Showing results by narrator "Elizabeth Evans" in All Categories

When Una Fairchild stumbles upon a mysterious book buried deep in the basement of her school library, she thinks nothing of opening the cover and diving in. But instead of paging through a regular novel, Una suddenly finds herself Written In to the land of Story - a world filled with Heroes and Villains and fairy-tale characters. But not everything in Story is as magical as it seems. Una must figure out why she has been Written In - and fast - before anyone else discovers her secret. Together with her new friend Peter and a talking cat named Sam, Una digs deep into Story's shadowy past.

On a foggy summer morning, private investigator Sharon McCone receives a call from her former neighbors, the Curleys. Their usually dependable daughter Chelle hasn't been answering their calls for weeks. Would Sharon check on her? Sharon arranges to visit the building Chelle had been living in and rehabbing in southwest San Francisco. Once it was a nightclub and bar, she learns, and a favorite destination for the city's elite during Prohibition. But there's something sinister about the space, and Sharon quickly discovers why.

It is a dazzling decade, and Barbara Bond is a beautiful young singer torn between her fierce desire for independence and her deep, abiding love for her husband, a brilliant doctor. She has trained for years to sing grand opera, but soon after her marriage to Harvey Perkins, she learns that he has accepted an assignment as a medical missionary in the country of Siam. Suddenly Barbara is forced into the duty of a “good wife"—to support her husband’s career, not her own. As resentment slowly grows, she travels with Harvey first to the jungles of Siam, then to the capital city of Bangkok.

San Francisco Noir lashes out with hard-biting tales exploring the shadowy nether regions of scenic "Baghdad by the Bay". In this superb collection, virtuosos of the genre meet up with the best of SF’s literary fiction community to chart a unique psycho-geography for a dark landscape. From inner city boroughs to the outlands, each contributor offers an original story based in a distinct neighborhood.

Fourteen-year-old Tom Röschenberg has inherited a ghost train and its members of the undead are very lively! And it's a suspenseful time for our young Ghostsitter: Vlarad the vampire has consumed too much hamster blood and has now turned into one, and Wombie the Zombie's hundredth deathday is coming right up. But the ritual for celebrating Wombie's deathday is no easy task: It requires a voodoo dagger, a magic ring, and an enchanted cauldron, and if Tom and his undead friends don't perform the ritual in time, Wombie will turn to dust.

In Admit This to No One, we meet a group of women connected to a central figure either personally or professionally, and for better or for worse - an all-powerful and elusive speaker of the House, whose political career has only stopped short of being presidential due to his myriad extra-marital affairs. The speaker’s daughters from his several failed marriages have a complicated relationship with him to say the least - alternating between longing for his affection or bristling with resentment, and occasionally relief at being left out of the spotlight.

My uncle and my father. I used to be able to tell them apart. Not anymore. Because they're both the same. They both want to destroy me....

After my capture, I’m escorted to the capital for my magik to be tested. While I don’t know who I am, the magi guards believe I’m the kumdar’s lost bondmate. I know better. What they propose is impossible for two irrefutable reasons. First, my magik is nothing like hers. And second, if my body and soul were mate-bonded, I wouldn’t feel this unquenchable desire for my captor. Dragged before the ruthless king, I’m forced to participate in a magical trial.

My memory is lost. Gone. I can’t remember my name or magîk. I don’t know what happened to our ruler or why the jungle is transforming and becoming even wilder. Who is the guard, and why is he angry? And why do I feel safe with a deadly panthera? Arriving in Pûleêr, I hope to find relief among the magî and, hopefully, some answers. Instead, the laws of nature change before my eyes, and the dangers of the jungle are nothing compared to this twisted utopia.

Maggie learns all about dog racing when an injured greyhound is brought to the clinic. She goes to the track with Dr. Mac and Taryn, the newest Vet Volunteer, to check on the condition of the dogs. It's risky, but it will be worth it if they can save these greyhounds!

