Showing results by narrator "Stephen Mendel" in All Categories

A man wanted by two governments, Peter Ash has found a simple, low-profile life in Milwaukee, living with his girlfriend, June, and renovating old buildings with his friend Lewis. Staying out of trouble is the key to preserving this fragile peace...but when Peter spots a suspicious armed man walking into a crowded market, he knows he can't stand by and do nothing. Peter does interrupt a crime, but it wasn't at all what he'd expected. The young gunman appeared to have one target and one mission.

Imagine a place populated by criminals - people plucked from their lives, with their memories altered, who've been granted new identities and a second chance. Welcome to The Blinds, a dusty town in rural Texas populated by misfits who don't know if they've perpetrated a crime or just witnessed one. What's clear to them is that if they leave, they will end up dead. For eight years, Sheriff Calvin Cooper has kept an uneasy peace - but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town's residents revolt.

In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there and it came for him.”

On a remote mountaintop in Western China, Doctor Ai Liang is about to risk everything and defy the Chinese Communist Party. She and her team have created a terrifying new coronavirus, even more deadly than COVID-19, called C-62 that is capable of killing a person in 20 minutes. But her conscience tells her she must destroy the deadly bioweapon before it can bring devastation to millions. The doctor’s heroic plans are interrupted when mysterious commandos swarm the lab, kill everyone in sight, and take off with the C-62 virus.

"Are you one of us?" a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the world-renowned psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy. "Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope." Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide to tell her story.

One cold night Lainie Goff, a glamorous young attorney on the fast track to a partnership at Portland's top firm, is found frozen in the trunk of her BMW on the local fishing pier. Detectives Mike McCabe and Maggie Savage quickly uncover a long list of suspects.

In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom — who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic — gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel. With his hallmark percipience, remarkable scholarship, and extraordinary devotion to sublimity, Bloom offers meditations on 48 essential works spanning the Western canon.

Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.

In one swift moment, a fall wiped away his memory. All he knew for certain was that someone wanted him dead - and that he had better learn why. But everywhere he turned there seemed to be more questions - or people too willing to hide the truth behind a smoke screen of lies. He had only the name he had been told was his own, his mysterious skill with a gun, and a link to a half million dollars’ worth of buried gold as evidence of his past life. Was the treasure his? Was he a thief? A killer? He didn’t have the answers, but he needed them soon. Because what he still didn’t know about himself, others did....

Iraq war veteran Peter Ash is restless in the home he shares with June Cassidy in Washington State. June knows Peter needs to be on the move, so she sends him to Memphis to help her friend Wanda Wyatt, a photographer and war correspondent who's been receiving peculiar threats. When Peter arrives in Memphis, however, he finds the situation has gone downhill fast - someone has just driven a dump truck into Wanda's living room. But neither Wanda nor Peter can figure out why.

In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love, and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself”, a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death....

Peter Ash came home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with only one souvenir: what he calls his "white static", the buzzing claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him to spend a year roaming in nature, sleeping under the stars. But when a friend from the marines commits suicide, Ash returns to civilization to help the man's widow with some home repairs. Under her dilapidated porch, he finds more than he bargained for.

War veteran Peter Ash is driving through northern Nebraska when he encounters a young pregnant woman alone on a gravel road, her car dead. Peter offers her a lift, but what begins as an act of kindness soon turns into a deadly cat-and-mouse chase across the lonely highways with the woman’s vicious ex-cop husband hot on their trail. The pregnant woman has seen something she was never meant to see . . . but protecting her might prove to be more than Peter can handle.

The mutilated body of a young woman. The town doctor lying comatose in the road. And 150 tablets of Canadian OxyContin. This is the havoc that a merciless killer has wreaked on a sleepy Maine seaport. As detectives Maggie Savage and Michael McCabe investigate, they realize the man they are after does not exist. Nobody knows his real name. Nobody has seen his face. But everybody fears his blade.

In arguably his most personal and lasting work, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than 80 texts by canonical authors - texts he has had by heart since childhood.

Lewis has helped Peter Ash out of more trouble than Peter cares to remember. So he doesn’t hesitate when Lewis asks a favor in return. Lewis has left his criminal past behind, but a former associate may be in trouble, and he and Peter must drive into the teeth of a blizzard to find him. When they discover blood in the snow and a smoldering cabin, both men know things are bad. Then they learn that someone has stolen notebooks full of incriminating secrets about Lewis's long-ago crimes, and realize the situation is much worse than they'd thought.

In the newest action-packed thriller starring war veteran Peter Ash, a well-planned and flawlessly executed hijacking reveals the hidden dangers of Colorado's mellowest business, but Ash may find there's more to this crime than meets the eye.

Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. The iconic tortured artist/everyman delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.

Detective Mike McCabe moved from a top homicide job with the NYPD to Portland, Maine, to leave his failed marriage and suspicions of wrongdoing behind, and to find a more peaceful life for himself and his 13-year-old daughter. But the small New England city is not nearly as safe as he thought. On a warm September night, a missing high school athlete is found dead in a scrap-metal yard, her heart removed from her body with surgical precision. As outrage over the killing spreads, a young businesswoman disappears while out on a morning jog.

Losing ground in his fight against post-traumatic claustrophobia, war veteran Peter Ash has no intention of getting on an airplane - until a grieving woman asks Peter to find her eight-year-old grandson. The woman's daughter has been murdered. Erik, the dead daughter's husband, is the sole suspect, and he has taken his young son and fled to Iceland for the protection of Erik's lawless family.