Showing results by narrator "Traber Burns" in All Categories

The trouble began for Sheriff Claude Rainey when the Hightower Ranch cowboys discovered a mummified man and his horse in a desert canyon near Springville, Arizona - both shot in the head. Ordinarily that should have been the end of it. Few men riding the outlaw trail up out of Mexico make it through that godforsaken country. What troubled Rainey and the townsmen, however, was what Hightower foreman Al Trail had brought into town and given to the sheriff.

Enormity is the strange tale of an American working in Korea, a lonely young man named Manny Lopes, who is not only physically small (in his own words, he's a "Creole shrimp"), but his work, his failed marriage, and his race all conspire to make him feel puny and insignificant - the proverbial 98-pound weakling. Then one day an accident happens, a quantum explosion, and suddenly Manny awakens to discover that he is big - really big. In fact, Manny is enormous: a mile-high colossus!

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure.

Seventeen-year-old Silver King dreams of becoming a working cowboy. His mother, however, has pushed him to be a baseball player - and King certainly has the arm to be a star pitcher. When the National League forms a team in Kansas City in 1886, both mother and son get their wishes.

Gulliver Queen, nephew of the famous detective, Ellery Queen, doesn't want to be a detective. But when Gully and his new friend, Fisty Jones, investigate the strange underwater noises in the Hudson River, they suddenly find themselves deep in a mystery that Gully can't resist tackling. The menacing tattooed man, the weird one-eyed figure in the abandoned building, the strange but merry Magnus Merlin, magician extraordinaire - all add up to an exciting tale of danger and suspense on and under New York's waterfront.

Free passes to the circus seemed pretty exiting to Djuna and his friend, Tommy Williams, and things promised to be even more exiting when they met their old friends, Socker and Cannonball, at the entrance gate, but they were only the start of a hair-raising experience. The boys soon learned that the newspaper reporter and the state trooper were trying to uncover a pack of tricksters who were cheating the circus audiences.

"Katal!" The black bird repeated the two syllables again and again. "Katal! Katal!" As Gulliver Queen seeks out the meaning of the strange word, he is drawn into the world of international diplomacy - and dangerous espionage! As he follows the trail of clues, Gully acquires two friends from India who aid him in the search for a missing embassy guard.

In The Last of All Possible Worlds, royalty, bankers, lovers, and wives intertwine to create a vivid portrait of Europe in the early 1900s. We meet wise and worldly Prince Sobieski, Vienna's ambassador in London, his enchanting wife, her English lover, and her enigmatic lifelong companion, Josefa. When Sobieski's illegitimate daughter makes a demand of her influential father, the unspoken rules of the family are challenged.

Sam Cassidy comes home to find himself in a series of tense confrontations. His father expects Sam to work for him at the local bank, and Sheriff Ben Faraday, for whom Sam worked the previous summer as deputy, is suffering from a terminal disease and wants Sam to become a deputy again. "Black Mike" Nickels wants to expand his use of public land and bring in more sheep, backed by guns.

Nothing seemed to stop the little monsters. I shot a second time, wounding or killing another, and then dropped the gun to the ground. I pulled a slender blade from under my belt, and whipped it at the little men. Another couple of strikes against my legs brought me level with the filthy floor of the alley, my fine clothes being soiled by the trash of the Big City-and although I sliced and diced deeply into the bodies of several of my attackers, I knew that I was doomed to lose this particular battle in the end. There were just too many of them: they would either kill or severely injure me.

A feud between the biggest and richest cattleman, Richard DeFore, and the local stage line couldn’t have come at a worse time to Winchester, Colorado. The town’s new sheriff, John Klinger, young, inexperienced, and hot-headed, hasn’t been in the job for a month yet, when DeFore, who has never sold or donated the right of way for the pass which is on his land, demands the stage line pay a toll for passage, which the company is refusing to do.

Fourteen years ago, Mike Milligan learned he would become a grandfather for the first time. He was surprised to find that there was little or no information available on what it means to be a grandfather, how to make the most of the experience, and how to be the best grandfather possible. Sure, there were shelves of books dedicated to grandmothers - all with cuddly covers depicting spring bouquets or gentle little lambs. But there was not a single book that spoke to him, a 64-year-old grandfather-to-be. It struck him that there were countless other grandfathers out there experiencing this same feeling of neglect.

It's 1976. Dr. Colin Sanford, a brilliant, ambitious obstetrician in the Pacific Northwest city of Emerald, has a plan to create the first in vitro baby. He recruits Dr. Giselle Hearn, an experienced laboratory geneticist/embryologist at the university who’s frustrated by the ultraconservative policies of her department chairman. Drs. Sanford and Hearn, working secretly, set out to put their names in the history books. Unfortunately, a secret that big is hard to keep....

It was spring on the Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains of Texas, the time for the cattle drives to push north to the rail heads in Kansas. The "Lost Cause" of the South was still fresh in the mind of Southerners, including 55-year-old Ben Albright, a pioneer of the Texas cattle drives, who was well familiar with the trail and its dangers. Northerners have taken over the trading post and ferry and refused provisions or passage to Texas cattle drives. When Albright finds a way around this, tensions reach the breaking point.

The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the ensuing trial of Derek Chauvin for murder a year later has rubbed raw the bloodiest stain on the United States’ history and its world reputation. The nine minutes and 29 seconds during which Chauvin’s knee crushed the spark of life out of Floyd was not unusual in the history of the United States. In roughly two centuries, Blacks have achieved nominal freedom. But, as this book’s opening chapter and expert essays that follow indicate, freedom has been conditional based on inequity of wealth, social, and legal discrimination.

William Lee Braden was no secessionist, no slave owner. In fact, when the polls opened in Jacksboro, Texas, on February 23, 1861, Braden rode 12 miles up Lost Creek from his small ranch not only to vote against secession, but on his ballot, right next to his signature, he wrote "For the Union forever". But come the fall of 1861, William Lee Braden rode off to join his brother Jacob in Harrisburg to fight, not for the Confederacy, but rather to defend the state of Texas from invasion and occupation. Braden left behind him his wife, Martha Jane Pierce Braden, and his six-year-old son.

In the title story, Murdo Morgan left Paradise Valley 16 years ago, after his brothers had been killed at the hand of the Turkey Track outfit. One year later, his father died a broken and defeated man. Broad Clancy, owner of the Turkey Track, has remained the controlling force in this area of high desert in Oregon, considering all the land to be open range, including the six-mile strip on both sides of the old wagon road which belongs to Cascade and Paradise Land Company. He fears that Morgan will return to exact his revenge for the death of his brothers.

Parenting can be hard work, and our lives continue to get busier and busier. Is it possible to lighten the load but still raise great kids? From his experiences as a dad and interacting with countless other parents, Jay Payleitner has gathered scores of secrets worth passing along - simple things moms and dads have learned over the years. Some of the ideas are old-school secrets passed from one generation to the next; others deal with issues that would have never crossed Grandma and Grandpa's minds.

Doug Gardner is witty, sensitive and a man whose life is falling apart. A combatant in the battle of the sexes, he must cope with the problems of joint custody, sharing his son and daughter with his liberated ex-wife. By the author of Kramer vs Kramer and Prized Possessions.

When the body of famed true-crime writer Julian Wells is found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question isn't how he died, but why. The death looks like an obvious suicide, but why would Wells take his own life? And was this his only crime? Wells' best friend, Philip Anders, wants to know more. His first clue is an Argentinean crime, which may have been Wells' last book idea. As Anders gathers the missing parts of Wells' life, the man he knew - or thought he knew - becomes increasingly obscured.