Showing results by narrator "Scott Brick" in All Categories

Philadelphia police detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano are working a new beat: the Special Investigations Unit, aka the cold case squad. Ironic, given that it's the height of a blazing hot August. But even these hardened homicide veterans are chilled to the bone as a dormant murder case stirs to life - leading Byrne and Balzano into the dark heart of their city, their souls, and a psyche of pure evil.

Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 is an enduring masterwork of twentieth-century American literature - a chilling vision of a dystopian future built on the foundations of ignorance, censorship, and brutal repression. The origins and evolution of Bradbury’s darkly magnificent tale are explored in A Pleasure to Burn, a collection of sixteen selected shorter works that prefigure the grand master’s landmark novel.

When Everly Tertium encounters a strange man in the park claiming to be her grandfather, she is invited to visit a mysterious apartment building. There, she finds herself in a constant state of déjà vu, impossibly certain that she’s already lived through these moments, already been introduced to these people, and already visited all of these rooms and floors. So why does she have no idea what’s happening to her?

This classic essay from Jon Krakauer is now available as an unabridged audiobook download. This essay is also included in the Classic Krakauer collection. From the best-selling author of Missoula and Into the Wild: a selection of the singular investigative journalism that made Krakauer famous, covering topics from avalanches on Mt. Everest to a volcano in Washington state; from a wilderness therapy program for teens to an extraordinary cave in New Mexico so unearthly that is used by NASA to better understand Mars.

Sideways: Chile follows the further adventures of Miles Raymond (played by Paul Giamatti in the critically acclaimed movie Sideways). It’s now a few years later and Miles is a successful author with a blockbuster movie adaptation under his belt, but he’s still searching for something, and depression has him, once again, in its taloned grip. When he is offered a chance to travel to the country of Chile and visit their wine regions for a magazine assignment, Miles—his world turned upside down by bad financial investments and even worse luck with relationships—happily agrees.

Ian Tregillis's Something More Than Night is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas’s vision of Heaven. It’s a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God.

August 6, 1943: In his brief career in the Office of Strategic Services, 24-year-old Cletus Frade has already been involved in a lot of unusual situations, but nothing like the one he's in now, standing with a German lieutenant colonel named Wilhelm Frogger in a Mississippi prisoner-of-war detention facility.

When Russ Wesley finds an unusual artifact in his grandfather’s collection of rare antiquities, the last thing he expects is for it to draw the attention of a ferocious alien from a distant planet. Equally surprising is the adventurous team of intergalactic exterminators dispatched to deal with the alien threat. They’re a little wild, and a little reckless. Worse yet, they’re so impressed with Russ’s marksmanship that they insist he join their squad . . . whether he wants to or not.

Dashiell Hammett was a crime writer who elevated the genre to true literature, and The Thin Man was Hammett’s last - and most successful - novel. Following the enormous success of The Thin Man movie in 1934, Hammett was commissioned to write stories for additional films. He wrote two full-length novellas for the films that became After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man.

Some stories are all about the crime. These stories are about the maelstrom of what happens afterward. A hard-bitten crew of professional thieves pull of the score of their lives, coming away with millions in cash, enough to change their lives, make new identities, start fresh. But that's when the real trouble begins. In this linked anthology, we follow each member of the crew of culprits after the heist and watch as this perfect score ends up a perfect nightmare.

Everything on the job is going as expected. The target has been dealt with, and all that's left to do is remove the body. But a surprise is waiting for Quinn and Nate, one that completely changes their mission. Then when the client who gave them their new orders disappears, they find themselves on their own, with a human asset holding a dark secret that several parties are interested in obtaining, by force if necessary.

Luke Angel is on a routine cargo flight in the Bahamas, anticipating an icy beer waiting for him on the far side, but when a distress call diverts him into a watery landing in the turquoise Caribbean waters, he ends up with a dead pilot and a mysterious unconscious woman on his hands. The island town of Hooper’s Haven is a refuge for the wealthy and glamorous. And their secrets.

In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies - genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral.

Everyone knows the story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination in 1865, but few are aware of the original conspiracy to kill him four years earlier in 1861, literally on his way to Washington, DC, for his first inauguration. The conspirators were part of a pro-Southern secret society that didn't want an antislavery President in the White House. They planned an elaborate scheme to assassinate the brand new President in Baltimore as Lincoln's inauguration train passed through en route to the Capitol.

In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental army under an unsure George Washington evacuated New York after a devastating defeat by the British army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeded in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have lost the war. As this book ends, four years later, Washington has vanquished his demons, and Arnold has fled to the enemy. America was forced at last to realize that the real threat to its liberties might not come from without but from within.

Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, "a towering figure in the study of American and European history" (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power.

Haunted by his traumatic past and determined to track down his estranged father for revenge, legendary assassin Bic Green has no easy task killing the infamous drug kingpin Clarence Green. Traveling deep into the heart of the New Orleans bayou, he knows that one of them isn’t walking away alive.

Wars come to an end. But then new ones begin. Just weeks after Hitler's suicide, Cletus Frade and his colleagues in the OSS find themselves up to their necks in battles every bit as fierce as the ones just ended. The first is political-the very survival of the OSS, with every department from Treasury to War to the FBI grabbing for its covert agents and assets. The second is on a much grander scale-the possible next world war, against Joe Stalin and his voracious ambitions.

Gerrold, a science fiction writer from California, adopts a son who has a slight behavioral problem. He believes himself to be a Martian. Gerrold begins the long, involving work of trying to earn the acceptance of Dennis, a hyperactive eight-year-old who desperately wants a father's love, but is so insecure he feels he must be an alien. Gerrold's semi-autobiographical memoir of the first two years with Dennis is a funny, endearing, heartbreaking, and beautifully written testament to fatherhood.

Jason Steadman is a thirty-year-old sales executive living in Boston and working for an electronics giant, a competitors to Sony and Panasonic. He's a witty, charismatic guy who's well liked at the office, but he lacks the "killer instinct" necessary to move up the corporate ladder. To the chagrin of his ambitious wife, it looks as if his career has hit a ceiling. Jason's been sidelined. But all that will change one evening when Jason meets Kurt Semko, a former Special Forces officer just back from Iraq.