Showing results by narrator "Nick Santa Maria" in All Categories

During the difficult decade encompassed by the years 1933-43, a commanding figure blazed his way through a legion of Depression-era supercriminals, Nazi spies and saboteurs. He was wealthy criminologist Richard Wentworth. He was also secretly The Spider!

G-8 and his Battle Aces rode the nostalgia boom 10 years after World War I ended. These high-flying exploits were tall tales of a World War that might have been, featuring monster bats, German zombies, wolf-men, harpies, Martians, and even tentacled floating monsters. Most of these monstrosities were the work of Germany's seemingly endless supply of mad scientists, chief of whom was G-8's recurring Nemesis, Herr Doktor Krueger.

White slavery, the loathsome traffic in women's bodies - and souls - was stripping America of wives, sisters and sweethearts. Richard Wentworth, valiant champion of human rights, knew that an Oriental master criminal was captaining the slavery syndicate, guessed the unspeakable purpose behind those wholesale abductions. But with Nita hopelessly lost, with G-men harrying him relentlessly, can the Spider outwit his most formidable foeman and save America's doomed womanhood?

When terror suddenly boarded a little tramp steamer and left crimson havoc littering its narrow decks, a spluttering wireless flashed the doom of every living thing aboard. Within a week, the same ghastly fate struck a gigantic new ocean liner, its luxurious cabins occupied by the elite and powerful of a dozen different nations! Death - swift and terrible - rode the ocean lanes. And the Spider - taken for once off guard - was supposedly dying in a hospital room on the very day when that terror from the seas first showed itself above the city skyline.

By 1939, Richard Wentworth had been operating as the Spider for nearly six harrowing years. He had been through everything a good pulp hero could expect to face. Malevolent master villains. Sinister Asian world conquerors. Mad scientists more diabolical than anything conceived before that point. And of course since the Spider was a wanted criminal, endless police officials, uniformed cops, homicide detectives and other officers of the law had been pursuing him with single-minded fervor.

For 10 grim years, the Spider battled the underworld, imprinting his scarlet seal on the bodies of the criminals he slew. No one knew his name. His face was unknown. Pursued by the police, sought by the mob, the Master of Men crushed crime with a blazing intensity never witnessed before or since. Now he's back with a vengeance in a new series of audiobooks retelling his pulp-pounding exploits, as chronicled by Norvell W. Page, writing as Grant Stockbridge.

Hell Gate tells the story of Suzanne Heath, a ticket vendor for Luna Park in 1909 Coney Island. The Boardwalk in those days was a garish, noisy place filled with bizarre shows, death-defying roller coasters, and wild and unusual shows. It is home to the tawdry, the grotesque and the unusual. A reluctant psychic, Suzanne has been approached by police Lieutenant Granger as a last chance effort to help discover and stop a killer all of whose victims have been found horribly mutilated.

Cursed Be the Child by Mort Castle is a classic horror novel of possession and revenge. Lisette has been dead for nearly a century, but she is very determined to get payback on the big, cruel world that betrayed her. This is not a book for the faint-of-heart. It is a story of a tormented soul, that of a murdered child, Lisette, who was raped and killed when she was only five years old.

In the heart of New York's Chinatown, on his imperial throne, guarded by swordsmen and gunmen and a labyrinth of death traps, sat the archcriminal of all time. Master of life and death, of disease, of horrible, crawling things - the emperor of vermin released destruction over city and nation. The Spider, Master of Men, champion of humanity, fought with every ounce of his cunning against the monster who personified evil incarnate.

Dr. Sheila Takamura, a young, dedicated oncologist, is proud to be involved in the clinical trials. Once the FDA approves it for widespread use, VG723 will revolutionize cancer therapy. That is why she's alarmed when former patients return with bizarre syndromes. Yes, they're cancer free, but they're experiencing dramatic changes in their hair and skin and general appearance. When she investigates a possible link to the protocol, those patients start dying.

This is the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with a whisper - a whisper of wings! Death has come out of Africa in the form of swarms of vicious African flies. A living plague, these monstrous bugs cannot be battled like some ordinary disease. Medical science is unable to prevent the deadly autoimmune reaction caused by the bite of these insects. Across the world, billions are dead and more are constantly dying. Governments are falling everywhere, and civilization is collapsing.

Deep-hidden in evil, Satan's Suicide Club sat in council - and men died. What dreadful force drove these men, leaders of society with everything to live for, to end their lives at the behest of that sinister being who sardonically called himself Professor Mephisto? And why did men and women suffer the tortures of the damned, rather than defy this mysterious being? Richard Wentworth once more assumes the cloak of the Spider to free these lost ones from a living hell and a disgraceful death - and steps into the jaws of a devil's trap that casts his life among the lives in pawn!

Back in 1936, an obscure New Orleans pulp writer named Lars Anderson created a remarkable character for an even more obscure girlie magazine, Saucy Romantic Adventures. She is the slinky sleuth celebrated today as one of the rare pioneering pulp heroines of the Great Depression, the Domino Lady!

Held once each generation and attended by the greatest mages in the world, the Auction offered a prize of incredible power to the winner. But, what happened to those bidders whose offers didn't meet the final price? Valerie Lancaster had no desire to attend the Auction. But when her father was murdered for his invitation, she knew she had to go to find his killer - and keep from being slain herself. It's the Devil's Auction. Accompanied by her father's friend, Alex Warner, Valerie found herself confronted by werewolves, golems and the most powerful sorcerers in the world.

How do you fight a menace that strikes without warning - that disintegrates flesh and blood and stone to mere chemical atoms? Men flee in blind panic from the merest rumor of a new attack, and even the Spider - dodging the death blasts - can find at first no weapon with which to combat this new and devastating evil that obliterates its victims in the fraction of time between two heartbeats!

For our latest Spider audiobook, we've jumped ahead in time to 1939 and one of the most dramatic and horrific exploits of Richard Wentworth's nightmarish career. "Exploits" might not be the operative term for Claws of the Golden Dragon. It's actually one of the most intense ordeals the Master of Men ever endured in his decade-long career as a crime hunter. And that's saying a hell of a lot!

The Man Who Ruled in Hell pits the Master of Men against The Red Hand, a vicious supercriminal who has audaciously unionized New York's Underworld. But how can Richard Wentworth overcome this new threat when he himself has been cast in prison? This thrilling Spider audiobook features acclaimed voice talent Nick Santa Maria, who has made the Spider his own! Also included is Arthur Leo Zagat's "Doc Turner - Slave Buyer," read by Roy Worley.

A faceless terrorist calling himself the Green Hand has unleashed a corrosive gas on the lumber town of Elkhorn, Michigan, killing its inhabitants - by stripping the living meat from their bones! His next victim will be another Michigan hamlet. And this unknown monster vows to keep snuffing out entire cities until Washington pays him a $5 billion ransom. But the Green Hand has reckoned without another powerful force: the Spider!

This exciting audiobook also includes two short stories, "Killer's Knout" by Anson Hatch and G. T. Fleming Roberts' "The Standing Corpse".

When the underworld united in one compact army of crime, the Spider - his prestige gone - faced the most vicious collection of criminals and degenerate killers ever assembled under one dark banner of bloody social war! How can Richard Wentworth, robbed of Kirkpatrick and Nita, renew the Spider-fear, which alone can bring him victory from a menace that is making casualty columns of our daily papers and filling our institutions with driveling victims of the new madness?