successful. But the appearances can be deceiving.