Showing results by narrator "Mandy Williams" in All Categories

Eighty-five-year-old Veronica McCreedy is estranged from her family and wants to find a worthwhile cause to which to leave her fortune. When she sees a documentary about penguins being studied in Antarctica, she tells the scientists she's coming to visit - and won't take no for an answer. Shortly after arriving, she convinces the reluctant team to rescue an orphaned baby penguin. He becomes part of life at the base, and Veronica's closed heart starts to open.

There's a lot Jean hasn't said over the years about the crime her husband was suspected of committing. She was busy being the perfect wife, standing by her man while living with accusing glares and anonymous harassment. Now her husband is dead, and there's no reason to stay quiet. People want to hear her story. They want to know what it was like living with that man. She can tell them there were secrets. There always are in a marriage. The truth - that's all anyone wants. But the one lesson Jean has learned in the last few years is that she can make people believe anything.

Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high. Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered.

As an old house is demolished in a gentrifying section of London, a workman discovers a tiny skeleton, buried for years. For journalist Kate Waters, it’s a story that deserves attention. She cobbles together a piece for her newspaper, but at a loss for answers, she can only pose a question: Who is the Building Site Baby? As Kate investigates, she unearths connections to a crime that rocked the city decades earlier: A newborn baby was stolen from the maternity ward in a local hospital and was never found.

The kingdom of Goredd: a world where humans and dragons share life with an uneasy balance, and those few who are both human and dragon must hide the truth. Seraphina is one of these, part girl, part dragon, who is reluctantly drawn into the politics of her world. When war breaks out between the dragons and humans, she must travel the lands to find those like herself - for she has an inexplicable connection to all of them, and together they will be able to fight the dragons in powerful, magical ways.

Azalea is trapped. Just when she should feel that everything is before her...beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing...it’s taken away. All of it. The Keeper understands. He’s trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. And so he extends an invitation. Every night, Azalea and her 11 sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest. But there is a cost. The Keeper likes to keep things. Azalea may not realize how tangled she is in his web until it is too late.

Princess and heir to the throne of Thorvaldor, Nalia has led a privileged life at court. But everything changes when she learns, just after her 16th birthday, that she is a false princess, a stand-in for the real Nalia, who has been hidden away for her protection. Cast out with little more than the clothes on her back, the girl now called Sinda must leave behind the city, her best friend, Kiernan, and the only life she's ever known.

The Tearling, founded as a utopia, has collapsed and reverted to feudalism. As the gap between rich and poor widens and famine threatens the land, rumors of a prophecy begin to spread: a great hope, a True Queen who will ascend and save the kingdom. But rumors will not help Lazarus, a boy on the verge of manhood, trapped in the clandestine underworld known as the Creche. Enlisted from his earliest days to kill without mercy, he has never seen sun or sky, not until a quest for vengeance propels him above ground.

Nell is not happy about spending her school vacation with relatives she doesn't know. Expecting nothing more than silly little cousins and boring farm life, she sneaks along a special suitcase that once belonged to her father. In it, she knows, are the parts of a music box and 16 miniature painted horses, and she thinks maybe she can fit them all back together. But the countryside has unexpected surprises. When a half-wild and mysterious girl named Angel steals Nell's suitcase, the two girls are united in an adventure of Angel's devising.

As maid to some of the most wanton ladies of the ton, Margery Mallon lives within the boundaries of any sensible servant. Entanglements with gentlemen are taboo. Wild adventures are for the Gothic novels she secretly reads. Then an intriguing stranger named Mr. Ward offers her a taste of passion, and suddenly the wicked possibilities are too tempting to resist.... Henry Atticus Richard Ward is no ordinary gentleman. He's Lord Wardeaux and he is determined to unite Margery with her newfound inheritance by any means - including seduction and deception.

