Showing results by narrator "Christopher Lane" in All Categories

Timothy Freshwater's father can't control him, his mother is always out of town, and now the boy too smart for his own good has been expelled from the last school in the city. After he meets Mr. Shen, a mysterious Chinese mailroom clerk at his father's office, Timothy winds up in more trouble than he has ever gotten himself into.

Although not fully recovered from the injuries he suffered while preventing a terrorist attack in Targets of Deception - Stephens's self-published first novel - Jordan Sandor returns into service when an Iranian defector brings word of a secret alliance among Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.

CIA agent Jordan Sandor's mission is more complex and has more at stake than any he has faced before. From Bermuda to the United Kingdom, from France to the deserts of Iraq, Jordan must face down villains both known and unknown, recognized and hidden, as he struggles to prevent the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. Needing more help than ever, Sandor calls upon his usual group of talented associates.

When Jordan Sandor resigned from active service with the Central Intelligence Agency, it was before September 11th, before the fall of Saddam Hussein, and before the world had so dramatically changed. He is reluctantly drawn back into action when a series of violent events leads him to suss out a new al-Qaeda conspiracy to initiate cataclysmic assaults with poison gas.

All the bureaucratic scolding in Washington won't stop CIA Agent Jordan Sandor when he's hungry for revenge. His newest target: Venezuelan drug lord Adina, a coldblooded sociopath with a taste for slaughtering innocent people - including Sandor's close friend. Despite stern warnings from his superiors, Sandor mobilizes a team of skilled, dedicated agents to secretly penetrate the Venezuelan jungle.

Late October, 1962. Wes Avery, a one-time air force tail-gunner, is living his version of the American Dream as loving husband to Sarah, doting father to 17-year-old Charlotte, and owner of a successful Texaco station along central Florida's busiest highway. But after President Kennedy announces that the Soviets have nuclear missiles in Cuba, army convoys clog the highways and the sky fills with fighter planes. Within days, Wes' carefully constructed life begins to unravel.

Thirty years hasn't changed Las Vegas - the desert just got dirtier. The biggest game in town centers on a massive, deadly roller coaster that winds its way through the Strip's most famous attractions. On the first Saturday of every month, twenty-four desperate passengers get strapped into the notorious ride and gamble with their lives in a twisted game of chance, to the thrill of webcast audiences worldwide. One of them will win, and one will die, but the other twenty-two will escape with nothing but their lives.

Junior exec Ben thought working for a prestigious bank in Hong Kong would be a career-building adventure and an exotic change from his staid Long Island upbringing. In the complex splendor of Hong Kong, he finds himself in a position of extreme privilege - a position in which everything is seen as a commodity. When he and his colleagues take an outing on the South China Sea to escape the city smog, a sordid secret is revealed.

Donald S. Crowley was a CPA by day; a bean counter; a number cruncher and a certified bore. By night he was as stimulating as the hero in his latest read with all the social skills of a brick and to make matters worse he was in love with a door. Not just any door, number four was special. Her alluring smile had caught Donald's eye when he was just a boy and she called him by name.

They were a family. The young father, haunted by his own parents’ disappointment, can’t manage to complete his doctorate, nor can he imagine being able to earn a living or pursue a career. Just as he comes to terms with being a stay-at-home dad, leaving his wife to provide for the family, she hits him with a shocking surprise. As the father begins to hope for a return to the lifestyle he enjoyed before fatherhood, he finally finds the inspiration to see something through to the end.

A Jewish teenager on the hunt for black-market tight pants and rock records, Svyatoslav somehow fails to develop his undying love for Lyuba into a happy ending. He finds work in a mental institution, runs off to Kiev with one of the patients, marries a few times, has a son, becomes a professor, and halfheartedly runs interference for the KGB.

Detective First Grade Brian McKenna and his partner Cisco Sanchez are chasing a killer that all of New York City is rooting for, a vigilante of supreme technical skill, physical power, and intelligence who signs himself "Justice." Justice is executing drug dealers, helping the police close unsolved cases, and providing those in need with stolen drug money - creating a nightmare for the police commissioner, the mayor, and the two detectives

Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles - worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client - all in the same instant?

Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer, provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women's increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era - the belief in self-actualization and expression - being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one's existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.

Ben Riller is the most successful producer on Broadway, but his newest production is in danger of closing before it opens. In his stressed-out condition, Ben is hearing the voice of his long-dead father, and they're having a running argument about life, love, and other people's money.

Prospecting was a lonely business for Tappan, but his burro Jenet was good company, and more. She knew the trails and waterholes better than Tappan, from the scorching heat and poison air of Death Valley to the blinding blizzards of Arizona's mountains. Jenet tracked with him, faithfully, as his only friend. And he repaid her loyalty with a final, supreme effort of heart, will, and spirit.

From dark and humble beginnings, a master musician rises to take the world by storm. Nick Raze, a violin virtuoso, exists at the height of popularity, while his life remains a well-protected mystery. A year of artist-in-residency in Chicago introduces him to a man who offers him his first friendship and a woman who offers him his first taste of love. Now Nick must make a choice to fight against the bonds of his past in order to escape the isolation of his heart.

A Long Island fishing crew makes a horrific catch: the bodies of an Asian couple dragged up with the trawl from the Atlantic. Homicide cop Buddy Lock knows there isn’t a chance in hell that this is some tragic accident. But as soon as his investigation begins, so do the warnings to back off. They’re not only coming from within the NYPD; they’re hitting close to Buddy’s heart: His new family has become the killer’s target.

Celebrated for more than fifty years as a world-renowned novelist, essayist, and political figure and commentator, Gore Vidal is less known for the exquisitely crafted short fiction he wrote as a young man. Like the work of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, his stories have been overshadowed by the author’s triumphs writing in other genres. Still, Vidal’s short fiction offers us a portrait of the young artist in the 1940s and 1950s. His subtle and comic tales often center on adolescence and homosexual themes.

After seven years of exile, Justin Hacker returns to his hometown of Nogales, Arizona, to try and break his younger brother out of a Mexican prison where he waits to be hanged for crimes he didn't commit. But first, Justin must overcome certain obstacles—such as a town bully, a Mexican bandito and his gang, being stranded naked on the desert, an Indian attack, a father who has vowed to shoot him on sight should he return to Nogales, and matching wits with a maniacal prison warden who hates gringos.

The brain worm plague decimated the human population, destroying civilization as man knew it. Infected animals turned into bloodthirsty killing machines, spreading the diseased worms animating their bodies. A year later, an intrepid Jack Russell terrier leads a diverse fellowship of animal companions struggling to stay alive in this apocalyptic world. When the safety of their lair is compromised, the motley pack embarks on a dangerous journey to find a new home.