Showing results by narrator "Maria McCann" in All Categories

I’ve coveted a lot of valuables in my life. Magic was never one of them. My plan was to spend my days on a little team-building, a headquarters’ renovation, and an overdue date with a smoking-hot shifter. Instead, I’m stuck learning to wield a magic as unpredictable as my nature. As the first known shifter witch hybrid, my sexy alpha werewolf isn't the only one pressuring me to join ranks. The local coven is determined to get me under control. With their rules and rituals, they're worse than a supernatural H.O.A. Too bad, I'm allergic to being told what to do.

The story begins in 1940s Palestine, where twins Rasheed and Rasheeda Dinar work in the family’s inn. When Rasheed falls in love with Natalia, a Jewish woman, he applies what he learned from the Jesuit priest who mentored him to his budding relationship, but by then relations between Arabs and Jews have become tense. And when those tensions come to a breaking point, Natalia mysteriously disappears, and Rasheed and Rasheeda are chased out of Palestine forced to flee to Beirut, Lebanon. As the years pass and the Dinar family expands and enters the 1970s, their convictions are tested.

We don’t typically think of experiences like illness, death, betrayal, job loss, burnout, or accidents as the doorway to a more fulfilling and beautiful life. Yet, if you know how to look at these challenges in a different light, they can be powerful opportunities to turn your life around—in small and large ways.

I’m rejecting him—even if my heart doesn’t agree. Atlas Arcturus is trouble. I knew it from the start. I knew it from the second he kissed me after I agreed to be his pretend girlfriend. But I seriously underestimated how one alpha heir could take my heart and destroy it.

It wasn’t until I lost everything—my home, my marriage, even my career—that I started to wonder if our “family curse” might be more than an unfortunate turn of phrase. Now turning forty-five, the age at which every woman in my family dies, I need answers not only for myself but for my two daughters. And I’ll see every specialist in the country if that’s what it takes. But when a lifelong friend discovers a link between my strange family history and an abandoned estate, I can't pass up the opportunity to learn what happened before the death certificates started piling up.

In 1985, three Harvard archaeology graduate students travel to Peru for a backpacking trip to seek adventure, culture, and historic sites. While exploring undiscovered Incan ruins on the remote eastern frontier of the old empire, the friends witness an unspeakable crime. Their enchanting trip becomes a primal fight for survival. The three friends must come to terms with their experiences, and each student's recovery and healing process becomes intensely personal and continues for decades. This is a story of exploration, endurance, and the cruelty of lost love.

When the Bough Breaks presents a breakthrough concept of mourning, documenting the process of evolution from initial grief to an altered outlook on life. Excerpts from interviews with fifty parents who lost a child from age five to forty-five trace the road from utter devastation to a revised view of life, resulting in a work that is a tribute to resilience and the indomitable human spirit.

Turns out, the only difference between a felony and acquisitions is who’s bankrolling my heist. I’m about to go from scrounging up enough tip money to make rent to pulling six figures. I’ll finally put those years stealing for my old alpha to good use. Only this time, I’ll be the one calling the shots. My crew. My way. When a witch starts dabbling in forbidden magic, the Enclave sends me after the demon artifact fueling her power. The job should be simple, except they can’t point me to the culprit or tell me what I’m after.

Avery Stone will do anything to have the family she didn't have growing up—even marry a man she doesn't love. Or at least that was the plan until she woke up on her wedding day with feet so cold she might as well name them Elsa…from Frozen, get it? After asking her deceased Grammy for a sign that she is doing the right thing, she receives a news alert on her phone announcing the newest cast member of Fairytale Love, who just happens to be the man she shared the best two weeks of her life with five years earlier and who she's loved and pined after ever since.

Ashe has lived an isolated, quiet life taking care of her twin sisters within their cabin in the woods. They are arctic wolf shifters, the rarest and most sought after lineage in the paranormal world. While their family was once the ruling alpha pack, an uprising exiled them and landed them in the Great Woods. Shortly after, their parents vanished, leaving Ashe to care for her sisters and to ensure they're never found.

