Showing results by narrator "Ari Fliakos"

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than 20 years' experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders, or does she intervene?

Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as third-year students, these close friends realize they have been duped. They all borrowed heavily to attend a third-tier, for-profit law school so mediocre that its graduates rarely pass the bar exam, let alone get good jobs. And when they learn that their school is one of a chain owned by a shady New York hedge-fund operator who also happens to own a bank specializing in student loans, the three know they have been caught up in The Great Law School Scam.

At 32 Russell Green has it all: a stunning wife, a lovable six-year-old daughter, a successful career as an advertising executive, and an expansive home in Charlotte. He is living the dream, and his marriage to the bewitching Vivian is the center of that. But underneath the shiny surface of this perfect existence, fault lines are beginning to appear, and no one is more surprised than Russ when he finds every aspect of the life he took for granted turned upside down.

Allie Garvey is heading home to the funeral of a childhood friend. Allie is not only grief-stricken, she's full of dread. Because going home means seeing the other two people with whom she shares an unbearable secret. Twenty years earlier, a horrific incident shattered the lives of five teenagers, including Allie. Drinking and partying in the woods, they played a dangerous prank that went tragically wrong. The teenagers kept what happened a secret, believing that getting caught would be the worst thing that could happen. But time has taught Allie that not getting caught was far worse.

Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as third-year students, these close friends realize they have been duped. They all borrowed heavily to attend a third-tier, for-profit law school so mediocre that its graduates rarely pass the bar exam, let alone get good jobs. And when they learn that their school is one of a chain owned by a shady New York hedge-fund operator who also happens to own a bank specializing in student loans, the three know they have been caught up in The Great Law School Scam.

In Dalton Fury's Execute Authority, Kolt "Racer" Raynor and his Delta Force squadron are in Greece, providing VIP security for the newly elected - and deeply controversial - American president on his desperate mission to hold the NATO alliance together. Then, the unimaginable happens. Just as the president is arriving, an assassin's bullet takes the life of the Greek prime minister. The president is safe, but Raynor recognizes the killer - Rasim Miric - by his grisly signature: a bullet through his target's left eye.

After a crippling wave of crime and decades of economic deterioration, a large-scale movement to revitalize the city is underway. For the first time in a long time, there’s cause for optimism. That is, until Malick’s latest investigation finds him tugging the threads on a criminal conspiracy that touches all rungs of Cain City society. 

Teddy Telemachus is a charming con man with a gift for sleight of hand and some shady underground associates. In need of cash, he tricks his way into a classified government study about telekinesis and its possible role in intelligence gathering. There he meets Maureen McKinnon, and it's not just her piercing blue eyes that leave Teddy forever charmed but her mind - Maureen is a genuine psychic of immense and mysterious power.

It's 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson - college professor, stalled writer - has a Nix of his own: his mother, Faye. He hasn't seen her in decades, not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she's reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart.

Still recovering from his near-fatal wounds suffered at the Yellow Creek Nuclear Plant, Delta Force Commander Major Kolt "Racer" Raynor is thrust into a new battle with some of the toughest killers he's ever faced - US Navy SEALs. Government austerity measures have the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplating the unthinkable - combining Delta Force and the SEALs into a single unit or eliminating one entirely.

Handsome and charismatic, Albert Hicks had long been known in the dive bars and gin joints of the Five Points, the most dangerous neighborhood in maritime Manhattan. For years, he operated out of the public eye, rambling from crime to crime, working on the water in ships, sleeping in the nickel-a-night flops, drinking in barrooms where rat-baiting and bear-baiting were great entertainments. Rich Cohen tells the story of this notorious underworld figure, from his humble origins to the wild, globe-crossing, bacchanalian crime spree that forged his ruthlessness and his reputation.

Dewey Andreas, still reeling from recent revelations about his own past, is ready to retire from the CIA. But he's the only available agent with the skills to carry out the CIA's plan to stop North Korea, which has made a secret nuclear deal with Iran. The plan is to inject a singular designer poison into the head of the North Korean military and in exchange for the nuclear plans, provide him with the one existing dose of the antidote. But it goes awry when Dewey manages to inject a small amount of the poison into himself.

Daniel Carter used to be a homicide detective, but his last case - the hunt for a serial killer - went wrong in strange ways and soured the job for him. Now he's a private investigator trying to live a quiet life. Strangeness, however, has not finished with him. First, he inherits a bookstore in Providence from someone he's never heard of, along with an indignant bookseller who doesn't want a new boss.

Tap Duvarney lost his innocence in the War Between the States and then put his skills to the test as a soldier in the frontier army. Now, leaving behind a devoted fiancée, he is trying to make his fortune on the Texas coast, working a ranch as the partner of his old friend Tom Kittery - and finding himself in the middle of a feud between Kittery and the neighboring Munson family.

Former disgraced Delta Force commander Kolt "Racer" Raynor has earned his way back into The Unit after redeeming himself during an explosive operation at a black site in Pakistan. But he is about to face his deadliest challenge yet. The most wanted man in the world, American al Qaeda commander Daoud al Amriki, and his handpicked team of terrorist operatives, have acquired stores of Russian-built, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (SAM's) from ex-Libyan spies in Cairo.

When Andrei Kaplan’s older brother, Dima, insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It’s the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends.

Back in the run-and-gun days of the mid-'90s, when Billy Graves worked in the South Bronx as part of an anticrime unit known as the Wild Geese, he made headlines by accidentally shooting a 10-year-old boy while stopping an angel-dusted berserker in the street. Branded as a cowboy by his higher-ups, for the next 18 years Billy endured one dead-end posting after another.

The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich and intriguing territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies.

When SEAL Team Six killed Osama bin Laden, they pulled a treasure trove of intelligence on planned attacks on U.S. soil. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's new leader, is activating his most trusted (and deadliest) terrorists to carry out his newest plot: to detonate a bomb inside one of the 64 commercial nuclear power plants in the U.S. in an attack 10 times worse than 9/11, causing radiological fallout that would kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans.

In near-future America, film critic Noah Body uploads his reviews to a content aggregator. His job is routine: watch, seethe, pan. He dreams of making his own film, free from the hackery of commercial cinema. Faced with writing about lousy movies for a website that no one reads, Noah smuggles into his work episodes from his trainwreck of a life. We learn that his apartment in Miniature Aleppo has been stripped of furniture after his wife ran off with his best friend - who Noah believes has possessed his body.