Showing results by narrator "Amy McFadden" in All Categories

From the outside, the Davenports look like any other family living a completely ordinary life - until that devastating day when five-year-old Jonah is killed, and the family is torn apart. As the fury of guilt engulfs them, the Davenports slowly start to unravel, one by one. Losing her son forces Rachel to withdraw into a frayed, fuzzy reality. Her husband, Sam, tries to remain stoic, but he's consumed by regret with the choices he's made. Eden mourns her brother, while desperately fighting to regain a sense of normalcy.

When Muriel Sterling released her new book, A Guide to Happy Holidays, she felt like the queen of Christmas. She's thrilled when the new tree she ordered online arrives and is eager to show it off - until she gets it out of the box and realizes it's a mangy dud. But rather than give up on the ugly tree, Muriel decides to make a project out of it. As she pretties up her tree, she realizes there's a lesson to be learned: Everything and everyone has potential. Maybe even her old friend Arnie, who's loved her for years. Except she's not the only one seeing Arnie's potential....

There he stood in the doorway: overweight, depressed, and nearly homeless - a pug named Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy was Brydie Benson's latest problem, arriving on top of her messy divorce and sudden move. Brydie needed a place to start over, so this rent-free home seemed a great idea. She just never counted on Teddy or his owner, the Germantown Retirement Village's toughest customer, Pauline Neumann.

The historic Madrigal theater, in the heart of downtown Wishful, is about to close its doors forever. A last ditch fund-raising effort, a production of White Christmas, is probably the only thing that could bring Tyler Edison out of retirement. She fell in love on that stage, but when Brody Jensen abandoned her, she lost the heart to sing and dance for the crowd. Maybe it's time to take that back.... It seems like pure chance when Brody's job, which has taken him all over the world, brings him back to his little hometown to oversee his boss's latest secret project.

Since finishing graduate school, Maggie Griffin has worked hard to build an enviable life in Boston. She's an elementary school teacher in a tony Boston suburb, a devoted sister, and a loving aunt. With her childhood best friend's wedding quickly approaching and her own relationship blossoming, this is the summer she has been waiting for. But when Maggie's career is suddenly in jeopardy, her life begins to unravel. Stricken, Maggie returns home to seaside Mystic, Connecticut, where she expects to find comfort.

Since 2001, the Gallup Management Journal has provided leaders with essential insights into managing the human side of their businesses - their employees and customers. This book features the highlights of the first seven years of the GMJ: more than 50 thought-provoking articles with actionable ideas, grounded in decades of Gallup management research.

No sneaking out. No going into Boston alone. Moxie Fleece knows the rules and follows them - that is, until the day she opens her front door to a mysterious stranger. Suddenly, Moxie drops smack into Boston’s biggest unsolved mystery: the Gardner Museum art heist. Moxie has two weeks to find the art, otherwise she - and the people she loves - will be in big-time danger. Her tools? Her best friend, Ollie, a geocaching addict who loves to find stuff; her Alzheimer’s suffering grandfather, Grumps, who knows lots more than he lets on; and a geometry proof that she sets up to sort out the clues.

Sixteen years ago, Tyne Whitlock cut all ties to her past and left town under the shameful shadow of a teenage pregnancy. Now her 15-year-old son is in trouble with the law, and she is desperate for help. But reaching out to high-powered attorney Lucas Silver Hawk will tear open the heart-wrenching past in ways Tyne never imagined.

Forced to return to the Delaware Indian community where Lucas was raised, Tyne and Lucas are tempted by the heated passion that consumed them as teens. Tyne rediscovers all the reasons she found this man irresistible, but there are scandalous secrets waiting to be revealed....

Three years after a series of massive waves takes out New York City and apocalyptic weather continues to shrink US coastlines, Julian and Kate's daughter returns to their Midwestern home...what's left of it. They should be thrilled, but while Kate is happy to have her daughter home, Julian can't quite believe it's really her. Since their daughter worked in New York City at the time of the first disaster, it seems impossible for her to be alive.

When it comes to her heart, Arabella D'Angelo has moved on - even though she still lives in Mirror Lake, Connecticut, a little tourist town with a long memory for mistakes. Ever the dutiful daughter of a cantankerous widower who holds grudges, Bella has spent the past twelve years raising her younger brother and making a name for herself as a successful psychologist. Now, when she isn't counseling a lonely-hearts club for senior women, she's humoring her matchmaking girlfriends.

