Showing results by narrator "Christina Delaine" in All Categories

From mild mannered coworkers to doting parents. Some might be your jack-of-all-trades friend, or others might be your family member with an altruistic persona. The Best New True Crime Stories: Well-Mannered Crooks, Rogues & Criminals takes you deeper into the unconventional criminal's psyche. The ones where their most prominent feature isn't a bloodied knife, but a bright smile and warm gaze meant to lure their next victim.

Fame is rare in Driftwood - it's hard to get famous if you don't stick around long enough for people to know you. But many know the guide Last, a one-blooded survivor who has seen his world end many lifetimes ago. For Driftwood is a strange place of slow apocalypses, where continents eventually crumble into mere neighborhoods, pulled inexorably toward the center in the Crush. Cultures clash, countries fall, and everything eventually disintegrates.

Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: Climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects.

LAPD detective Cassandra Lee is known for her single-mindedness, and right now she's got only one goal: track down the Bonebreaker, the man who murdered her father. But her quest for justice is derailed when LA comes under attack. The Aztec Empire, a Central American group determined to take back the US territories that their Spanish ancestors once controlled, has led a mutant army into California.

Sarah Price wants a career in politics. But she has a secret past that won't stay past, threatening her job on a San Diego congressman's reelection campaign. Casey Cheng wants a story. An ambitious local television reporter, Casey needs to get her career back on track after being seriously injured in a mass shooting. When she investigates the man who nearly killed her, she finds a connection to a group of online harassers called #TrueMen - and realizes her shooter may not be the only killer they have inspired.

Modern gods and goddesses, remote, revered - and like the pantheon of heroes and heroines of ancient myth - possessing great power tempered with flaws. Now, find within this anthology great tales by gifted and award-winning authors who move superheroes from the four-color panels of comic books to the fantastic pages of fiction, stories that will remind anyone who ever wanted to wear a cape or don a cowl of the extraordinary powers of the imagination!

Nearly every aspect of our criminal justice system encourages defendants-whether innocent or guilty-to take a plea deal. Punishment Without Trial showcases how plea bargaining has undermined justice at every turn and across socioeconomic and racial divides. It forces the hand of lawyers, judges, and defendants, turning our legal system into a ruthlessly efficient mass incarceration machine that is dogging our jails and pun­ishing citizens.

Each disparate object described in this book - a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a Greek love poem, an island in the Pacific - shares a common fate: It no longer exists, except as the dead end of a paper trail. Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, or Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of 12 specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and, taken as a whole, opens mesmerizing new vistas of how we can think about extinction and loss.

On February 21, 1992, 22-year-old Brian Bechtold walked into a police station in Port St. Joe, Florida, and confessed that he’d shot and killed his parents in their family home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said he’d been possessed by the devil. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ruled “not criminally responsible” for the murders on grounds of insanity. But after the trial, where do the "criminally insane" go?

At the deteriorating Pheasant Run, the occupants keep their secrets and sadnesses locked tight behind closed apartment doors. Kind Leo Umberti, formerly an insurance agent, now quietly spends his days painting abstract landscapes and mourning a long-ago loss. Down the hall, retired professor Rydell Clovis tries desperately to stay fit enough to restart a career in academia. Cassie McMackin, on the same floor, has seemingly lost everything - her husband and only child dead within months of each other - leaving her loosely tethered to this world.

Like many Americans in the middle of the 21st century, aspiring actress Kira Clark is in debt. She financed her drama education with loans secured by a “lifetime services contract”. If she defaults, her creditors will control every aspect of her life. Behind on her payments and facing foreclosure, Kira reluctantly accepts a large signing bonus to become a corporate gunfighter for TKC Insurance. After a year of training, she will take her place on the dueling fields that have become the final, lethal stop in the American legal system.

Injured in a bombing, war correspondent Kate Tessler returns to her hometown in Arizona to recover. For the first time in her life, she's starting to feel her age of nearly fifty despite living like a teenager again: staying in her childhood bedroom with only a cat for company, trying to understand why her sister resents her so much, and running into people who still refer to her as Kitty. The hardest part? Seeing her once sharp and witty mother stuck in an Alzheimer's unit.

Still recovering from an injury that might have permanently derailed her career as an international war correspondent, Kate Tessler is living in her childhood bedroom and pondering her second act when another case lands in her lap. Kate's father and his coffee group are worried. Their friend Larry married a younger woman who now insists he has dementia and won't let any of his friends visit. They're convinced that Larry's wife and her two adult, dead-beat kids are out to steal his money. Can Kate help?

Martin, a market analyst, and Lily, a corporate attorney, have a life that many would envy - they share an expensive New York apartment with their twin toddlers, sample the delicacies of Manhattan's finest restaurants, and take Caribbean vacations. But when the couple's nanny announces her imminent departure, they panic: How will they ever find a replacement capable of managing their spirited boys? Enter Maeve, a young Irish emigre.

On a sunny September day in 1931, Soviet spy Stanislav Shumovsky walked down the gangplank of the SS Europa and into New York, concealed in a group of 65 Soviet students. Joseph Stalin had sent him to acquire American secrets to help close the USSR’s yawning technology gap. In this thrilling history, Svetlana Lokhova takes the listener on a journey through Stalin’s most audacious intelligence operation, piecing together every aspect of Shumovsky’s life and character using information derived from American and Russian archives.

Steadfast in fighting crime, but operating outside the police force - and sometimes even the law - is the private detective. Driven by his own moral code, he is a shadowy figure in a trench coat standing on a street corner, his face most likely obscured by a tilted fedora, a lit cigarette dangling from his hand. The hard-boiled detective is known by his dark past, private pain, and powers of deduction. He only asks questions - never answers them. In his stories he is both the main character and the narrator.

Fun, bright, and playful, Power Pop is a sometimes adored, sometimes maligned, often misunderstood genre of music. From its heyday in the '70s and '80s to its resurgence in the '90s and '00s, Power Pop has meant many things to many people. In Go Further, editors Paul Myers and S. W. Lauden have a whole new crop of writers going deep on what certain Power Pop bands and songs mean and have meant to them. Whether they love or hate it, Go Further is a dive into the Beatles-inspired pop rock of the last five decades.

This quartet of crime stories about deadly books, penned by award-winning contemporary mystery writers, includes The Little Men, What's in a Name?, The Book of the Lion, and From the Queen.

When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife Meghan find their daughter Maisie shaken and bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever handled, and a letter laying out impossible demands regarding its future.

Over the last decade, author and activist Astra Taylor has helped shift the national conversation on topics including technology, inequality, indebtedness, and democracy. The essays collected here reveal the range and depth of her thinking, with Taylor tackling the rising popularity of socialism, the problem of automation, the politics of listening, the possibility of rights for the natural and nonhuman world, the future of the university, the temporal challenge of climate catastrophe, and more.