Showing results by narrator "Jeff Cummings" in All Categories

As the sole members of LAPD's Special Cases Unit, Detective Michael Gideon and his German shepherd partner Sirius work investigations considered bizarre even by Los Angeles's standards. Yet their latest case is more than strange - it might be out of this world. Ronald "Wrong" Pauley is a homeless man long fallen from grace. When Pauley's late-night drinking is interrupted by a detonation of light, he sees what he describes as a "being of light" in the alley below.

In 2012, no one saw Victor Daco coming. In 2024, he lobbied Congress to turn America's 13 most powerful conglomerates into sovereign regional states, transforming the control that corporations had held for decades over the US government into a formal nobility. Once the bill was signed into law, it became known as the New Rule. As the wealthiest man in the country, Victor became the most powerful patriarch.

>i>Rock Island Rock continues the Crossroads Thriller series from where Blues Highway Blues, voted Best Blues Book of 2012 by Blues411.com, left off. In the shadow of the mysterious bluesman, Mr. Atibon, reluctant hero Daniel Erickson; his hitman friend, Moog Turner; and his girlfriend, Vicki Bean, are crisscrossing America to follow the musical clues that lead to a rock-and-roll superstar’s killer. Along the way they’ll encounter obsessive FBI agents, vengeful Russian mobsters, ruthless cartel assassins, and psychotic bikers.

Police Sergeant Lou Boldt heads a special task force within Seattle’s Homicide bureau. His job: find and stop the Cross Killer, a twisted, perverse serial murderer who has eluded police for six months and paralyzed the city. But when a body washes up on the shore of Puget Sound, Boldt thinks the killer has finally made a mistake. This body shows some of the work of the Cross Killer - but a job badly botched. Did this woman die while trying to escape? Did she knowingly jump in the water to preserve a clue? And is she now desperately trying to tell Boldt something?

It was supposed to be a simple proof of concept. The physics were sound. Over 100 teleportation experiments had already been successfully performed.... Debate raged over whether the Reidier Test's disastrous outcome resulted from human error, government conspiracy, or sabotage. No one had actual knowledge of the truth. But hidden from the public eye, there existed a government report commissioned from criminal psychologist Dr. Hilary Kahn, chronicling the events that took place.

Abby Donovan’s decade-long dream of partnership at her prestigious Chicago law firm is just months from fruition. But it’s all about to change because of one misstep. One step onto a late-night train headed in the wrong direction. Headed into Chicago’s west side, where gangs and violence and drugs fill the streets. In this engaging debut, E.C. Diskin, a former Chicago attorney, takes us on a fast-paced thrill ride with a believable and flawed heroine. Listeners will relate to her, fear for her, and get a glimpse inside Chicago’s best and worst.

Baby Boomers are reinventing retirement just as they have so many other aspects of their lives. They will live longer and be healthier than their parents and grandparents, and they plan to remain relevant, be fulfilled, and leave legacies. Many will continue to work well into their 70s and 80s, some because they want to, others because they need to.

Under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, Wright has booked passage on what would be the luxury liner’s disastrous final crossing. He claims to be interviewing celebrity passengers, but the reporter is actually investigating rumors that the ship is ferrying an illegal cache of weapons to aid the British war against Germany. His investigation is put on hold when three German stowaways are discovered and then - in an unexpected and violent twist - killed.

Late one night, a man calls the local emergency line. He's in a cemetery, and he's just discovered a freshly dug grave marked with a wooden cross bearing his name. The dispatcher thinks it's the ravings of a drunk - until the police find the man's body the next day. What seemed like a morbid prank soon becomes a living nightmare for Berlin detective Jan Tommen. Recently reinstated to the force after a harrowing case's tragic conclusion, Jan enlists his friends.

In his new book, investment expert Jim Jubak explores the "new normal" of market volatility. With remarkable insights into the zeitgeist of financial markets and the economy, Jubak combines the big macro trends with the more mundane aspects of life to depict why volatility is here to stay, why things are not going to get any calmer soon, and how you can make investing decisions to profit off this new reality.

