Showing results by narrator "John McLain" in All Categories

After his wife Alison, First Assistant United States Attorney, unwittingly recruits an ex-CIA operative and former international arms dealer to help in an undercover operation, Brock Andrews learns that the man has a dangerous agenda of his own.

When an elderly woman is gunned down on the street, the resulting police investigation leads to places no one could have expected, and may actually endanger national security.

He was a war hero and a member of Congress. Now he's dead - shot down the day after he made a scathing speech blasting corruption in Washington. For Sacramento police detectives Terry Nye and Rose Tafoya, the investigation is a time bomb. They have just twenty-four hours to find out if the congressman was killed because of his speech...or something far worse. Dennis Cooper is acting District Attorney during these critical twenty-four hours. He's in for the fight of his career and time is running out for everyone - and they know it.

In the small Lake Erie township of Benning, someone is at work cultivating a supernatural garden... Andy Kemp's young life has been as ravaged as his scarred face. Disfigured by an abusive father, the teenager hides behind his books and an impenetrable wall of cynicism and anger. As Andy's mother struggles to reconnect with him, his Uncle Rip returns transformed from a stint in prison and wants to be a mentor to the reclusive boy, doing everything he can to help end Andy's pain.

A comedic western, "Mountain Man" is about the tall tales and big adventures of Brekenridge Elkins, an exaggerated, cartoonish version of Howard himself. The story first appeared in the March - April 1934 issue of Action Stories and was so popular that other magazines asked Howard for similar characters, giving birth to an entire series full of colorful characters.

Rotten Row is the worst place we've made. Humankind can travel to the stars - but only those content to be flung as a data stream through space, flitting from male to female, dark to fair, one random discard body to the next. Those who go are the Upshot, rare individuals subject to their own rigid laws. And then there's Rotten Row. Outcasts in breach of all codes, in Rotten Row people design their own bodies and sell them on for re-use after. Outlandish bodies: furred and feathered, winged and hooved and worse.

For small-town, Iowa lawyer, Sam McCain, the year 1965 is not a sweet one. His father is gravely ill. His elitist boss is just coming out of rehab. And, the brilliant lawyer he hoped to start a relationship with has gone back to her husband. Still, McCain tries to enjoy himself during the town's Labor Day weekend party, reuniting with several old friends - until two of them are murdered for what seems to be a motive buried in the past...

Eliot Spitzer built his reputation as Attorney General of New York by redefining the role and purpose of the public prosecutor. The cases he brought against the largest corporations on Wall Street and others - both criminal and civil - targeted pervasive misconduct and structural flaws in the economy that were metastasizing in the years leading up to 2008. The cases themselves and the remedies they produced were precedent setting. Today, after the financial crisis has exposed the faults that were brewing and the ever-expanding gap between the 1% and the 99%, it is clear that Eliot Spitzer was prescient.

"Three years ago, when my son was still in college and my daughter lived across the Bay, my wife packed her car with her clothes and things, discussed with me her reasons for taking half the savings and, after a farewell which I cannot recall verbatim, she left..." In this short story, which won a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, a retired schoolteacher in his sunset years, gets his first glimpse at the failures in his life, cracking a window open to everything and everyone outside.

Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell - TV persona of Friedemann Paul Erhardt, America's first TV showman chef. Big on personality and flavor, Chef Tell was once called by Philadelphia magazine the "affably roguish Bad Boy of the Philadelphia restaurant world." Chef Tell explores how a young German American chef became America's biggest TV celebrity chef of his time. Most of Chef Tell's forty million baby boomer viewers - a number comparable to Julia Child's - never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story. Until now.

It's about as noir as you can get. In a bleak Texas prison, Franklin Royce, an alcoholic doctor, is given the odious task of administering inmate Bobby Mencken's last "high." The young black man on the other end of the needle seems remarkably indifferent to his fate - but Royce is convinced that the convicted killer was innocent. When Royce's marriage crumbles, he takes off for Dallas to search for the real killer.

