Showing results by narrator "Susan Bennett"

When Caroline Sears receives the news that her unborn baby girl has a heart defect, she is devastated. It is 1970, and it seems that nothing can be done. But her brother-in-law, a physicist, tells her that perhaps there is. Hunter had appeared in their lives just a few years before - and his appearance was as mysterious as his past. With no family, no friends, and a background shrouded in secrets, Hunter embraced the Sears family and never looked back.

The Silent Sister is a gripping novel from Diane Chamberlain, the best-selling author of  The Midwife's Confession. What if everything you believed turned out to be a lie? Riley MacPherson is returning to her childhood home in North Carolina. A place that holds cherished memories. While clearing out the house she finds a box of old newspaper articles - and a shocking family secret begins to unravel. Riley has spent her whole life believing that her older sister, Lisa, died tragically as a teenager.

A successful LA artist, Roman Velasco appears to have everything he could possibly want - money, women, fame. Only Grace Moore, his reluctant, newly hired personal assistant, knows how little he truly has. The demons of Roman's past seem to echo through the halls of his empty mansion and out across his breathtaking Topanga Canyon view. But Grace doesn't know how her boss secretly wrestles with those demons: by tagging buildings as the Bird, a notorious but unidentified graffiti artist - an alter ego that could destroy his career and land him in prison. 

In 1944, 23-year-old Tess DeMello abruptly ends her engagement to the love of her life when she marries a mysterious stranger and moves to Hickory, North Carolina. Hickory is a small town struggling with racial tension and the hardships imposed by World War II. Tess' new husband, Henry Kraft, is a secretive man who often stays out all night, hides money from his new wife and shows no interest in making love. Tess quickly realizes she's trapped in a strange and loveless marriage with no way out.

Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. It's a pretty standard dried-up western town. There's a pawnshop (someone lives in the basement and is seen only at night). There's a diner (people who are just passing through tend not to linger). And there's new resident Manfred Bernardo, who thinks he's found the perfect place to work in private (and who has secrets of his own). Stop at the one traffic light in town, and everything looks normal. Stay awhile, and learn the truth....

Welcome to the most intriguing mystery you'll read this year. Welcome to Midnight, Texas. From the number-one New York Times best-selling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels - 'the Mark Twain of things that live under your bed' - comes a new novel of Midnight, Texas, the town where some secrets will never see the light of day.... At Midnight's local pawnshop, weapons are flying off the shelves - only to be used in sudden and dramatic suicides right at the main crossroads in town.

Welcome to Midnight, Texas. It's a quiet little town, perched at the junction between Davy Road and Witch Light Road, and it's easy to miss. With its boarded-up windows, single traffic light, and sleepy air, there's nothing special about Midnight...which is exactly how the residents like it. So when the news comes that a new owner plans to renovate the run-down, abandoned old hotel in town, it's not met with pleasure.

Texas: 1931. Bonnie Parker’s dreams of the limelight and a white picket fence are on hold. She’s a waitress in Dallas, endlessly writing letters to the governor pleading for the release of the man she loves: a reckless, quick-smiling boy named Clyde Barrow, sentenced to 14 years at the notorious Eastham prison farm. When Clyde is paroled early, Bonnie thinks their life is about to really begin. But Clyde has changed in prison. Distant, damaged, and dogged by the cops, he knows it’s only a matter of time before the law tries to lock him up again. That’s not something he or Bonnie can bear.

When the pretending ends, the lying begins.... It's the summer of 1990, and 14-year-old Molly Arnette lives with her extended family on 100 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The summer seems idyllic at first. The mountains are Molly's playground, and she's well loved by her father, a therapist famous for books he's written about a method called 'Pretend Therapy'; her adoptive mother, who has raised Molly as her own; and Amalia, her birth mother who also lives on the family land.

