Showing results by narrator "Bahni Turpin" in All Categories

Visiting her family's South Carolina estate, socialite Gray Godfrey wakes from a night out to an empty bed. Her husband, Paul, is gone, and a thrashing hangover has wiped her memory clean. At first, she's relieved for the break from her tumultuous marriage; perhaps Paul just needed some space. But when his car is found abandoned on the highway, Gray must face the truth: Paul is gone. And Gray may not want him found. Her life is unraveling. When a stranger named Annie calls claiming to know Paul's whereabouts, Gray reluctantly accepts her help.

Kay’s life is pretty boring. She goes to school, spends quiet evenings at home with her foster mom, and has the occasional brush with mischief thanks to her best and only friend Will. But everything is about to change. One night, Kay tags along on another one of Will’s adventures, and they both end up recruited by a talking fox to become Netherjacks, protectors of all the worlds. Once they arrive at the training academy, though, Will is paired with a legendary Netherwing mount and quickly rises in the trainee ranks, leaving Kay behind with barely a glance.

Mary B. Addison killed a baby. Allegedly. She didn't say much in that first interview with detectives, and the media filled in the only blanks that mattered: a white baby had died while under the care of a churchgoing black woman and her nine-year-old daughter. The public convicted Mary and the jury made it official. But did she do it?

Patricia Campbell's life has never felt smaller. Her ambitious husband is too busy to give her a goodbye kiss in the morning, her kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she's always a step behind on thank-you notes and her endless list of chores. The one thing she has to look forward to is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime and paperback fiction. At these meetings they're as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are marriage, motherhood, and neighborhood gossip.

Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where Black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver. There's Aibileen, raising her 17th white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another.

Viva Durant, New Orleans’ youngest detective, is on a quest to solve a jazzy mystery. Every summer, Viva heads to New Orleans to spend time with her loving but stern Grandmother, known as Gram. After Gram reads Viva an article in the local paper about a missing treasure related to the world-famous song, “Miss Mary Mack”, Viva heads through the Crescent City on an epic adventure to track down the treasure. The clues lead Viva to the French Quarter, a jazz club, a creepy cemetery, and even the circus.

After her life was turned upside down by solving the murder of her best friend, Sister Amity Gay, all Glory Brousard wanted was a little peace and quiet. That included getting back to her Sunday morning routine as a bookie in a coffee shop, and planning the annual Mardi Gras gala for her church. But there’s no rest for Glory once the woman who broke up her marriage walks in to CC's Coffee House and asks for help finding her missing husband. It doesn’t take long before Glory finds him . . . with a knife impaled in his chest.

Zélie remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. When different clans ruled - Burners igniting flames, Tiders beckoning waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoning forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, anyone with powers was targeted and killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope. Only a few people remain with the power to use magic, and they must remain hidden.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a strange book hidden in the library stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood. Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to a subterranean library, hidden far below the surface of the earth.

It’s Mardi Gras time in New Orleans, and Viva Durant, the young sleuth, is taking a break from mystery solving to celebrate with her family. Paired up with her precocious pal Reece, Viva’s too busy navigating the daunting world of debutantes too get caught up in the unsolved cases of Crescent City. But the festivities take a sharp turn when there’s a blackout at the Mardi Gras Ball—and Viva’s grandmother goes missing!

In this radiant, highly anticipated debut, a cast of unforgettable women battle for independence while a maelstrom of change threatens their Jamaican village. Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis-Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate.

Three women are tied together by blood, love and family secrets. Potent, poetic, powerful, told with deep love, and spanning from the Great Migration through the civil unrest of the ‘60s to the cultural shift of the early 2000s, Denene Millner’s beautifully wrought novel is a hymn to Black motherhood, exploring three women’s intimate struggle with generational trauma and healing.

Now that she’s returned to New Orleans for Thanksgiving break, Viva is charged with figuring out the truth behind a mysterious bout of illness traced back to a local creole restaurant called Madame Bouchard’s. Were customers poisoned on purpose, or was it a simple cooking mistake? And who could be behind the chaos? Viva only has a week to solve the culinary mystery, and to do so, she’ll have to contend with a longtime rivalry, rumors of voodoo magic, and Thanksgiving dinner with her extended family!

Travel the Nine Worlds with your favourite characters from the world of Magnus Chase in a brand-new series of adventures. Find out why Amir Fadlan hates clothes shopping in Midgard, see how Mallory Keen learns in icy Niflheim that insulting a dragon can be a good idea, and join Alex Fierro as they play with fire (and a disco sword) in the home of the fire giants, Muspellheim.

Fifteen years old and blazing with the hope of a better life, Hattie Shepherd fled the horror of the American South on a dawn train bound for Philadelphia. Hattie’s is a tale of strength, of resilience and heartbreak that spans six decades. Her American dream is shattered time and again: a husband who lies and cheats and nine children raised in a cramped little house that was only ever supposed to be temporary.

Snagging a date? Not a problem. But one that meets my special requirements? As the premier best-man-for hire in all of Manhattan, I promise discretion, so when I need a plus one for a couple of I dos, she needs to be A-Plus in reliability. Fortunately, I have a brilliant solution in asking my best friend's sister to go on my arm. Truly is my good friend, too, and I trust her completely.

It all starts with a school essay. Twelve-year-old Gratuity “Tip” Tucci is assigned to write five pages on “The True Meaning of Smekday” for the National Time Capsule contest, and she’s not sure where to begin: When her mom started telling everyone about the messages aliens were sending through a mole on the back of her neck? Maybe on Christmas Eve, when huge, bizarre spaceships descended to Earth, and aliens - called the Boov - abducted her mother?

It's 1986, the heart of the Cold War. Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She's brilliant and talented, but she's also a black woman working in an all-white boys' club, and her career has stalled with routine paperwork - until she's recruited to a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic, revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention. In the year that follows, Marie will observe Thomas, seduce him and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down.

1915. May and Naomi are extended family, their grandmothers’ lives inseparably entwined on a Virginia plantation in the volatile time leading up to the Civil War. For both women, the twentieth century promises social transformation and equal opportunity. May, a young white woman, is on the brink of achieving the independent life she’s dreamed of since childhood. Naomi, a nurse, mother, and leader of the NAACP, has fulfilled her own dearest desire: buying a home for her family. But they both are about to learn that dreams can be destroyed in an instant.

Andrea Vernon always thought she would spend her life living in Paris writing thought-provoking historical novels all day and sipping wine on the Seine all night. But the reality is she's drowning in debt, has no prospects, and is forced to move back to Queens, where her parents remind her daily that they are very interested in grandchildren. Then, one morning, she is kidnapped, interviewed, and hired as an administrative assistant by the Corporation for UltraHuman Protection. Superheroes for hire, using their powers for good. What could possibly go wrong?