Showing results by narrator "Caroline Shaffer" in All Categories

In one night, Leanne Summers has lost her home, her every possession, and learned that everything she's ever believed is a lie. So when she witnesses a bank robbery in progress, she doesn't think of the consequences. She steals a gun, barges in - and finds herself being held captive within minutes.

Silver Screen Kisses is a collection of stories inspired by movies that are on every favorite-movie list. Written by award-winning and best-selling authors, these contemporary romances take the listener back to Echo Ridge in the spring, when the promise of new love is budding just like the tulips around the Emerald Inn Bed & Breakfast.

A newly blended Irish-Chilean Jewish family sits down for their first Passover dinner together. Joe Wenderoth, who chose Ghost Deer was the winner of the 2015 New Guard Machigonne Fiction Contest, writes, "Ghost Deer, for me, is nothing less than the conjuring of human beings. They have grown strange - they appear haunted - from years (and centuries) in the trap of loving one another."

Stuck in a dead-end job at the DMV, Brenda feels invisible, certain no one could guess she was once loved by someone who's now a famous movie star. But when she fails an angry woman on her driving test and the woman turns the situation into a violent standoff, Brenda discovers just how grand her own stage can be in this funny, wrenching story of how past loves can reverberate for years and keep us going in ways we never imagined.

Three men are trapped in time. One woman could save them all. Historian Lia Carrer has finally returned to southern France, determined to rebuild her life after the death of her husband. But instead of finding solace in the region's quiet hills and medieval ruins, she falls in love with Raoul, a man whose very existence challenges everything she knows about life - and about her husband's death.

Possibly the only romance ever set in a high-end Montreal kosher restaurant, A Taste of Heaven layers spicy love scenes with directions for making velvety pâté and musings about babies. Will Dena and Richard Klein's marriage overheat - or will they find more savor and sweetness?

Within the course of a week, Natalie is dumped by her husband, receives an urgent call home from her father, and discovers her estranged sister is pregnant. A road trip on Route 66 may not help, but it sure couldn't hurt. Or so Natalie thinks until Lindsay's boyfriend starts stalking them. Will their trip down the Mother Road bring the two sisters closer together or turn out to be the biggest wrong turn yet?

In this powerful, wide-ranging, and emotional story about the limits of medical knowledge, Abel discovers why she wasn't diagnosed with celiac as a child. She considers how environmental fears and Internet anecdotes lead people to avoid gluten. And she grapples with the question that confronts us all: how to live calmly, even joyfully, in the face of uncertainty.

The dream always started the same…. Psychology Meredith Morgan understands the how and why of dreams. She understands that dreams are how our subconscious mind tells us things we are too busy to notice. It was a nearly senseless dream…. She understands that some see dreams as prophetic, as the future reaching back and giving us a clue as to what is to come. Some see dreams as open doors through which the past can claw its way into the present. Dreams are where time and space collapse. Meredith awoke…. But dreams are dreams, and when you wake up, the people you meet in your dreams shouldn't still be with you….

Gwendolyn Golden and Armand Leopold have been America's go-to couple for home decorating tips, letting the cameras into their So Perfect house, their So Perfect life, their So Perfect marriage. One problem: It's all an act. Actually, two problems: America just found out it's all an act. When a picture of Armand kissing another man hits the newsstands, everyone knows the jig is up. Both are evicted from their home and eviscerated by the press.

At first, Manhattan financial planner Melanie Banks adores Dan Swain, her pro-football player husband who has a sexy Oklahoma drawl to go with his athletic good looks. But then his career comes to a screeching halt, and he spends the next few years out of a job, seemingly unconcerned about it. Suddenly, she's the one bringing home the bacon and falling out of love with the paycheck-devouring, couch-sitting mooch. Divorce is the answer, she decides - only to learn she has to fork over alimony while he lives like a prince on her income, and she has to share custody of their precious dog.

Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns with her first story collection in over eight years. In Acts of God, she has crafted 10 different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will. For Marie James, a teenager from Fayetteville, Arkansas, the future changes when she joins a group of friends in their effort to find survivors among the debris left when a tornado destroys a neighboring town.

Thirty-year-old Max Maguire, detective with the New York Police Department, finds herself in France again when she is sent as a bodyguard for one of America's most famous wine critics, who is traveling to Bordeaux to taste some of the most expensive wines in the world. In the tragic circumstances that follow, Max is once again paired with French examining magistrate Olivier Chaumont, with whom she had had a fling the year before while solving a case in Champagne.

Kimmer Reed is a Hunter Agency operative, a street foundling escaped from an abusive family and raised to be code-name Chimera - a fierce, savvy loner with a natural gift for reading people. Now on her first assignment with the one man she trusts - the one man she can't read - she finds herself overseas in the Basque countryside, framed for the theft of the very antiquity she has been sent to guard and doubting her ability to work with a partner at all - never mind the man she loves.

On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers.

It was in New York that he discovered Sarah. As Simon recovers from a professional disaster - and escapes Chicago for New York - he is drawn to the beautiful, exciting, and mysterious Sarah. Even though the forty-year-old Simon has a wife and child, he falls madly in love with Sarah. Devoting themselves with abandon to the pursuit of happiness, the lovers tour New York, Paris, Venice, and beyond. Their journey takes them deep within their emotions, and reveals dangerous secrets in Sarah’s past.

Thirteen authors (fifteen if you count pseudonyms) from the Book View Cafe got together one rainy Saturday afternoon with a big bowl of popcorn and reruns of Buck Rogers. They started comparing short stories and a new anthology took form. Rare reprints, hard-to-find favorites, and new tales all combine in this one-of-a-kind story collection, available exclusively from Book View Press.

Forget the French perfume and the boxes of candy, the Hallmark cards and the gift certificates. The birthdays in this collection are observed in more carnal ways, with suitably sexy presents for all. In Simone Harlow's "Happy Birthday", a tough policewoman gets the tables turned when naked Nick arrives to tame her. In Marilyn Jaye Lewis's "The Birthday Party", an unexpected menage a trois in the dark proves the perfect gift.

In the wake of the financial crisis, investors are faced with a stark choice: entrust their hard-earned dollars to the Wall Street casino or settle for anemic interest rates on savings, bonds, and CDs. Meanwhile, small businesses are being starved for the credit and capital they need to grow. There's got to be a better way. In Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit from It, Amy Cortese takes us inside the local investing movement, where solutions to some of the nation's most pressing problems are taking shape.

This groundbreaking anthology presents 40 narratives, both nonfiction and fiction, that together capture the impact and complexity of Alzheimer’s and other dementias on patients, as well as their caregivers and family. Deeply personal, recounting the wrenching course of a disease that kills a loved one twice - first they forget who they are, and then the body succumbs - these stories also show how witnessing the disease and caring for someone with it can be powerfully transformative, calling forth amazing strength and grace.