Showing results by narrator "Liza Ross Ross" in All Categories

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families. For V.I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango?

Ohio, 1838: James and Sadie Goodenough have settled in the Black Swamp, planting apple trees to claim the land as their own. As fever picks off their children, husband and wife take solace in separate comforts. Fifteen years later their youngest son, Robert, is drifting through gold rush California. When he finds steady work for a plant collector, peace seems finally to be within reach. But the past is never really past, and one day Robert is forced to confront the brutal reason he left behind everything he loved.

When a young woman named Sabrina disappears without a trace in Kansas, private investigator V.I. Warshawski knows she must act fast. But when she discovers Sabrina close to death in a drug house, the locals don't take kindly to her - and Sabrina's mother becomes suspicious. V.I. finds herself under the sharp gaze of the FBI - and the men running the county's opioid distribution. And when a dead body surfaces a few days later, V.I. is pitched headlong into a battle between the locals - with roots that date all the way back to the American Civil War.

Sixteen classic stories.

During a routine stake-out of a major client's former home, V.I. stumbles upon something she didn't expect to find: a body. The police immediately dismiss the victim as a drunken intruder, but V.I. sees things differently. Hired by the dead man's family to investigate, V.I. is lead back to the blacklists of the McCarthy era as well as into the murky operations of modern American government. Stopping at nothing in her quest for justice, V.I. soon discovers the perilous cost of bringing dark secrets to light....

Deadwood, USA. A girl sneaks out just before dark to ride her new bike. Suddenly, the ground disappears beneath her. Waking up at the bottom of a deep pit, she sees an emergency rescue team above her. The people looking down see something far stranger.... That girl grows up to be Dr. Rose Franklin, a brilliant scientist and the leading world expert on what she discovered.

When two girls are abducted and killed in Missouri, journalist Camille Preaker is sent back to her home town to report on the crimes. Long haunted by a childhood tragedy and estranged from her mother for years, Camille suddenly finds herself installed once again in her family's mansion, reacquainting herself with her distant mother and the half sister she barely knows - a precocious 13-year-old who holds a disquieting grip on the town.

BBC Audio present six fantastic tales of twisted futures and times beyond tomorrow. Inspired by the pulp sci-fi of '50s America, these perfectly pitched parodies are redolent of the atomic age—when the space race was at its height, Cold War paranoia was at fever pitch and the future seemed both thrilling and terrifying.

On a clear day, you could see America from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather when he had had a drink. Then, in 1818, he left and sailed to the New World with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants. They were a Spartan lot: showing off was frowned upon, and fear was commonplace, at least for females. But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters.

Mindfulness meets execution...at work. The wisdom of 13 Eastern sages, augmented by modern research on workplace influence, is the basis for profound yet practical advice on getting things done without force. The Art of Quiet Influence shows anyone how to use influence, a key mindfulness principle, to get things done. Through the classic wisdom of 13 Eastern sages (especially the Buddha), relevant insights from influence research, and anecdotes and advice from 25 contemporary experts, Davis lays out a path for becoming a 'mainspring,' an unobtrusive yet powerful influencer.

Twenty-five years ago, Stella Guzzo beat her daughter to death and then walked up the street to play bingo at her church. V. I. Warshawski grew up with the Guzzo family. She dated Frank Guzzo when they were teens and knew Stella's murderous rages firsthand. She didn't think about the family again until the day Frank came to her office, wanting V. I. to help his mother with an exoneration claim. The detective wants no part of Stella Guzzo's world, but she doesn't feel able to say no.

Moments of change, chance encounters, twists of fate that create a new way of thinking or being: The stories in Dear Life build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be. The collection includes four powerful pieces, "autobiographical in Feeling", set during the time of Munro's own childhood, in the area where she grew up.

While driving home after celebrating friend Murray Ryerson's big break into TV hosting, V.I. almost collides with a fatally wounded woman lying in the street. The deceased is Nicola Aguinaldo, former employee of security giant B.B. Baladine and recent prison runaway. Taking on the case, V.I. finds herself plunged into a sinister network of corruption that pits her against the police, the prison and the entertainment industry - with potentially lethal results.

As students at the prestigious Anya Sedgwick School of Decorative Arts in Paris, Alexandra Gordon, Kay Lenox, Jessica Pierce and Maria Franconi share the challenges and excitement of developing their artistic talents to the fullest under Sedgwick's caring and demanding guidance. But once best friends, they part enemies, and after graduation they go their separate ways, pursuing careers and establishing lives in different corners of the world.

The Early Birds is the feel-good and funny follow-up to The Future Homemakers of America that proves that no matter what life throws at you, great friends and regular cocktails will always see you through. In this hymn to lifelong female friendship, Peggy soldiers on through new upheavals, including her ex-husband Vern's Alzheimer's diagnosis, the death of one of her nearest and dearest, a life-changing house move and the world-shattering events of 9/11.

Wallace James Stevens was born on October 2nd, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His father, a lawyer, sent Wallace to Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and worked briefly as a journalist. In 1923 ‘Harmonium’ was published. At last, at age 38, he was an overnight success. His career was not prodigious in quantity but its quality was exceptional and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

When V.I.'s close friend Lotty Herschel is approached by a man claiming to be a fellow Holocaust survivor, she's forced to recall a painful past she's tried desperately to forget. Coming to Lotty's aid, V.I. decides to investigate the mysterious stranger. But her findings lead to the exposure of something much darker involving an international conspiracy reaching all the way back to Nazi Europe - as well as a shocking truth which could potentially devastate her friend....

Elizabeth Bell runs a quiet household, with no family and no more than the usual number of servants. She passes her time thinking about crime and working on her biography of a relative. When a young cousin comes to stay, life in the house becomes uncharacteristically lively. First, cousin Judy burns a hole in Miss Bell's desk. Next, they spy a burglar on the staircase - a shadowy figure who vanishes without a trace. And finally, Sarah, the nurse, takes the dogs for a walk and never returns.

When private eye V.I. Warshawski is called out to a derelict drug house in a rural town just south of Chicago, she discovers something she wasn't expecting: the mutilated corpse of a man, dumped in a cornfield. It is a discovery that throws V.I. into the fascinating world of physics and invention: a design that sparked the construction of the computer as we know it, the development of nuclear weapons, the wonder of Newton's prisms and a train of dramatic events that occurred in wartime Vienna.

The Last Time They Met focuses on the relationship between childhood sweethearts Linda Fallon and poet Thomas Janes. We begin in the year 2000 at a writers' festival in Toronto and are propelled backwards in time, via the politically repressive Naiobi, to the small town in Massachusetts for their school days in the 1960s. Along the way the novel delves deeply into the destructive nature of life and the need for forgiveness.