Three sisters come together for the first time since birth: Nessa Kurland, a werewolf with powers she has learned to control; Delphine, who grew up knowing there was more to their family's story than was being said; and finally, the chimera, a construction of their father's lab, whose very existence threatens them all. Now that all three live at their father's property and laboratory facility in the Pacific Northwest, what will the family's future hold?

The forest is full of secrets. And who knows them better than Nessa Kurland, a 16-year-old cross-country star with a secret of her own: She can transform at will into a werewolf, and her power grows stronger with every moon. Nessa returns home from a run with her pack to find an FBI raid and the shocking news that her mother, Vivian, is being arrested for violations so serious she may be facing life in prison. What did Nessa's mother, a small-town vet tech, do to threaten Homeland Security?

By law, any child born in Idara is free, even if that child is born in a slave brothel. Unfortunately, Cinder has grown into a beauty that surpasses even the renown of her mother and grandmother, making her far too valuable a commodity to lose. The slaveholder calls in Cinder’s debts. Forcing Cinder to play a game where her very freedom is the prize. The man most interested in buying Cinder is Adar - a prince with a wicked reputation that masks a kindness Cinder cannot fathom. In his glittering world of prestige and power, she discovers the game for her freedom is a smaller move.

Jo Spencer is a girl who knows what to be and how to be it - straight-A student, cheerleader, May Queen, popular and cute and virginal, and in perfect control. But halfway through her first year in college in the early '70s, her carefully normal life explodes and she comes completely undone. In The Cheer Leader, Jo Spencer looks back, as if she were watching reruns of old syndicated TV shows, to figure out what happened.

Many years before AMC's Mad Men was a hit, Daws Butler (Yogi Bear) wrote The Ad Game. Adam is the top copywriter at his firm when he finds himself in a career crisis that baffles his wife, Melissa, and his father-in-law, Ed, who is his boss.

Ruby's turning 16 - but the day doesn't turn out to be as sweet as it's supposed to be. Her long-lost father shows up, and Ruby doesn't want to have anything to do with him. Instead, she wants to hang out with her friends: loyal Beth, dangerous Katherine, and gossipy Maria. They have plenty of advice for her - about boys, about her dad, about how she should look, and what she should be feeling. But really, Ruby doesn't know what to think or feel. Especially when a new boy comes into the picture....

Jill McCorkle's new collection of 12 short stories is peopled with characters brilliantly like us - flawed, clueless, endearing. These stories are also "animaled" with all manner of mammal, bird, fish, reptile - also flawed and endearing. She asks, what don't humans share with the so-called lesser species? Looking for the answer, she takes us back to her fictional home town of Fulton, North Carolina, to meet a broad range of characters facing up to the double-edged sword life offers hominids.

The future world has been divided into sectors - each the same as the other. Surrounded by thick steel fences, there is no way in and no way out. Yet a cyborg army penetrates each sector, picking off its citizens one by one, until no one is left. Behind the sectors’ thick walls, the citizens wait to die. Few will be chosen to survive what’s coming; the rest will be left behind to suffer. A new world has been created, and its rulers are incredibly selective on who will become a citizen. They want only those with important roles in society to help create a more perfect future.

Set in 1960s New York, this piquant coming-of-age story concerns a teenage girl, Queenie, raised to become a "kept woman" in an exceedingly comfortable and well-adjusted - yet insular and retrograde - household. After enrolling in college, Queenie confronts new understandings, both personal and political, and gradually becomes cognizant of the dated values imparted upon her.

From the start of Elizabeth McKenzie’s beguiling fiction debut, we are drawn into the offbeat worldview of sharp-eyed, intrepid Ann Ransom. Stop That Girl chronicles Ann’s colorful coming-of-age travails, from her childhood in a disjointed family through her tender adolescence and beyond. Along the way, she discovers the absurdities that lurk around every corner of a young woman’s life, by way of oafish neighbors, overzealous boyfriends, prurient vegetable salesmen, sour landlords, and an iconoclast grandmother, known even to her family as Dr. Frost.