John Lincoln needs a hot best seller, and finds his salvation in Amy O’Malley, a recent University of Chicago grad who’s worked on the school’s famous sex survey. With Lincoln’s prodding, Amy writes an erotic thriller that draws on her research experience. Her book indeed opens doors for Lincoln — but not in the way he imagined. Meanwhile, Tony Buford, a “professor of happiness studies” at a local college, gently blackmails him into publishing his fantastically mundane poetry.

Detective Michael Gideon is used to being handed L.A.'s oddest cases, but his newest one assigned itself. When Gideon's K-9 partner, Sirius, rescues a lost dog from a pack of coyotes, the duo tries to return her home - only to discover her owner is missing. Heather Moreland has clearly disappeared under suspicious circumstances, and the more Gideon digs into her past, the more he's convinced of her abduction.

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself — what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly — religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

An inconvenient reassignment has landed Reykjavík crime reporter Einar in the small northern town of Akureyri, where his biggest story to date has been the college stage production of Loftur the Sorcerer, an Icelandic folktale of ambition and greed. But that supposedly ancient history becomes ominously relevant when an unexpected new story lands in Einar’s lap: A local woman dies after falling overboard during a corporate boating retreat. All evidence suggests an accident, but when the victim’s mother cries foul play, kindhearted Einar agrees to investigate.

Sent to live with a wealthy family on a West Indies plantation, Rachel carries with her a past shrouded in mystery. Drawn to her grit and fortitude, charming widower and fanciful inventor Henry is willing to overlook the vague explanations about her history. But after years of marriage, Rachel leaves Henry and their oldest son without explanation and sets off for New York City with their other four children. Is her flight the ultimate act of betrayal or one of extraordinary courage? Using real family letters, Laurel Saville reconstructs the secrets, tensions, and longings surrounding Rachel in this densely layered, poignant novel.

At first, Rachel Vasquez found her new job working for private detective Clayton Guthrie promising. He got her a gun and a license and took her to target practice. But lately she’s just been doing surveillance, and it’s not her idea of an exciting time. She is contemplating quitting when Guthrie lands an intriguing case that will take all their wits and guts to solve.

Camille Bowman, a beautiful blonde Columbia student and Manhattan heiress, is found dead, shot by a gun that belonged to her fiancé, Greg Olsen, an Afghan war veteran. Guthrie is hired to prove Olsen’s innocence, and fortunately he thinks Olsen smells clean.

An attractive sous chef at the famous L’Elfe is murdered and half of the employees are suspect. Lacking confidence in the police to solve the murder, Chef Jean Bouvier seeks a quicker solution. He hires private eyes James Lessor and Skip Moore to go undercover and discreetly investigate his restaurant staff. But their investigation turns up far more than they bargained for. Skip’s girlfriend, Emily, confesses that the murder victim and she had been close friends at one point in their lives and had shared a very dark secret.

Moments after venture capitalist Gloria Baradaran experiences what it's like to be a polar bear - really be a polar bear - she knows she's found something revolutionary. Farley Rutherford and his team - migraine-tortured neurologist "Chopper" Vittori and uber-geek engineer Ringo Hayes - have created sensory saturation, a virtual reality system that drops users into the psyches of endangered animals as they fight for survival, and they believe the profound experience could turn the indifferent masses into avid environmentalists.

Child prodigy Joshua Bland’s life has been anything but bland. Joshua’s father abandons him and his mentally imbalanced mother when he is a young boy, leaving him to be raised by a cynical, hostile, and self-doubting stepfather. When Joshua loses a national knowledge competition, his family’s reaction puts him on the path to becoming a World War II veteran, best-selling author, successful producer, and absentee father.

Berlin detective Jan Tommen expected to wake up with a hangover - not a murder charge. But a well-known judge has been brutally killed and hard evidence places Jan at the crime scene. When disturbing gaps in Jan’s memory make finding an alibi impossible, the case against him looks open and shut. Faced with life on the inside, Jan flees police custody to take refuge with an old friend deeply enmeshed in the capital’s seedy underworld.