A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings begins as the author is entering her 30s and feeling disconnected in her life. Uneasy about her future and struggling to settle into her new house in Oxford with its own small garden, she is brought back to a time of accompanying a friend in London - a beekeeper - on his hive visits. And as a gesture of good fortune for her new life, she is given a colony of honeybees. This is a subtle yet urgent mediation on uncertainty and hope, on solitude and friendship, on feelings of restlessness and on home; on how we might better know ourselves.

In a bustling suburban neighborhood in Kent, England, sits an unassuming house. There is no sign of life behind the unwashed windows, but Robin Marshall is inside. Driven by fears and obsessions, racked by anxiety, Robin is frantically pushing her body through punishing workouts, eating little, haunted by what happened to her family when she was a girl. Robin's only connection to the outside world is through her rear windows and the lives she spies upon in the apartment house across the way.

Playwright Maggie Delamere shuts down aristocratic males with a mere flick of her razor-sharp quill. If only they were so easy to dispatch offstage - especially Cameron, Viscount Marwood. The impossibly charismatic man seems made to test her resistance. But when writer's block and an enemy from Maggie's past simultaneously strike, Cam makes an all-too-tempting proposal....

From chemo...to cannabis...to chaos.... When Sadie and her colleagues find themselves out of a job and down on their luck they know desperate times call for desperate measures. What starts off as a crazy idea to sell marijuana to the ladies at her friend's chemo sessions quickly spirals into a booming drug empire. But they didn't expect a sexy detective on their trail, suspicious neighbors, and drug dealers angry they’re working on their patch. Can Sadie pull them out of this dangerous world they’ve found themselves in? And can she do it before they end up in prison?

Eight-year-old Zayd is migrating from Pakistan to Canada. Though he's sad leaving his grandparents behind, he's excited at the thought of reaching Canada. From the moment he boards the airplane, he experiences all things Canadian: From the famous Canadian poutine to the Canadian provinces. But the most fascinating of all: Zayd enters a magical world of the Canadian Arctic, where he's surrounded by grizzly bears, Canadian geese, dog sleds, and a very special polar bear, named Jackson. For Zayd, the adventure has only just begun!

Just before her 16th birthday, Princess Katerina is informed she will not be inheriting the throne of the Empire of the Ice-Bear - merely because of her sex. Married off to a foreign lord and exiled to a provincial backwater, she is having none of it - and murders her husband on their wedding night. Determined to have her revenge and regain the throne, she will destroy anyone who stands in her way. Katerina embarks on a perilous voyage in search of the wealth and power she needs to achieve her ambitious goals.

Shy and vulnerable Maya Hartney has one great passion - cooking. She's turned her greatest pleasure into a thriving business, and nothing fulfills her more than delighting her clients. Until she's hired by taciturn workaholic Will Thomas to cater a charity dinner. Where Will's concerned, Maya can do no right!

It is 1918, six months after the end of World War I, and Rosalind awaits the return of her father from the war. While it is common practice for British children in India to be packed off to boarding school at the age of 6, Rosalind is unusual because she lives and is schooled in India because her mother insists.

Former thief Jovan Davenport is the black sheep in a family of powerful sorcerers. But when his dying father - head of the League of Illusion - reaches out for help, Jovan has no choice but to accept. He must find his missing brother Sebastian and stop the power-hungry Hawthorne family from taking control of the council. If only they'd appointed someone other than Skylar Vanguard to help him in his quest. Skylar, a druid and accomplished tracker, has spent three years trying to forget her past, especially Jovan Davenport.

The conclusion to the League of Illusion trilogy. Five years ago, Sebastian Davenport tried to go back in time to reverse a fatal mistake, but found himself trapped in another reality, and gave up his magic for a quiet life as a blacksmith. Healer Drea Blairwood knows he's hiding something about his past, but has no idea what kind of adventure awaits them both. After militant elves kidnap Drea, Sebastian needs to find a way to reclaim his magic. The fate of the League - and the world - hangs in the balance.