They meet at a local tavern in the small town of Belleville, Delaware. Polly is set on heading west. Adam says he's also passing through. Yet she stays, and he stays - drawn to this mysterious redhead whose quiet stillness both unnerves and excites him. Over the course of a punishing summer, Polly and Adam abandon themselves to a steamy, inexorable affair. Still, each holds something back from the other - dangerous, even lethal secrets. Then someone dies. Was it an accident or part of a plan? By now Adam and Polly are so ensnared in each other's lives and lies that neither one knows how to get away.

It's 1994 and Lenore Littlefield is a junior at Briarwood School for Girls. She plays basketball. She hates her roommate. History is her favorite subject. She has told no one that she's pregnant. Everything, in other words, is under control. Meanwhile, Disney has announced plans to build a new theme park just up the road in Virginia, a "Technicolor simulacrum of American history". When the threat of the theme park begins to intrude on the lives of the faculty and students at Briarwood, secrets will be revealed and unexpected alliances will form.

Against the backdrop of the wave of demonstrations known as the Arab Spring, in 2011 hundreds of thousands of Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom, democracy, and human rights. The government's ferocious response, and the refusal of the demonstrators to back down, sparked a brutal civil war that over the past five years has escalated into the worst humanitarian catastrophe of our times. Yet despite all the reporting, the video, and the wrenching photography, the stories of ordinary Syrians remain unheard.

Noah is four and wants to go home. The only trouble is he's already there. Janie's son is her world, and it breaks her heart that he has nightmares. That he's terrified of water. That he sometimes pushes her away and screams that he wants his real mother. That it's getting worse and worse, and no one seems to be able to help. In desperation, she turns to someone who might have an answer - but it may not be one she's ready to hear.

All 11-year old Alex wants is to launch his iPod into space. With a series of audio recordings, he will show other lifeforms out in the cosmos what life on Earth, his Earth, is really like. But for a boy with a long-dead dad, a troubled mum, and a mostly-not-around brother, Alex struggles with the big questions. Where do I come from? Who's out there? And, above all, how can I be brave?

Seattle gallery owner Virginia Troy has spent years battling the demons that stem from her childhood time in a cult and the night a fire burned through the compound, killing her mother. And now one of her artists has taken her own life, but not before sending Virginia a last picture: a painting that makes Virginia doubt everything about the so-called suicide - and her own past. Like Virginia, PI Cabot Sutter was one of the children in the cult who survived that fire - and only he can help her now.

The summer of 1927 might be the height of the Roaring Twenties, but Bonnelyn Parker is more likely to belt out a church hymn than sling drinks at an illicit juice joint. She's a sharp girl with plans to overcome her family's poverty, provide for herself, and maybe someday marry her boyfriend, Roy Thornton. But when Roy springs a proposal on her, and financial woes jeopardize her ambitions, Bonnelyn finds salvation in an unlikely place: Dallas's newest speakeasy, Doc's.

It's taken Nora three years. With the help of her best friend, she fled New York City for a small resort town, snagged a job as the advice columnist for the local paper, and is cautiously letting a new man into her life. But when Hugh and his perfect new family move into a house nearby, Nora backslides. Coping with jealousy, humiliation, and resentment again is as hard as she feared. It's harder still when Hugh and his wife are shot to death in their home. If only Nora could account for the night of the murders.

Being dead sucks. Make that being undead sucks. Literally. Just ask Thomas C. Flood. Waking up after a fantastic night unlike anything he's ever experienced, he discovers that his girlfriend, Jody, the woman of his dreams, is a vampire. And surprise! Now he's one, too.

"The city of San Francisco is being stalked by a huge shaved vampyre cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal, emergency backup mistress of the Greater Bay Area night, and my manga-haired love monkey, Foo Dog, stand between the ravenous monster and a bloody massacre of the general public. Whoa. And this is a love story? Yup."

Phoebe has loved Jake Pierce since childhood, and that love continues without hesitation while she watches him create a financial dynasty. But when Phoebe learns that her husband's triumphs are the result of an elaborate Ponzi scheme, her world unravels. Lies underpin her life and marriage. And as Jake's crime is uncovered, the world obsesses over her. Did she know her gilded life was fabricated by fraud?