Showing results by narrator "Stephen Mendel" in All Categories

Two months after D-Day, the Allies found themselves in a stalemate in Normandy, having suffered enormous casualties attempting to push through hedgerow country. Troops were spent, and American tankers, lacking the tactics and leadership to deal with the terrain, were losing their spirit. General George Patton and the other top US commanders needed an officer who knew how to break the impasse and roll over the Germans - they needed one man with the grit and the vision to take the war all the way to the Rhine. Patton and his peers selected Maurice Rose.

On a remote mountaintop in Western China, Doctor Ai Liang is about to risk everything and defy the Chinese Communist Party. She and her team have created a terrifying new coronavirus, even more deadly than COVID-19, called C-62 that is capable of killing a person in 20 minutes. But her conscience tells her she must destroy the deadly bioweapon before it can bring devastation to millions. The doctor’s heroic plans are interrupted when mysterious commandos swarm the lab, kill everyone in sight, and take off with the C-62 virus.

In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love, and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself”, a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death....

In the title story of Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there and it came for him.”

An invitation addressed to his long-dead mother sparks Van Shaw’s curiosity about the woman he barely knew. As he digs into young Moira Shaw's past, he uncovers startling details about her life, including her relationship to a boy named Sean Burke - a boy Moira may have been seeing when she became pregnant. Could this Burke be the biological father who abandoned Van before he was born? Although Van knows all too well that some doors shouldn’t be opened, he decides to investigate the man - only to discover that Burke has an even darker family history than Van's own.

Described as both “one of the most important novels ever written” and “the gospel of evil,” 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade, a notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat who waged a campaign of mayhem and debauchery across France, evaded execution, and inspired the word “sadism,” which came to mean receiving pleasure from pain. Despite all his crimes, Sade considered this work to be his greatest transgression.

The River of Time brings together 12 of David Brin's stories, including "The Crystal Spheres", which won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story in 1985. Here are powerful tales of heroism and humanity, playful excursions into realms of fancy, and profound meditations on time, memory, and our place in the universe. Who guides our fate? And can we ever hope to wrest control for ourselves?

Kevin Pearce - baseball star, honor student, the pride of Brighton - was 15 when he left town in the back of his uncle's cab. He and his buddy, Bobby Scales, had just committed heinous violence for what they thought were the best of reasons. Kevin didn't want a pass, but he was getting it anyway. Bobby would stay and face the music; Kevin's future would remain as bright as ever. At least that was the way things were supposed to work, except in Brighton things never work the way they're supposed to.

On a freezing December night, Hannah Reindel leaps to her death from an old railway bridge into the rushing waters of the river below. Yet the real cause of death was trauma suffered 12 years earlier, when Hannah was plucked from a crowd of freshman girls at a college fraternity party, drugged, and then viciously assaulted by six members of the college football team.

Van Shaw is hired to evaluate the safeguards for the art collection of eccentric business magnate Sebastian Rohner. Then Rohner reveals to Van the real reason he’s been recruited: to prevent another professional burglar from stealing the art. Rohner wants to set a thief to catch a thief. Van, while questioning the bizarre nature of the job, takes it seriously and surveils the highly secure gallery wing of Rohner’s expansive island estate, only to stumble across a murdered body on the rocky shore beyond: one of Rohner’s honored guests for an international corporate deal.

It’s Christmas time, and Mary Valley is in a funk. She’s a writer for home magazines, but she’s lost touch with what home means. Her life seems meaningless. The last house she wrote about was a gazillion-dollar mansion with a moat! Plus, she’s estranged from her daughter, CC, and granddaughter, Larkin, and mired in a dead-end relationship with her boss. Daniel is a man adrift since his son Timmy was killed in Afghanistan. He’s living on a houseboat in Florida with Timmy’s three-legged dog, Tripod, and taking tourists out on fishing charters. But his life is on the edge.

Are all rules broken when it comes to playing a game? Washed ashore a South Carolina beach, Lois Steinberg learns her shelter, an old plantation house, was scheduled to host a "Catch Me" game convention. When the cook is the first one found murdered, the game environment instantly morphs into a terrifying evening reminiscent of "And Then There Were None".

In small-town Maine, unhappily retired Howard Woods is shaken awake one morning by his wife, who confesses to a devastating affair. To the utter dismay of his family, Howard refuses to forgive her. Instead, he vows to travel to Pamplona, Spain, in the footsteps of Hemingway to join the annual running of the bulls. His life promptly descends into chaos. But how does a middle-aged homebody, who has never even done his own laundry, salvage his manhood and pride and learn how to rebuild his life on his own?

They're everywhere around us, but usually we choose to ignore them. They happen in space. They happen in time. They're little moments of discontinuity in our experience, but they can become portals to the greater experience of our world as illusion, as the veil, as Maya, as the collective dream; and the experience of ourselves as the dreamers. If we choose not to ignore them, but to follow them, like Alice down a cosmic rabbit hole, we might just begin to understand how it was that we got here in the first place.

In the midst of a February cold snap and the political maneuverings of a new government that threatens the jobs of good officers including his young partner, Detective Barry Gilbert of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force Homicide Squad is called to investigate the murder of Cheryl Latham, the stepdaughter of a prominent government official. Cheryl, her body frozen, is found on a snow-swept pier at the harbor with a bullet in her chest. Autopsy reveals a bizarre clue - Cheryl froze to death first and was shot later.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Foxcatcher by Mark Schultz, read by Stephen Mendel. On 22 January 1996, Dave Schultz, Olympic gold medalist and wrestling's golden boy, was shot in the back by John E. du Pont at the famed Foxcatcher estate in Pennsylvania. That started a two-day siege at the ranch before the du Pont family heir was finally captured.

A man, hanging from a tree at the edge of the forest that surrounds Dockerty, Newry County, has been shot with arrows, two of which pin his belly to the tree trunk. Orwell Brennan, Dockerty’s chief of police, questions the validity of it being a hunting accident when a sergeant tells him it’s been ruled a murder. He also tells the chief that the investigation is now in the hands of Metro Homicide and outside his concern.

Detectives Barry Gilbert and Joe Lombardo return after their highly praised debut, Cold Comfort. This time the two are plunged into Toronto's Chinatown district where they are called to investigate the death of Edgar Lau, a man whose history and connections take the detectives on a ride across continents and cultures, deep into the story of one family's struggle to survive against terrible odds

What may we become? How will we endure? The future is a daunting realm, filled with real and imagined perils. So enter it prepared! Here are vivid tales about possible tomorrows, from the keen eye and colorful pen of David Brin, a modern master of speculative fiction.

When a music mogul is found strangled to death in his apartment, there's little that would give seasoned professionals Barry Gilbert and Joe Lombardo reason to pause, but this is no ordinary murder victim. Glen Boyd, the sly music producer whom even Gilbert once threatened to kill after the man nearly destroyed his venerable marriage, seems to have a shopping list of enemies a mile long.