Showing results by narrator "Peter Berkrot" in All Categories

The peaceful Christmas season in Minneapolis is shattered when two friends, Chuck Spencer and Wally Luntz, scheduled to meet in person for the first time, are murdered on the same night, two hours and several miles apart, dramatically concluding winter vacation for homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth. An hour north of Minneapolis, Lydia Ascher comes home to find two dead men in her basement. When Leo and Gino discover her connection to their current cases, they suspect that she is a target, too.

Eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin “B .F.” Windes decides to abandon home and trail his father’s path. Thus begins a trip of constant struggle with disease, severe weather, hardship, Indian attack, and death on his lone journey across much of what is now the United States. B. F. spends the next 11 years in gold rush towns in California - first as a barber, then as a physician’s assistant - before departing for the Caribbean at age 19, where he becomes a blockade runner during the American Civil War.

Twelve-year-old Ethan Blackwood has always known exactly what he wants - to win the state soccer championship, get into the best high school, and become an astronaut. Then he meets Madison and Felix, who tell him something... insane. They claim that fifty years ago, aliens took over the Earth, and everyone past the age of puberty is under their mind control. Ethan doesn’t believe it. But then he sees for himself the aliens’ monster bug robots and the incredible way Madison and Felix have learned to fight them. So Ethan Blackwood has a choice....

You might as well know this going in: Lawrence Block's new novel is not for everyone. It's recounted in journal form by its protagonist, and begins when he walks into a roadhouse outside of Bakersfield, California, and walks out with a woman. And rapes and murders her. But, um, not in that order. Right. But it's what he does with the rest of his life that's really interesting.... 

Davis Bentwood has nearly finished medical school when he meets an abolitionist dwarf walking across Harvard Yard. Jeb Coffin is a nonpracticing doctor, a devoted student of transcendentalism whose home life has been shaken by tragedy. The two men become friends, and Coffin invites Bentwood to rural Maine to save his family from itself. The Coffins are noted abolitionists, their home a stop on the Underground Railroad, and lately they have been menaced by a supernatural terror. The tragedies are countless: two brothers killed, a father driven mad, and a baby frozen solid in its crib.

Captain Jonathan Dallas, Commodore of Battle Unit 72, investigates the disappearance of a military research vessel on the fringes of known space. When the unit is ambushed by a threat that endangers not only the fleet but also all of humanity itself, Jonathan must somehow find the resources to fight back.

From Michael Jackson's bizarre guest appearance that kickstarted the golden era to the death of Maude Flanders and all the Conan O'Brien throwaway gags, Phil Hartman guest voices, extensive movie references and encore worthy musical numbers in between, We Put the Spring in Springfield serves as the perfect companion guide to the Simpsons' golden years and delves into the particular elements that made seasons 3-8 so magical.

For every child who has ever looked up at the stars and asked, "What are they?" comes the story of a curious boy who never stopped wondering: Carl Sagan. When Carl Sagan was a young boy he went to the 1939 World's Fair and his life was changed forever. From that day on he never stopped marveling at the universe and seeking to understand it better.

In 2002, New York City's newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg made a historic announcement: His administration had won control of the city's school system in a first step toward reversing its precipitous decline. In a controversial move, he appointed Joel Klein, an accomplished lawyer from outside the education establishment, to lead this ambitious campaign. Lessons of Hope is Klein's inside account of his eight-year mission of improvement.

Bigly is an hilarious compilation of memorable quotes from President Donald Trump, arranged as poetry and divided into sections on Life, Love, Beauty, and Death. It will have the president's fiercest supporters and harshest critics asking the same question: Can a president appoint himself Poet Laureate?

J.D. Scrbacek has just won the biggest trial of his career, but even as he crows to the press, his entire life blows sky-high. Was the bomb meant for him, or for his mobster client? In this seaside casino town where the tables run hot and the tensions run high, the odds say the attorney is a marked man. Alone and on the run, Scrbacek flees into the city's forgotten underbelly, a ruined corridor called Crapstown, where he is forced to confront the ghosts of his past, his present, and his future.

When the children of Glenwood begin vanishing one by one, baffling local and federal authorities alike, the idyllic New England suburb becomes anything but a utopia. Built upon the ruins of a lost colony, Glenwood harbors a long-forgotten secret, and when three strangers are lured into the midnight woods by the phantom of a Puritan boy, they discover the truth of the town's dark past and must face a vision of its bloody future.

Why did Norman Mailer stab his second wife at a party? Who was Edith Wharton's secret transatlantic lover? What motivated Anais Nin to become a bigamist? Writers Between the Covers rips the sheets off these and other real-life love stories of the literati - some with fairy tale endings and others that resulted in break-ups, breakdowns, and brawls. Among the writers laid bare are Agatha Christie, who sparked the largest-ever manhunt in England as her marriage fell apart; Arthur Miller, whose jaw-dropping pairing with Marilyn Monroe proved that opposites attract, at least initially.

Between the end of his marriage and the excessive force complaints against him, Detective Sergeant Mickey Dolan is running out of chances. When a powerful and connected city councilman reports that his wife and two daughters have disappeared, Dolan is assigned the case - knowing full well that his career is riding on the outcome.

He's making news with his fists, his gun…and the ladies. The San Francisco Sun's freelance field stringer Stuart "Stringer" MacKail needs a new story to sell to pay the bills. His editor sends him back to MacKail's home town in Calaveras County for an update on an old legend about a stagecoach robbery by "Sulky Jack" and its missing treasure. Stringer's feet barely hit the ground when the bullets begin flying and it quickly becomes clear that folks are still trying to find the treasure and will stop anyone who gets in their way.

America is on the brink of crisis. Unless we can curb our dangerous appetite for foreign oil, petroleum-rich countries and speculators will bring our economy to its knees… long before CO2 emissions will devastate our ecosystem. The President has answered the call with the Dakota District Initiative, a top-secret research team hidden deep in the Badlands of North Dakota.

The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed (metamorphosed) into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. The cause of Gregor's transformation is never revealed, and Kafka himself never gave an explanation. The rest of Kafka's novella deals with Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repulsed by the horrible, verminous creature Gregor has become.

In the first audiobook, The Gumshoe Diaries: Fortune Cookies Always Lie, he introduces us to Whitey Roode, a shaggy but likeable former LAPD gold shield who turned private investigator after (as he tells it) being invited to retire by the brass. Stanton then takes us on a wheels-within-wheels scavenger hunt for the killer - or killers - of pretty Mei Li Teng (a.k.a Sally November), the not-so-innocent niece of Whitey's close friends and occasionally accurate snitches, Jai Lai and Lu Rong.

In Tokyo Tempos, award-winning mystery writer Michael Pronko explores the mystery of everyday Tokyo life. Drawing on three decades of living, writing, and teaching in Japan, he delves into Tokyo’s dynamism to show what it’s like living with Japanese food, seasons, ceremonies, and special moments he calls “small intensities.”

Victor Gischler's STAY, in which a stay-at-home dad with a secret past is forced to take pre-emptive action when his family is threatened by a crime lord, with TV rights sold. David Sparrow is an awesome stay-at-home dad. He gets his kids ready for school while his wife, Amy, commutes to New...