Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Pickens" in All Categories

Keep your head up, put one foot in front of the other, and never stop. For Bunny Beckman, former cop-turned-stripper, that motto had always been enough to keep the gun out of her mouth. Now, her beliefs, and her life, will be challenged in a way she never even imagined as the dead rise with a hunger for the living. To survive, she must face the monsters outside, and the demons within.

It was supposed to be a road trip to reconnect with my younger sister. We weren’t getting any younger and life had thrown us a few curves lately. Like her divorce and my…well, I’m not getting into that. Just two days into the trip, (getting lost, but that’s beside the point!) our world tipped off its axis. It began that frightening morning when we woke up, still sitting in the front cab of the RV. We were never the same women after that.

You would think that Shannon and her coven would have their act together by now—especially after Cynthia, who is waaay more experienced in the magical realm, joins them. Nope. With Shannon’s familiar, Robert the bobcat, still missing after being shot by Steve, and the budding romance with Devon also shot to hell, Shannon’s got some serious challenges. As for the rest of the neophyte coven members, Libby got the job promotion but she detests it. Careful what you wish for, right?

A young woman returns home to the small claustrophobic town of Knife River. When Jess was thirteen, her mother went for a walk and did not return - now, fifteen years later, bones have been discovered in the woods nearby. Jess's sister has remained in their childhood home - her life, their home and the town itself seemingly frozen in time. As days turn into weeks, Jess's understanding of the past, her sister, and herself become more and more complicated - and the list of suspects responsible for her mother's terrible fate more and more ominous.

It's 1979, and fourteen-year-old Suzanne, who should be enjoying her first year at Denver East High, is instead reckoning with the aftermath of her mother Alex's shooting death during a robbery at Alex's store, Zoe's Records. A clairvoyant since childhood, Suzanne is unsurprised when Alex's ghost appears. But when Alex raises alarm bells about Suzanne's father's new girlfriend, what Suzanne can't foresee is the lifelong repercussions as she heeds Alex's warning.

Now that Geraldine Porter is retired, she's got time to devote to her favorite craft. You'd think the world of shoe-box-sized Victorian shadow boxes and little ceramic bathtubs would be trouble free. But Gerry's problems are anything but tiny. Gerry likes working in a smaller scale, yet her to-do list is anything but. Between creating a miniature Victorian room box for the holiday auction, teaching crafts at the Mary Todd Retirement Home, and watching her granddaughter, her calendar is bursting with holiday cheer—until she has to add in a murder investigation.

A girl suffering from paralyzing night terrors finds a missing poster hanging from the door of her apartment building. On that poster is a photograph of a frighteningly familiar face. It's her. Only, she's never seen this photo before and something about its grin scares her. How its eyes seem to follow her no matter where she finds herself in the room.

Diana Bellatrix has discovered the truth. She is the last surviving heir of the Athens throne, and the reason the Netherportal remains open. In her guilt, she leaves Afterlife Academy with the conviction of eradicating the curse on her bloodline and restoring the Overworld. In need of an army, she returns to her homeland to prove she is a worthy successor. And while queen Minerva accepts, it is with contempt and suspicion, for she has not forgotten the treachery of her son.

In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era.

Former FBI agent Karen Pantelli lives by a simple philosophy: never, ever care. Three years after a tragic mistake ends her once-stellar career, she drifts from one dead-end job to another, quickly moving on when she finds herself getting too attached. A new city. A new life. A new way of forgetting and being forgotten. Until one chilly night behind a seedy bar, when a frightened girl leaps out of the back of a speeding van.

What would it take for you to kill someone for money? And if you did, who - or what - would you have become? These are the questions one woman faces when she loses everyone she loves and everything she has. When the opportunity arrives to reinvent herself as a killer for hire, she takes it. She's good at it - and if she doesn't do it, someone else will. Then everything changes when she learns about a serial killer so horrible she vows to find him and kill him until - overcome by self-doubt - she seeks redemption rather than vengeance.

2115 Post-C: Humanity has been saved from the brink of extinction by Centurions. Extraterrestrial overlords impose androgyny and control reproduction through strict methods. AI world government, constant monitoring, and the ability to manipulate time are the results of advanced alien technology.

Her assignments were always to kill someone. That's what a hitman—or hitwoman—is paid to do—and that is what she does. Then comes a surprise assignment—keep someone alive! She is hired to protect Virginia Martin, the stunning and brilliant chief technology officer of a hot startup with an innovation that will change the world. This new job catches her at a time in her life when she's disillusioned, even depressed. She's confused about the “why”, but she addresses her charge as she always does, with skill and stealth, determined to keep this young CTO alive.

Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things she cared about. Describing the ups and downs of beekeeping from one springtime to the next, A Country Year transports listeners to a different, simpler place.

Navigating Grief and Loss is a book for anyone who's experienced the pain of mourning, who's struggled to find a job, who is devastated by a bad breakup—yearning to rest, feel understood, and believe in themselves and the future. It's a guidebook filled with relatable stories and practical meditations to help navigate the profound experience of death and loss, be it an elderly parent succumbing to a lingering illness, the shock following a tragic accident, a divorce after years of conflict, or the euthanasia of a beloved pet.

From Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kathe Koja comes a fiercely poetic homage to Emily Brontë’s supernatural masterpiece Wuthering Heights, where love is relentless and the dead are never gone.

Things are going well for Jane Murphy, or so it seems. She’s making it in New York, a sort of wunderkind at the social media marketing startup where she works. She’s put an experimental writer, Jeremy Miller, on the map by helping him concoct a viral internet novel, told in fragments through various fake social media accounts. But privately, Jane feels trapped, ruled by her routines and her compulsions, caught up in an endless cycle of soothing and punishing herself.

For years, Betsy Lupino has lived alone in a rundown apartment. Alone, except for the growing wall of darkness that slowly devours her thoughts and memories. When a mysterious stranger moves into the building, Betsy fears the worst: that all of the darkness inside her head has escaped into the real world.

Single mom Cynthia Pace has her hands full with her uniquely gifted child. She has no idea how or why Maddie does the things she does, and neither does her daughter. But there is an answer, discovered by mother and child only after tragedy strikes.

Generous Press is a new kind of romance imprint. Someplace Generous—a vibrantly diverse and inclusive anthology of romantic short stories—can be described in one word: yes. Featuring stories by award-winning poets like Richard Siken, Rachel McKibbens, and Brionne Janae; acclaimed fiction writers like Temim Fruchter, Corinne Manning, and Max Delsohn; and popular thinkers like Jessica P. Pryde, Someplace Generous presents voices largely new to the genre of romance, each bringing a fresh take on what it means to tell a love story.