Showing results by narrator "Scott Merriman" in All Categories

Christopher was Auggie's best friend from the time they were babies until his family moved away; he was there through all of Auggie's surgeries and heartbreaks, through bad times and good--like Star Wars marathons and dreams of traveling to Pluto together. Alternating between childhood flashbacks and the present day, an especially bad day for Christopher, Pluto is the story of two boys grown apart learning that good friendships are worth a little extra effort.

Honesty is the best policy. Beware a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Look before you leap. A bird in the hand. These and countless other everyday expressions originated centuries ago with Aesop, the slave and storyteller of ancient Greece. With humor, irony, and commonsense philosophy, Aesop’s Fables illuminates the follies, frailties, and resilience of humankind to this day.

Leaving behind the Divine Beast World, Hui Yue embarks upon the life of an immortal in the vast outside world. To resurrect his loved one, he will go to hell and back. Follow Hui Yue as he enters a world unlike any he has ever seen before and adapts to the many changes that surrounds him on his quest to become the strongest person alive.

One afternoon in November 1975, ten-year-old Miranda Larkin comes home from school to find her house eerily quiet. Her mother is missing. Nothing else is out of place. There is no sign of struggle. Her mom’s pocketbook remains in the front hall, in its usual spot. So begins a mystery that will span a lifetime. What happened to Jane Larkin? Investigators suspect Jane’s husband. A criminal defense attorney, Dan Larkin would surely be an expert in outfoxing the police.

Joe Arneson's ordinary life is upended by troubling dreams of himself as a different man in another place and time. It isn't until he visits his estranged grandmother, Pearl, in her Wisconsin hometown that a startling connection emerges. Drawn into his family's past, Joe discovers secrets weighing on the old woman's soul: the tragic death of her sister Alice a half century ago and its ripple effect on all who loved her.

Disgraced college quarterback Logan Hunt was on his way to NFL stardom when he messed up big-time. Now the Texas star player with a bad temper has a new option: Seattle’s EOL College—as in End of the Line, to his fellow misfit recruits. It’s Logan’s last chance. If he can follow the rules. No parties, no fighting, no swearing, and oh, no dating the coach’s daughter, Jess. Simple. Yeah, right. For Logan, there has never been a rule he’s more tempted to break.

Though the tyrant rajah she was forced to marry is dead, Kalinda's troubles are far from over. A warlord has invaded the imperial city, and now she's in exile. But she isn't alone. Kalinda has the allegiance of Captain Deven Naik, her guard and beloved, imprisoned for treason and stripped of command. With the empire at war, their best hope is to find Prince Ashwin, the rajah's son, who has promised Deven's freedom on one condition: that Kalinda will fight and defeat three formidable opponents.

Jon Talbot is a history professor who makes sense of the past by examining facts. He also knows how to speculate about the what-ifs. Jon’s doing both following the death of his wife, Pax. Driving home late from a volunteer assignment, she plunged off a mountain highway and died. The police find nothing suspicious about the facts: a deer in the road, a blown tire, a broken neck. But the what-ifs are leading Jon down a twisting trail of secrets. After five years of marriage, he is finally getting to know his wife.

Kalinda has brought peace to the Tarachand Empire, at least for now. Bhutas no longer need to hide their gifts. The last of the rebels have been banished. And Prince Ashwin is set to take over as rajah. But for Kalinda, this came at a great loss. Her childhood home. Her best friend. The love of her life. Deven is still trapped in the Void, though he is able to find his way to Kalinda each night. He has been lucky so far—mortals are not meant to last in the Void for long, and Deven has lasted longer than most. But when he doesn’t visit one night, Kalinda knows that his luck has run out.

A searing confessional infused with the darkest humor, Permanent Midnight chronicles the opiated abyss of a Hollywood screenwriter and his formidable climb into sobriety. Made into a major motion picture starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, Permanent Midnight is revered by critics and an ever-growing cult of devoted fans as one of the most compelling contemporary memoirs.

Max Emerson is rich and powerful: a patron of the arts and the owner of a multinational business. But Max's business is money laundering, and, for the first time in his fortunate life, he's in trouble. Hackers are targeting his company. The FBI is pressuring him to betray one of his crooked clients. And a dark secret from his own past looks in danger of resurfacing.

For pretty Ohioan Joan Rogers and her two teenaged daughters, a Florida sunset cruise was a dream come true. They were so taken with friendly boat owner Oba Chandler that they gladly accepted a ride with him on beautiful Tampa Bay. Little did naive mom and two daughters know that behind Chandler's mask of a gracious host lurked a daring and ruthless ex-con, a thief and a liar, a seductive Don Juan who used and discarded wives and children. As the sun serenely sank below the Gulf of Mexico, Chandler suddenly shut down the engines, dropped anchor, and turned into a sadistic torturer.

Scott Hartley first heard the terms fuzzy and techie while studying political science at Stanford University. If you majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy. If you majored in the computer sciences, you were a techie. This informal division has quietly found its way into a default assumption that has misled the business world for decades: that it's the techies who drive innovation.

In the wake of a disastrous firefight with a Mexican cartel, two El Paso police officers find themselves in a military hospital facing a debriefing about what went wrong. As their accounts unfold, Tony, a by-the-book cop, begins to believe that hotheaded Matt might have divided loyalties. Could he have intentionally led the team into a trap that saw the death of a beloved senior officer? Or is the truth even more terrifying than Tony dares to imagine?

We depend on - we believe in - algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations - the marriage vow, the shaman's curse - do not merely describe the world but make it.

Contains books 3 and 4 of Condemning the Heavens: Stars Are Falling and Tears of the Soaring Dragon.

Following on the heels of Robert Brockway's comedic horror novel The Unnoticeables, The Empty Ones reveals the next chapter in the lives of a few misfits attempting to fight back against the mysterious Unnoticeables. The Empty Ones follows Carey and Randall to London where they go to rescue Gus and fight more of these mysterious angel-like creatures, and stumble on a powerful and unexpected ally.

To Pocahontas and her people, the Tidewater is the rightful home of the Powhatan tribe. To England it is Virginia Territory, fertile with promise, rich with silver and gold. As Jamestown struggles to take root, John Smith knows that the only hope for survival lies with the Powhatan people. He knows, too, that they would rather see the English starve than yield their homeland to invaders. In the midst of this conflict, Pocahontas, the daughter of the great chief, forges an unlikely friendship with Smith.

After conducting an intensive study of happy retirees to learn the financial practices they hold in common, Moss discovered that it doesn't take financial genius, millions of dollars, or sophisticated investment skills to ensure a safe, solid retirement. All it takes is five best practices.

Bound to wheelchairs and dependent on prosthetic limbs, the physically disabled students living in the House are overlooked by the Outsides. Not that it matters to anyone living in the House, a hulking old structure that its residents know is alive. From the corridors and crawl spaces to the classrooms and dorms, the House is full of tribes, tinctures, scared teachers, and laws - all seen and understood through a prismatic array of teenagers' eyes.