Showing results by narrator "David Colacci" in All Categories

Twelve years ago, Chester Morton disappeared from his hometown in New York, leaving no trace and never to be heard from again. For the past twelve years, his mother has kept the search for her son alive by hounding every law enforcement agency she can get to listen. Now, Chester's body is finally found - hanging from the very billboard that has been advertising his disappearance.

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.

As the dreary, bitter weather of late fall descends on Minneapolis, Detective Nikki Liska is restless. After moving to the cold case squad in order to spend more time with her sons, she misses the rush of pulling an all-nighter, the sense of urgency of hunting a murderer on the loose. Most of all she misses her old partner, Sam Kovac. Sam is having an even harder time adjusting to Nikki's absence, saddled with a green new partner younger than pieces of Sam's wardrobe.

My Ántonia chronicles the life of Ántonia, a Bohemian immigrant woman, as seen through the eyes of Jim, the man unable to forget her. Jim, now a successful New York lawyer, recollects his upbringing on a Nebraska farm. Even after twenty years, Ántonia continues to live a romantic life in his imagination. When he returns to Nebraska, he finds Ántonia has lived a battered life and is now abandoned by the very man to whom she dedicated her life.

Erin McKenna, a beautiful songwriter married to a crooked Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, is kidnapped by Benjamin Armenta, the ruthless leader of the powerful Gulf Cartel. But his demands are as unusual as the crumbling castle in which Erin is kept. She is ordered to compose a unique narcocorrido, a folk ballad that records the exploits of the drug dealers, gunrunners, and outlaws who have populated Mexican history for generations. Under the threat of death, Armenta orders Erin to tell his life story - in music - and write “the greatest narcocorrido of all time.”

Though the fighting has stopped and Hitler is vanquished, a dangerous new war between America and the Soviet Union has begun. Invaluable in defeating the Nazis, accidental crypto-zoologist R. J. MacCready and Yanni Thorne, an indigenous Brazilian and expert in animal behavior, are working for the Pentagon once again. Sent to a mysterious Greek island in a remote corner of the Mediterranean, they are investigating rumors about a volcanic spring with “miraculous” healing properties that the locals say is guarded by sea monsters from ancient legends.

Neither Commissario Brunetti nor his wife Paolo have ever had much sympathy for the Italian armed forces, so when a young cadet is found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice's elite military academy, Brunetti's emotions are complex: pity and sorrow for the death of a boy, close in age to his own son, and contempt and irritation for the arrogance and high-handedness of the boy's teachers and fellow-students.

As Venice experiences a debilitating heatwave, Commissario Brunetti prepares to escape the city and spend time with his family in the mountains. For Ispettore Vianello, however, the weather is the last thing on his mind; it appears his aunt has become obsessed with horoscopes and has been withdrawing large amounts of money from the family business. Not knowing what to do, he consults Brunetti and asks permission to trail her. This ‘unofficial’ investigation leads them to the flat of Stefano Gorini.

On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a man is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the tourists who had been browsing the man's wares before his death - fake handbags of every designer label. Officially termed a venditore ambulante or extracomunitario, the dead man was working as a vu cumpra, one of the many Black Africans purveying goods outside normal shop hours and without work permits. Arriving on the scene, Commissario Brunetti's response matches that of everybody involved: why would anyone kill a vu cumpra?

Sex is everywhere in modern society, yet it remains taboo. We all have questions about sex that are too uncomfortable to ask—how do we get reliable answers? In this go-to guide Drs Grant and Chamberlain use their clinical expertise to answer the questions you wish you could ask about sex.

A luminous spring day in Venice, and Commissario Brunetti and his sidekick Vianello play hooky from the Questura along the Grand Canal to rescue Vianello's friend Marco, who has been arrested during an environmental protest. They get him released, only to be faced by the fury of the man's father-in-law, who owns a glass factory on Murano. The old man is seething with rage, and his daughter shares her fear with Brunetti that he will actually hurt her husband.

The Curtlees are a powerful force in San Francisco, unscrupulous billionaires who’ve lined every important pocket in the Bay Area in pursuit of their own ascent. So when the family’s heir, Ro Curtlee, was convicted of rape and murder a decade ago, the fallout for those who helped to bring him to justice was swift and uncompromising. The jury foreman was fired from his job and blacklisted in his industry.

Ivory's Ghosts is the first comprehensive, contemporary look at the world's most treasured organic material, ivory. Using a wide range of historical and firsthand reportage, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing and sometimes savage story of ivory's enormous impact on both human history and that of its most important source: the majestic African elephant.

The murder of two clam fishermen off the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, draws Commissario Brunetti into the island's close-knit community, bound together by a code of loyalty and a suspicion of outsiders worthy of the Mafia. When the Vice-Questore's secretary Signorina Elettra volunteers to visit the island, where she has relatives, Brunetti finds himself torn between his duty to solve the murders, concerns for Elettra's safety, and his not entirely straightforward feelings for her....

When a body is found floating in a canal, disfigured and with multiple stab wounds, Commissario Brunetti is called to investigate and is convinced he recognises the man from somewhere. However, with no identification except for the distinctive shoes the man was wearing, and no reports of people missing from the Venice area, the case cannot progress. Brunetti soon realises why he remembers the dead man, and asks Signorina Elettra if she can help him find footage of a farmers' protest the previous autumn.

Warren Ziller moved his family to California in search of a charmed life, and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of Southern California in the 1980s. But his American dream has been rudely interrupted. Despite their affection for one another - the "slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville" they share at home - Warren; his wife, Camille; and their three children have veered into separate lives, as distant as satellites.

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.

In an elite college in a once-decaying New England city, Steven Brookman has come to a decision. A brilliant but careless professor, he has determined that for the sake of his marriage, and his soul, he must extract himself from his relationship with Maud Stack, his electrifying student, whose papers are always late and too long yet always incandescent. But Maud is a young woman whose passions are not easily contained or curtailed, and their union will quickly yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.

Detective Lieutenant, Matt Stuart, third generation New York cop, is precinct head in Pigtown, an old wiseguy neighborhood where the name remains but the pig farms are gone in a forgotten section of Brooklyn. Which is where Beansy Rutolo is found inside a refrigerator with his brains blown out.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Charlie Hood is attached to the ATF, working undercover on the Iron River that flows across the U.S.-Mexican border. The diamond fillings he wears in his left canine glimmer, distracting the men who sell the illegal firearms that enable the unspeakable violence on both sides of the map. Spotting the sparkle when “Charlie Diamonds” opens his mouth is often their first step toward life behind bars. Meanwhile, Bradley Jones, sheriff’s deputy and employee of the Baja Cartel and son of the love of Charlie’s life, the deceased L.A. outlaw Suzanne Jones, is expecting a son of his own.