After raising twin girls as a single father and spending his days on construction sites, Ford was ready to live out his early retirement on his terms, which included solitude and fishing. So he ditched the big city, moved to a town the size of a postage stamp, and bought a house in the middle of nowhere without a neighbor in sight. His recluse plans hit a snag when the abandoned house down the road is suddenly inhabited by a woman who bears a striking resemblance to his childhood crush and her four kids.

No rest for the weary, right? Alex has barely strapped on her magical training wheels when a gorgon slithers into town! Medusa isn’t just seeking asylum, either. She expects Alex’s help in breaking her own family’s infamous curse. Old hatred runs deep in creatures with such long memories, and keeping the entire town from going after Medusa with their own torches and pitchforks may prove impossible.

Today, people and groups who disagree on an issue are less likely to send threatening letters, hold demonstrations, or riot. They are more likely to hire professional assassins to resolve the issue. The government has experienced an increasing number of assassinations: members of Congress, government agencies, and VIPs. Desperate, Congress directed the creation of an Anti-Terrorist Group and gave Home Land Security two and one-half years to produce the first anti-terrorist agents.

After years of being signed up to every matchmaking site known to man, speed dating, getting set up by well-meaning (if somewhat delusional) friends and family, and even applying for the reality TV show Fairytale Love to find her prince charming, Kennedy Dawes was starting to lose hope. On the advice of her therapist, she'd written down—in excruciating detail—everything she was looking for in an attempt to manifest her Mr. Right. There was just one problem—she couldn't get Mr. Wrong out of her mind.

How fast can charity fundraiser CeCe Barclay’s unimpeachable society life come tumbling down? One minute she’s speaking before Chicago’s glitterati. The next, her financier husband is wanted for embezzlement. Her assets seized and her fall mortifyingly public, CeCe grasps for refuge—and employment—as a sorority housemom at Eli Whitney University, her daughter Hayden’s alma mater.

Why did they come? When they appeared across the sky, speculation wheeled around the world—the aliens were from heaven, the invaders were from hell… or they were proof that neither existed. But when they landed, curiosity gave way to suspicion and the nations reacted with nuclear force, setting off a chain reaction that left the world in ruins. Twenty years later, instead of nearing her retirement, Dr. Elspeth Darrow struggles to forget the loss of her child and husband by plunging herself into the work of operating the last remaining hospital in San Francisco.

I’m a costume shop owner, not a demon hunter. My life was supposed to be filled with tequila shots and vintage clothing. But when I accidentally unleash a demon on Kansas City, the Tribunal labels me a walking menace. Then, they give me a two-week ultimatum—send him back to hell or face the consequences. The only problem? I have no idea how to do that.

As a scrawny goat shifter in a pack of werewolves, my role is to get into places they can't go. The alpha who took me in after my parents died molded me into a master thief. For four long years, he's lined his pockets, while I've taken all the risks. Now he's sending me after the magical artifact he's chased for years. This is my chance to escape. All I have to do is pull off the biggest heist I've ever attempted, escape the seethe of vampires I'm about to rob, and ditch the wolves who watch my every move.

Some women settle for charm bracelets. I get a murder of crows tattooed on my body. And that's the good news. After sending a demon back to hell, I thought I'd have a few weeks to kick back with my girls, go on that hot date with a certain stony-eyed enforcer, maybe even catch an outdoor concert or two. When witches start turning up dead, the Tribunal calls in a favor that lands me in the middle of a supernatural murder investigation. Again. When that search intertwines with a decade-old trail into my sister's death, there is nothing I won’t do to get answers.

And She Was Never the Same Again is about you. It is about your family and your friends, everyone you've ever met, and all the strangers you have yet to meet. It takes you on a journey of gains and losses that stretch generations, cultures, identities, and decades of time. It awakens you to the inevitable and makes you look at things most people want to avoid seeing. It explores near-death experiences; medical, individual, and intergenerational trauma; the stigmatized death of a partner; perfectionism; athletics.