Showing results by narrator "Anne Hancock" in All Categories

Imagine a visiting-nurse service with hot young guys as caregivers. What golden girl wouldn't dig that? Valerie Palka is a savvy businesswoman who is obsessed with keeping her elderly mom, Helen, safe from all the lethal disasters that can befall widows living alone. Helen thinks the workaholic Valerie should focus on having as much luck in the bedroom as she does in the boardroom.

When Rachel and her mother move to Mrs. Moore's house - the one with right next to the Line - Rachel starts questioning things. There are so many rumors of the horrible things that lie beyond the Line - in a place called Away - but no one dares to talk about it. And it's no use asking questions, especially of Mrs. Moore, who has always lived by the Line, or of her mother. But then, Rachel comes across a recorded message - one that could only have come from Away. And the voice on the recorder is asking for help...

When Rachel crosses "The Line" she leaves behind everything she has ever known and enters a strange new world: Away. Life there is hard, and survival is never guaranteed. The rules are different away, and Rachel has a lot to learn. The people of Away - the same people she's always been told are dangerous and untrustworthy - have gifts she's never thought possible.

Old Mother Duck's six little ducklings are her pride and joy. But it's very hard work teaching ducklings how to behave and keeping them safe. Sometimes their curiosity makes them forget her warnings not to talk to strangers, not to stray too far from her, and to come in from the rain. Children will identify with these gentle stories where nothing bad happens but the lessons and consequences are clear. A hundred years after Katharine Pyle's delightful tale was written, the same principle holds true: mother knows best.

Jean Grayson is traveling alone to visit her sister out west when a terrible accident occurs and she is saved from certain death by a stranger. Together they make their perilous way through the wilderness. His name is Jasper Holt, and their care for each other blossoms on their journey. But Holt warns Jean that when they reach the safety of their destination, she'll find that her relatives and the townsfolk have nothing good to say about him.

Jamie MacFarlane has returned a hero from the Great War but with a stubborn chest wound. The government has sent him to their new thermal springs hospital in California “where it was hoped that the brilliant sunshine, the fruits, and the clean air, the eternal summer of a beneficent land” would heal him. But nothing has worked and with his parents now deceased and no one to care for him, it seems the next step is a camp rife with tuberculosis. Realizing this, Jamie begins his Great Adventure on foot toward the ocean.

Sue Ives and Stephen Bellamy are charged with the murder of Stephen’s wife Mimi, found stabbed in an uninhabited cottage on a Long Island estate. The eight-day trial introduces a trove of witnesses (some reliable, some not); an avuncular defense attorney who may be incompetent; a wily and relentless prosecutor; and the voracious members of the press and public captivated by a crime that lays bare the intrigues and jealousies of the country club set. Two of the reporters, a veteran, and a rookie attending her first murder trial, act as a Greek chorus commenting on unfolding events.

Hitty is a doll, so a listener would be forgiven for assuming that this is a story written only for little girls. But Hitty's tale which spans a century, told from her perch in a New York antique shop, includes a hazardous journey on a whaling vessel, a stint as assistant to an Indian snake charmer, and, like Moses, abandonment in a basket on a muddy river. This is a story of adventure.

Eleanor H. Porter’s most famous literary creation is Pollyanna, but she isn’t the only precocious young girl to spring from the author’s pen. Mary Marie Anderson describes herself as “a cross-current and a contradiction", the offspring of incompatible parents who couldn’t even agree about her name. When the two divorce when she is thirteen, Mary Marie is delighted since she’s always liked being different. None of the other girls have two homes and spend six months with each parent! Father will remain in their small town and mother will live in Boston with her family.

Running away from an abusive stepmother, a little girl scrambles across London rooftops, a favorite hiding place. She peers through a window and sees a man apparently burglarizing a studio, but quickly realizes that she has witnessed the aftermath of a murder when the man puts a gun in the hand of a body on the floor. When she cries out he glimpses her and she escapes in terror. Very soon after, she is sent to live with her deceased mother’s aristocratic family and her secret is kept from the police.

According to legend, in 1910, Marie Belloc Lowndes attended a London dinner party where a guest told her that his mother’s butler and cook claimed they had once rented rooms to Jack the Ripper, the notorious mass murderer. The idea for “The Lodger” was born. Mr. and Mrs. Bunting have sunk their savings into their house with plans to let rooms. But no lodgers have materialized, and they are on the verge of penury when, one foggy night, a knock on the door brings Mr. Sleuth, an unassuming gentleman whose needs are perfectly suited to the suite of rooms the Buntings have to rent.