Showing results by narrator "Pete Cross" in All Categories

Jonathan Chiller has had a plan all along. Nothing is free in HorrorLand, especially his rare souvenirs. Now it's time for the six kids who visited his shop to pay up. And Chiller knows exactly what he wants--players for his deadly game. Andy, Sam, Jessica, Meg, Marco, and Ray are trapped by Chiller's evil plot. Who is the madman? He's made sure that there is only one way to escape from HorrorLand. But are they willing to pay for it...with their lives?

Every great artist started out as a kid. Forget the awards, the sold-out museum exhibitions, and the timeless masterpieces. When the world’s most celebrated artists were growing up, they had regular-kid problems just like you. Jackson Pollock’s family moved constantly - he lived in eight different cities before he was 16 years old. Georgia O’Keeffe lived in the shadow of her “perfect” older brother Francis. And Jean-Michel Basquiat triumphed over poverty to become one of the world’s most influential artists.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools - and to solve the education crisis in every city in America - it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their plans soon ran into a constituency not so easily moved - Newark's key education players, fiercely protective of their billion-dollar-per-annum system.

Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how does it work? Even in this age of cloning and synthetic biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we missing a vital ingredient in its creation? Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which provided a new perspective on how evolution works, Life on the Edge alters our understanding of life's dynamics.

Captain Delano is approached on the open sea by a battered-looking ship led by Captain Benito Cereno. Cereno, always accompanied by his personal slave, Babo, explains that his crew was transporting a group of slaves from Africa when their ship was caught and damaged in severe weather. He is polite but always timid and requests supplies for his ship's remaining journey. Captain Delano agrees to help but begins to notice the strange social interactions and atmosphere of Cereno's crew and the slaves.

Great horned owl Rufus is eight months old and still can’t hunt. When his mother is hit by a car, he discovers just how dangerous the forest can be. Reenie has given up on adults and learned how to care for herself - which is a good thing since she’s been sent to live with an aunt she’s never met. Yet this aunt has a wonderful secret: She’s a falconer who agrees to help Reenie catch an injured passage hawk in the wild and rehabilitate it. When Reenie traps bedraggled Rufus, his eyes lock onto her heart, and they form a powerful friendship.

Buster's in big trouble. He's been dragged to Dog Court for breaking one of the most sacred of all dog rules: Never ever talk to a human, or let a human know how smart you really are. But he swears he had a good reason! The boy he's been taking care of, Tonio, needed his help in a big way. You see, Tonio is afraid all the time - afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing, afraid of making a fool of himself or (even worse) hurting someone else's feelings. 

"Kiss & Tell is a total rush! Perfectly sweet and swoon worthy. I loved every page!" – Julie Murphy, New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin’ A smart, sexy YA novel about a boy band star, his first breakup, his first rebound, and what it means to be queer in the public eye, from...

Greta Russakoff loves her tight-knit family and tiny Maine hometown, but they can't seem to understand what it's like to be a lesbian living in such a small world. When an act of familial meddling goes way too far, she realizes just how desperately she needs space to figure out who she is. Truman Belvedere's heart is crushed when he learns that his boyfriend has a secret life, including a husband and daughter. Reeling, all he wants is a place to lick his wounds far far away from Louisiana.

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it's also critical to our species' evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found - Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators - and surveys the science of human navigation.

It's the winter of 1975, and Duane Minor, back home in Portland, Oregon, after a tour in Vietnam, is struggling to quell his anger, keep his drinking in check and keep his young marriage intact. Then Minor crosses the wrong man – John Varley, a vampire and criminal with a bloody history who sleeps during the day beneath loose drifts of earth and grows teeth in the light of the moon. In an act of brutal retaliation, Varley kills Heidi, leaving Minor broken with guilt and Julia shot through with rage.

There are three things you need to know about Preston “PK” Kingsley: He’s a writer, toiling in obscurity as an editorial assistant at a New York City publishing house. He is not a cliché. No, really. He’s been secretly in love with his best friend, Art, since they once drunkenly kissed in college. When Art moves in with PK following a bad breakup, PK hopes this will be the moment when Art finally sees him as more than a friend.

For the teenaged Luc, his days are preoccupied with the daily dramas of high school. President John F. Kennedy's assassination seems a world away. But the winds of history find its way to his small Montana town as marijuana clouds rise in the hallways and the notices of neighborhood young men of "Killed in Action" in Vietnam keep arriving at an increasing rate.

When most of us go for a walk, a single sense-sight- tends to dominate our experience. But when New York Times-bestselling author and expert navigator Tristan Gooley goes for a walk, he uses all five senses to read everything nature has to offer. A single lowly weed can serve as his compass...

It’s June 2012. The magical and slightly cultish River Run swim club is alive with the spirit of fun competition when a perfect storm brews between team moms and best friends Gillian Cloud and Kristy Weinstein. The ghost of family addiction has turned up, looming over their carefully planned pasta parties, tie-dye nights, and pep rallies, forcing them to face their unresolved childhood trauma. Gillian responds by trying to control everyone around her while Kristy relapses into her dangerous addiction to love.

"Fresh, surprising, and compulsively readable."--New York Times bestselling author Andrea Bartz A psychic on the verge of stardom who isn’t sure she believes in herself and a cynical journalist with one last chance at redemption are brought together by secrets from the past that also threaten...

Said Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as “a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain”. His new collection of stories are set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to fans of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles - a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction - even as they are battered by the larger, often invisible, economic and political forces of American society.

Dr. Steven Laureys has conducted groundbreaking research into human consciousness for more than 20 years. For this best-selling book, he explores the effect of meditation on the brain. He uses hard science to explain the benefits of a practice that was once thought of as purely spiritual. The result is a highly accessible, scientifically questioning guide to meditation, designed to open the practice to a broader audience.

In a post-Trump world, a relatively unknown candidate, Ian Wrightman, is elected president to heal a nation frayed by years of extreme partisanship. When a series of coordinated terrorist attacks rock the United States, Wrightman begins to take more and more executive control in the name of protecting democracy. But DC reporter and war veteran Rollie Stone uncovers evidence that the attacks might be coming from somewhere much closer to home.

Every president started out as a kid! Forget the legends, tall tales, and historic achievements - before they were presidents, the future leaders of the United States had regular-kid problems just like you. John F. Kennedy hated his big brother. Lyndon Johnson pulled pranks in class. Barack Obama was bothered by bullies. And Bill Clinton was crazy clumsy (he once broke his leg jumping rope). Kid Presidents tells all of their stories and more in these hilarious biographies. History has never been this much fun!