Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

Before there was the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles was a rough place, building its way out to the global city of today. In the late 19th century it was a rapidly growing city filled with pimps and prostitutes, Chinese railwaymen, robbers, smugglers, and corrupt politicians. It was a city where losers and dreamers from all over the world could came to make their fortune.

In prose that is darkly humorous and alive with detail, Valiant Gentlemen reimagines the lives and intimate friendships of humanitarian and Irish patriot Roger Casement; his closest friend, Herbert Ward; and Ward's extraordinary wife, the Argentinian American heiress Sarita Sanford.

One frigid, January morning in Manhattan, a new father, racked by sleep deprivation, decides to let his wife sleep in - then spontaneously flees lower Manhattan with the baby for a weekend in the Caribbean. It wasn’t a kidnapping, he wasn’t leaving his wife; he just wanted to spend a little time with the baby and give his wife a break. When the wife awakes, truly rested for the first time in nearly a year, she feels great - and embarks on a city adventure as misguided in its own way as her husband’s impulsive escape. Told from the couple’s alternating points of view, the story unfolds across one life-changing long weekend.

"For Christ sake don’t become a fluffmeister," are the last words Barnaby Griswold gets from his father. But despite trying to turn out otherwise, Barnaby knows himself a fool and already makes his living as a fluffmeister, as a puffer-up of investments. Well-bred, more or less educated, friendly to everyone, Barnaby is in fact foolishly successful. Until he blows it all. At 46, disgraced and broke and lonely, Barnaby must repair his life. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll find out that doing the foolish thing can lead to redemption.

FBI agent Puller Monk is losing his mind. His father passed away six months ago and left him a predisposition for Alzheimer's disease. Add to that a lethal American spy raised by the North Koreans, and Monk's life just got a lot more complicated. Aware of his dark side and willingness to take chances no matter what the risk, Monk is asked by the NSA to go undercover. His mission: find the sleeper spy, infiltrate the contact she's been seducing, and stop her before she carries out her shadowy objective.

During 20 years of almost total darkness in a rat-infested cell, Keith Johnson has had time to plan. So, like a ghost, he has returned to even the score. He has no intention of killing his betrayers; he wants to ruin their lives like they ruined his. Johnson's elaborate plan is meant to cause the three to self-destruct, and given their characters, it ought to be easy. But his scheme goes haywire with consequences he neither foresees nor wants.

In July 1942, the French police in Paris, acting for the German military government, arrested Victor Ripp's three-year-old cousin, Alexandre. Two months later, the boy was killed in Auschwitz. In Hell's Traces, Ripp examines this act through the prism of family history. In addition to Alexandre, 10 members of Ripp's family on his father's side died in the Holocaust. His mother's side of the family, numbering 30 people, was in Berlin when Hitler came to power.

The Euganean Hills golf community in northern Italy is a golfer's paradise. With a perpetual smell of freshly cut grass, rolling green plains, and bright blue skies, it seems nothing could go wrong for the tight-knit group that lives there. But the normally laid-back residents are shaken to their cores when one of their own turns up at the club brutally murdered. After discovering his friend's body, investigative journalist Riccardo Ranieri makes it his mission to track down the perpetrator of the heinous crime.

After settlement negotiations between humanity and the alien Tarsalans go horribly wrong, the Earth is engulfed in a mysterious green sphere - blocking all sunlight from reaching the surface. Only two scientists - one isolated on the Moon's lunar colony, the other trapped on a dying Earth - possess the minds and the means to destroy the sphere before it renders the world completely barren...

The Soviet Union is in turmoil. With the election of Gorbachev have come new ideas about freedom, compassion, and openness - ideas that leave no place for the dark machinations of the KGB. Reform is coming to the Soviet intelligence service, unless Victor Ivanovich Kazin can stop it. Kazin is one of the Old Guard, and an agent doesn’t survive three decades in the KGB without being relentless. He is a liar, a cheat, a backstabber - and he is proud of it.

A Swedish army lieutenant drops dead on a shooting range in the African desert. Tragic accident? Or murder? Agent Ernst Grip is sent to uncover the truth. At the same time, Somali pirates kidnap a wealthy Swedish family. Why is no one back home willing to pay the ransom to save these innocent lives? As Grip investigates, he is drawn deep into a web of intrigue, greed and double dealings. And soon he is forced to wonder - in a world where friends become enemies in the blink of an eye, how is it possible for anyone to survive?

A young girl's disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice and the atrocities of war, the latest from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates. Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father's frantic search for the girl, they discover instead the unlikeliest of suspects - a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family.

The German occupation of the Eternal City has ended, the war in Europe is over, the atomic bomb has yet to fall on Japan, and Rome is under the jurisdiction of the victors. An American Vatican prelate and lawyer, Brendan Doherty, is involved in two crusades. Abhorring capital punishment, he means to avert the execution of the Nazi collaborator Pietro Koch. In addition, as devil’s advocate, Doherty intends to prove the hypocrisy of Alessandro Serenelli, the man who 40 years before murdered Maria Goretti. Converted by a vision, Serenelli has spent his life, in prison and out, promoting the beatification of his victim.

Charlie is a sportswriter whose father's unexpected heart attack sets his own biological clock ticking. He decides he wants a family, but he doesn't even have a girlfriend. He enlists the help of Lacy, a single mom who works on the advice desk of their newspaper. The two develop a fast friendship that threatens to become very romantic indeed.