In this critically acclaimed novel, Harry Rent finds himself young and single and lost after the passing of his wife. Although numbed by his life's unexpected turn, Harry becomes fixated on Molly, an obsidian-haired, 22-year-old waitress. Meanwhile, Harry is forced to fend off Clare, his sister-in-law, who is convinced that Harry is somehow responsible for her sister's untimely death. At once deeply moving and darkly comedic, Harry, Revised is an extraordinary novel about the measure of a man's worth by a wonderful, emerging talent.

Heather and Mack McKay seem to have it all: wealth, a dream house in the suburbs, and two adorable children along with the nannies to raise them. But their marriage has lost its savor: She is a frustrated writer and he longs for a cultural trophy to hang on his belt. During a chance encounter in LA, Mack invites exiled writer Zoltan Barbu - once lionized as a political hero, now becoming a has-been - to live with him and his wife in their luxurious home. The plan should provide Heather with literary companionship, Mack with cultural cachet, and Zoltan himself with a pastoral environment in which to overcome his writer’s block and produce a masterpiece.

>Blood, Steel & Canvas: The Asian Odyssey of a Fighter is a story about fighting on two levels: the American lawyer author’s improbable career as Asia’s oldest amateur boxer and his fight to overcome colon cancer and its consequences. Through his friendships with boxers in the Philippines and Thailand, his efforts (not always successful) to learn the languages and his delight in experiencing local cultures, he sets an example for other expatriates who have the great fortune to live and work overseas.

Mason Dupre has resigned himself to never being loved. Silver Whitney has fallen under a spell - the spell of graceful, antebellum Rosewood Plantation. But it is the spell cast long ago over Mason Dupre that prevents Silver from writing the book she has traveled hundreds of miles to complete. Mardi Gras, the interference of a ghost, and the heavy New Orleans air swirl around Silver and Mason as they struggle to solve and understand the mystery that keeps them both bound to the plantation and a vengeful curse.

Manfred, a surly mountaineer recently abandoned by his wife, rents the upstairs apartment in his home in the Dolomites to Marina, a woman from the city, and her difficult young son. Deeply suspicious by nature, especially of women, Manfred spies obsessively on Marina, in whose shortcomings as a mother he finds resonances of his own mother’s desertion of him in childhood. When Marina’s frustration over her son’s refusal to eat or sleep leads her to harm the child, Manfred steps in, and the silent power struggle between them escalates. Yet Manfred’s attraction to Marina is as powerful as his distrust.

Annie Hamilton and Major David Grainger had a conflicted past as mis-matched spouses, and a conflicted present as separated parents. David saw the problem as her drive to be successful, and not fitting into the mold of an Air Force officer’s wife. Annie blamed their breakup on his unfortunate habit of bringing his dictatorial nature into their relationship as if she were in his squadron.... Can they ever learn to accept the other as they are? Will Annie let stubborn pride cause her to lose the only man she has ever loved? The real question for Annie is: does she take this man…again?

Tom Judah, a former Marine recently discharged from the military after serving three tours of combat in the killing zones of Iraq. Jessica Spire, a young woman trying to reinvent her life after fleeing a callous and loveless marriage. Scars of the Prophet is a dynamic story of what happens when fate and destiny collide in an aggressive world of pawns and broken kings. Tom Judah wanted to fit back into society and forget the horrific necessities of a war his conscious was still fighting.

Baseball star Cory Brand knows how to win. But off the field, he’s spiraling out of control. Haunted by old wounds and regrets, his future seems as hopeless as his past. Until one moment - one mistake - changes everything. To save his career, Cory must go back to the town where it all began. His plan is simple: coach the local Little League team, complete a recovery program, and get out as fast as possible. Instead, he runs headfirst into memories he can’t escape…and the love he left behind.

Renowned philanthropist and billionaire Paul Parnell had reached the pinnacle of monetary success, but not without cost. Had he put too much emphasis on work and spent too little time with his family? Determined to leave something far more valuable than money to his six children, Paul instructs his lawyers to create an unusual last will and testament. This unorthodox will, which stipulates that the lion's share of Paul's two-billion-dollar estate be given to the heirs who pass "the test", was Paul's last hope of creating a lasting legacy by inspiring his children to give back to society and embrace a code of moral values.