Showing results by narrator "Will Patton" in All Categories

It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end, those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.

Billy Bob Holland's friend, Doc Voss, has been battling against a local mining company whose operations would severely threaten the area's economy. Despite Voss's best efforts, the mining interests make it clear that they will resort to any means to see that Voss backs off. What Billy Bob doesn't know is that one member of the pro-mining faction is Wyatt Dixon, a recent prison parolee intent on exacting revenge for his imprisonment and his sister's death, both events he believes were Billy Bob's doing.

Texas attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland has many secrets. Among them is Vernon Smother's son, Lucas, a now-teenaged boy about whom few know the truth: Lucas is really Billy Bob's illegitimate son. When Lucas is arrested for murder, Billy Bob must confront the past and serve as the boy's criminal attorney. As a result, he incurs enemies that are far more dangerous than any he faced as a Texas Ranger.

Here is a visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith have combined with the public sphere's degradation to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason. Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason explains, we have precious little time to waste.

Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres - the American crime novel - but does so with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson's own. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, Nobody Move shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.

Three inmates break out of a maximum-security prison and go on a killing spree that soaks Oklahoma in blood. Bud Pewtie, a tough, cool-headed veteran detective, sets off on their trail. But when the three killers threaten the lives of his teenage son and the woman he loves, Bud's determination to trap them becomes personal. Narrated by Will Patton ( Silkwood, The Client), this thriller reaches a climax that's guaranteed to leave you breathless.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.

Jack London worshiped strong and virtuous heroes, and his stories give great weight to the inevitable triumph of good over evil. His telling of the adventures of Humphrey van Weydon in The Sea Wolf is in keeping with this theme of moral man. His powerful and gripping saga of van Weydon's capture by a seal-hunting ship and the ensuing tangles with its dreaded captain, Wolf Larsen, makes this a classic American tale of peril and victory.

Tike and Ella May Hamlin struggle to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas Panhandle. Living in a wooden shack, Tike yearns for a sturdy house that will protect them from the treacherous elements. He has the know-how to build a structure made from the land itself - a house of earth. Though they are one with the farm and with each other, the land on which Tike and Ella May live and work is not theirs. Thanks to larger forces, their adobe house remains painfully out of reach.

In In the Moon of Red Ponies, Billy Bob Holland discovers that jail cells have revolving doors and the bad guys are back and aching for revenge.

Dave Robicheaux returns in another Bayou adventure, this one more gruesome and gut-wrenching than any that have come before. Hurricane Katrina has ravaged New Orleans, leaving the streets and buildings flooded and the city awash with opportunists, looters, and vicious criminals. There is no order, no law. Police are shooting randomly at innocent people, prison guards have abandoned their posts, and bodies float through the streets and hang from trees.

"The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not." Bukowski's alter ego finds himself in a slow dance with the most beautiful girl in town, who also happens to be its saddest; a tale of loss and what might have been.

Set in the rugged Bitterroot valley of Montana - home to celebrities seeking to escape the pressures of public life and xenophobes dedicated to establishing a bulkhead of patriotic paranoia - Bitterroot features Billy Bob Holland, former Texas Ranger and now a Texas-based lawyer, who has come to Big Sky country at the request of an old friend in trouble.

A sprawling thriller drenched with atmosphere and intrigue that takes a young boy from a chance encounter with Bonnie and Clyde to the trenches of World War II and the oil fields along the Texas-Louisiana coast.

Seven years ago, newspapers across America called it "the espionage case of the century." While serving a security guard at the American Embassy, Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, a Native American marine, fell in love with a beautiful Russian woman and was recruited by a KGB officer posing as her "Uncle Sasha" to become a spy for the Soviet Union. The "sex-for-Secrets Marine Spy Scandal," as it was called by the press, had all the elements of a great novel...but it was a story.

Flooded by memories, poisoned by Agent Orange, Dan Lambert kills a man in a moment of fear and fury - and changes his life forever. Pursued by police and bounty hunters, Dan flees south toward the Louisiana bayous. In the swamplands he meets Arden Halliday, a young woman who bears the vivid burdens of her own past, and who is searching for a legendary faith healer called the Bright Girl. Looking for simple kindness in a world that rarely shows it, bound by a loyalty stronger than love, Dan and Arden set off on a journey of relentless suspense and impassioned discovery....

Celebrated crime master and two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke returns with a gorgeously crafted, brutally resonant chronicle of violence along the Texas-Mexico border. Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town, meting out punishment and delivering justice in his small square of this magnificent but lawless land. When an alcoholic ex-boxer named Danny Boy Lorca begs to be locked up after witnessing a man tortured to death by a group of bandits, Hack and his deputy, Pam Tibbs, slowly extract the Indian man’s gruesome tale.

In a startling departure, James Lee Burke has written an epic story of love, hate, and survival set against the tumultuous background of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Booklist calls White Doves "an epic filmed in tight focus, taking us from secession to Reconstruction at an intensely personal level."

Amos Kincaid is the son of a dowser a person gifted in knowing how to find water deep in the ground. As a young person, Amos doesnt reveal his gift to others; hes not sure he wants the burden. But through his experiences growing up and crossing the Oregon Trail, Amos learns about lifes harsh realities, especially the pain in losing loved ones. As he cares for those around him, Amos comes to accept his dowsing fate.

A true crime thriller - the first book for teens to tell the nearly unknown tale of the brazen attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's body! The action begins in October of 1875, as Secret Service agents raid the workshop of master counterfeiter Ben Boyd. Soon after Boyd is arrested, members of his counterfeiting ring gather to discuss how to spring their ringleader. Their plan: grab Lincoln's body from its Springfield tomb, stash it in the sand dunes near Lake Michigan, and demand, as a ransom, the release of Ben Boyd - and $200,000 in cash.