Showing results by narrator "Alex Picard" in All Categories

How do you mark a quarter century? While parties are great—and we'll have those—I wanted to distill the time in a tangible way. To hold it in my hands, and share with you, dear listeners, in celebration and appreciation. But how? A collection! I dove into my published short fiction. Some I included because they were challenging to write. Several show my growth as a writer. I love them all. There's science fiction, fantasy, and, yes, horror. Plus an all-new story from Night's Edge.

A renowned business innovation leader teams up with a social-personality psychologist to offer that something else—a collection of ten visionary principles to obliterate barriers to change and ignite a whole new level of creative problem-solving. Drawing upon decades of experience working with the world's best-known organizations and their teams, the authors provide practical advice that goes beyond "business as usual" for successfully tackling intractable challenges. The Breakthrough Manifesto explores why these principles are critical for the current times.

The Cotswolds. Leta Parker is happy the holidays are here again. Looking forward to a little relaxation after a harrowing murder case, the fifty-something widow can't wait to unwrap gifts with her beau. But the Yuletide cheer turns sour when her delightful doggo Dickens dashes out the door with a canine companion and doesn't return.

A sudden death interrupts what should have been an enjoyable day for Barbara Hollis. Once again, with Craig and Deputy Elwood at her side, Barbara must delve into the unhappy scandals and secrets certain inhabitants of Cobbsville will do anything to hide.

Leta Parker's fit-and-fifty reinvention in the Cotswolds continues rolling along fabulously. Happy among her new friends and talking dog and cat, the sharp-minded expat is delighted to learn the prestigious Tour of Britain will pedal through the quaint village next year. But everyone's excitement quickly crashes when the news is accompanied by a dead body.

From the opening attack of the conflict, the Royal Navy of the Inter-Planetary Commonwealth has been outnumbered. Unlike their enemies, who had been preparing for this war for years, the Commonwealth was caught flat-footed. Given enough time, the economic strength of the Commonwealth should prevail, but their enemies attack relentlessly. The Royal Navy hopes not for victory but for survival. Hampered by the near-complete failure of their intelligence agencies, time and again they are pushed to the very brink. Innovative approaches and the heroic sacrifices of ships and crews prevent disaster.

It is 1965, and Cora, a young, hearing impaired woman, buys a one-way ticket to the island of St. Thomas, where she discovers four dolphins held in captivity as part of an experiment led by the obsessive Dr. Blum. Drawn by a strong connection to the dolphins, Cora falls in with the scientists and discovers her need to protect the animals.

Having just survived the most recent assaults, the Royal Navy hopes for a breather. Instead, their enemies have different ideas. They plan a daring attack designed to destroy the Commonwealth's shipbuilding facilities before the Commonwealth's economic might overwhelms them. With two of the Royal Navy's five fleets destroyed, the Admiral of the Fleet must put his life on the line to blunt the enemy attack. If their enemies succeed, the war might drag on for years. The cost to stop them might be his life.

A violent assault on a door-to-door salesman leaves the man's life hanging in the balance as Barbara, Craig, and Deputy Elwood search for answers. Was it the victim's estranged wife? A business competitor? A dissatisfied customer?

Suspicion. Lies. Murder. Barbara Hollis didn't expect to encounter any of these in small town life. With a murky past to hide from, moving to quiet little Cobbsville was supposed to be a perfect escape. But a neighbor who has her own dangerous secret to conceal soon becomes as big a threat as the crazed lunatic who is setting fire to houses around town . . . Even as a terrible new doubt surfaces against her brother, Barbara is intrigued by an attractive new acquaintance who happens to be the local mayor. But will one more distraction prove welcome . . . or deadly?

Leo Zimmerman has had a crush on his curvy friend Kylie Jenkins since forever, so when he discovers the girl with a flair for candy making has a newfound plan to rebel against her overbearing parents, he's determined to be the one to help her carry it out. Who better than himself to show her the ropes of letting loose? Sure, taking her to her first high school party, helping her sneak out of the house, or watching a sunset together isn't exactly a hardship, but much harder is masking his feelings the more time they spend together.

Transformations in Portugal and Brazil followed the discovery of gold in Brazil's hinterland and the hinterland's subsequent settlement. Although earlier conquests and evangelizations had incorporated new lands and peoples into the monarchy, royal officials now argued that the extraction of gold and the imperatives of rivalry and commerce demanded new approaches to governance. Using archival records of royal and local administrations, Kirsten Schultz shows how the eighteenth-century Portuguese crown came to define and defend Brazil as a "colony" that would reinvigorate Portuguese power.

Torquay, Southwest England. Leta Parker can't wait to reconnect with her boyfriend. After a year of long-distance, she couldn't be happier to join him at a literary crime festival. But on the event's second night, she gets embroiled in a real-life murder mystery when a dead body is found . . .

This is the story of a Canadian woman who was in the Advanced Training Institute, run by Bill Gothard, for fourteen years. The amazing thing is that she never knew she was in a cult until several years after she was out. That's what happened to Christine in 2014. She has spent the past nine years trying to deprogram and change the way she sees the world. Join her as she navigates the cult, goes through a divorce, finds out she was in a cult and subsequently has to unlearn all she believed to be true.

I Never Said I Love You is the story of an unlikely love affair between two young people, spanning two decades. Listeners will take a journey across the globe as the couple, years later, unexpectedly reconnect, revisit the past, and ultimately find their own way forward.

The daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, author Bracha Horovitz spent her childhood surrounded by people who worked fervently to establish the fledgling nation of Israel after its 1948 independence. Inspired by their resilience and fortitude, Bracha set her heart on living a life that would honor her family, her community, and her heritage. At eighteen, Bracha joined the Israel Defense Forces. Alongside other female soldiers, she parachuted from planes, marched through hot deserts, and learned to shoot machine guns. Intense military training taught her that women, too, can be fierce fighters.

Luckily for humanity, scientist Marie Curie applied her brilliant mind and indomitable spirit to expanding the frontiers of science, but what if she had instead drifted toward the darkness? At the cusp of between child- and adulthood, at the crossroads between science and superstition, a teen Marie Curie faces the factual and the fantastic in this fabulous collection of stories that inspire, delight, and ask the question: What if she had used her talents for diabolical purposes?

Peer through the windows of Raven Day McShane’s life as she leaves her army life for the civilian world—not an easy task for any military veteran. With undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, Raven and her son, Aaron, encounter tremendous hardships as they journey through life, not always together, ultimately to learn that life is not how we plan. But together or apart, they realize that they can put life back together with faith in each other and with love.

Solana Sina is a scarab, salvaging wrecked and abandoned space habitats among the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium. She and an oddball crew—a raven, a cyborg, and a dinosaur—board the derelict colony Safdaghar hoping to score some loot before the colony gets catapulted into the outer reaches of the Solar System. But Solana and the scarabs come face-to-face with a gang of vicious pirates looking for slaves and treasure, and a mysterious stranger intent on preserving an explosive secret. Solana must overcome her own horrifying past to survive and escape before it's too late.

Sevastopol contains three distinct narratives, each burrowing into a crucial turning point in a person’s life: A young woman gives a melancholy account of her obsession with climbing Mount Everest; a Peruvian-Brazilian vanishes into the forest after staying in a musty, semiabandoned inn in the haunted depths of the Brazilian countryside; a young playwright embarks on the production of a play about the city of Sevastopol and a Russian painter portraying Crimean War soldiers.