Priscilla Slater goes to her 10-year high school reunion with equal parts dread and eager anticipation. Even though she's a successful owner of a chain of hair salons and no longer has the mousy brown hair, crooked teeth, and a discount-store wardrobe, she still feels like the ugly duckling. But when she arrives at the reunion, Priscilla soon realizes that her old classmates aren't exactly as she remembers them.

Brimming with life and unforgettable voices, the stories in Austin Bunn's dazzling collection explore the existential question: what happens at the end, and what lies beyond it? In the wry but affecting "How to Win an Unwinnable War", a summer class on nuclear war for gifted teenagers turns a struggling family upside down. A young couple's idyllic beach honeymoon is interrupted by terrorism in the lush, haunting "Getting There and Away".

When Jesse Graham unlocks the door to the deserted house she inherited from her Aunt Helen, she doesn't realize she's unlocking secrets that had lain dormant for years. Reeling from a broken engagement to acclaimed musician Robert Cronmiller, Jesse wants to leave the city where her name is linked to his in all the society pages. Her best friend, Maggie, aka Sister Angelina, convinces her to take a job at a private girls school in the pastoral Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

Jessie Myrer is the daughter of the prison warden in Cayuta County, where there are few foreigners and even fewer Jews. Jessie's provincial views change when she meets her new across-the-street neighbor. At 15, sophisticated, German-born Elisa Stadler is a year older than Jessie. The girls would seem to have little in common, yet they soon become the best of friends. Then one night, they hear the music of the prison band's spellbinding solo bugler.

Chizuru Akitani is the 12-year-old daughter of the famous violinist and Japanese "Living National Treasure" Hiro Akitani. Overweight and hafu (her mother is white), she is tormented by her classmates and targeted by the most relentless bully of them all, Tomoya Yu. When Chizuru's mother dies suddenly, her father offers her no comfort and she is left feeling alone and unmoored. At school, her bully's cruelty intensifies, and in a moment of blind rage, Chizuru grabs a Morimoto letter opener from her teacher's desk and fatally stabs Tomoya Yu in the neck.

Two years after the end of World War II, a director sets out to mimic real life by creating a film without a script, where the actors learn the story and their part in it as they go. The tale unfolds of a young couple on the run during the Nazi occupation, but soon the characters they play begin to take on lives of their own. As the lines between fiction and reality blur, the Secret Police become convinced that the director holds information that could compromise the nation’s security, and they decide to interrogate him about his fictional plot.

When Jesse Graham almost runs over a "body" in the road one night, she is plunged into a labyrinth of secrets, lies, and murder. All Jesse wants is a simple life teaching at St. Bart's and a chance at love with Joe Riley. She realizes that plan has been thwarted when puzzling occurrences at St. Bartholomew Academy for Girls get increasingly dangerous. The danger doesn't just spring from the ghost who haunts the grounds of St. Bart's, but from a sinister presence that is not ghostly at all.

Capturing in rich detail the freewheeling '60s, One Minus One explores a young woman’s journey toward self-realization following a painful divorce. In 1969, 30-year-old Emily Bean moves to a town in New Hampshire’s coastal region to take a job as a high-school teacher. Struggling with the challenges of single life and still in love with her ex-husband, David, Emily attracts the attention of local radio personality Warren, and also Cliff, the head of the high-school English department, who might perhaps take David’s place in her life.

Eighteen-year-old Benjamin Nefer seems to have it all: great looks, incredible football skills, and smooth moves that have won - and broken - the hearts of countless girls at his high school. But his hellish home life has left him feeling empty inside, unable to experience real feelings. He thinks he's fine being this way forever... until he meets a beautiful and witty 17-year-old girl named Charlotte "Charlie" Austin.

A neuroscientist walks out of her life and isolates herself in the woods, intending to blow the whistle on a pharmaceutical company and its creativity drug gone wrong. A recently orphaned graduate school dropout is hired as a "literary detective" to decode the work of a mysterious Internet poet who writes about disappearances and murders with an inexplicably precise knowledge of private details. And a virologist discovers her identity has been stolen by a conceptual artist in whose stories someone always goes missing.