Showing results by narrator "Aida Reluzco" in All Categories

The transporting stories in this year’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense are populated by those who exist on the fringe of our society and want more than what life has dealt them: A haunted veteran turned career criminal is on the run. An injured fighter turned bouncer seeks vengeance for his lost love. An assassin on his last job finds himself questioning his life choices and breaks all the rules to understand his final victim.

It’s 1975, and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book. That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx”, Triumph's first female hero.

As an orphaned girl, Harmony survived a strange war waged by an enemy called the Quondam. They crushed every technological advancement in the world, eviscerated the landscape, and killed millions. It can still be stopped. As prophesied, Harmony has a destiny to fulfill. Thirty years later, she is in a tenuous alliance with a cult of zealots who worship time itself. A master code breaker, she’s enlisted to obliterate the power of the Quondam and prevent a war that has already ended.

October 2559. With the galaxy in the suffocating grip of a renegade artificial intelligence, another perilous threat has quietly emerged in the shadows: The Keepers of the One Freedom, a fanatical and merciless Covenant splinter group, has made its way beyond the borders of the galaxy to an ancient Forerunner installation known as the Ark. Led by an infamous Brute named Castor, the Keepers intend to achieve what the Covenant, in all its might, failed to: Activate Halo and take the last steps on the path of the Great Journey into transcendence.

At the center of the current immigration debate are migrants from Central America fleeing poverty, corruption, and violence in search of refuge in the United States. In Central America’s Forgotten History, Aviva Chomsky answers the urgent question “How did we get here?” Centering the centuries-long intertwined histories of US expansion and indigenous and Central American struggles against inequality and oppression, Chomsky highlights the pernicious cycle of colonial and neocolonial development policies.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. It Came from the Closet features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body, Jude Ellison S. Doyle on In My Skin, Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers, and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

A talented sculptor and her psychotherapist fall in love, transgressing numerous ethical boundaries. But as their relationship progresses, what began as the patient’s attempt to liberate herself from her past becomes the most abusive relationship of her life - and the most dangerous.

The Keys Bed and Breakfast is hosting a reclusive author and a famous actress who are working together on a new memoir. But it soon becomes apparent that not everything is as it seems. And then the dead bodies start showing up. Can Eva and the Murder Mystery Book Club sort fact from fiction and solve another deadly mystery?

Growing up on Cape Cod in the 1960s, Liza Rodman was a lonely little girl. During the summers, while her mother worked days in a local motel and danced most nights in the Provincetown bars, her babysitter - the kind, handsome handyman at the motel where her mother worked - took her and her sister on adventures in his truck. He bought them popsicles and together, they visited his “secret garden” in the Truro woods. To Liza, he was one of the few kind, understanding, and safe adults in her life.

Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history. Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. When she’s introduced to her translator’s inscrutable wife—a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form—she becomes enthralled by her.

Eva and Jerome are on a romantic first date at a fancy French restaurant until a dead body is discovered in the alley. The date is obviously ruined, and the owner of the restaurant quickly gets blamed for the murder. Knowing there is more to the case, Eva recruits the Murder Mystery Book Club for one last mystery.

A serial kidnapper is preying upon women. He abducts them and then locks them in one of the cages dangling from the ceiling in a soundproofed basement. There, he sits quietly and just watches them, returning night after night, hoping he'll be in the room at the moment his beautiful captives finally starve to death.

The Golden State is at war. The Conservators are winning. With an insidious nano reform, they’ve cleaned out cities and upended thousands of Unfortunate lives by controlling a single emotion: inescapable fear. Billionaire CEO Damon Yates, the only one with the potential clues to stop the threat, has disappeared. Twin sisters Jade and Crys—along with their dedicated crew of Exiles—have fled Los Angeles for a remote Texas hideout and are leading the formidable mission to find him.

The tax demons want their pound of flesh. Or 52,000 dollars. Unable to pay what she owes, Eden is forced to fight a never-ending stream of bounty hunters while she tries to clear her name and find the cop who set her up. But demons are not known for their patience, and the new mercenary hired to bring Eden in dead or alive has magical abilities of his own - magical abilities oddly similar to Eden’s. Desperate, she turns to a friend for help, but Detective Juke demands a favor in return - help to find the demon or mage responsible for a killing spree.

Eden Alvaro is a licensed Vulture, picking through the aftermath of violence in demon-plagued LA, and fencing her finds to help support her family. But when a crooked cop reports her for a salvage she didn’t take, all hell breaks loose. Stripped of her license, Eden finds herself with a price on her head. When the mercenaries hunting her raid her home, brutalize her family, and abduct one of her sisters, Eden turns to the enigmatic Bishop - a man with a reputation for violence who, for the right price, can find just about anything or anyone.

You will not believe what you are reading - even though it all feels so real. Only a man like Smilin’ Jack could monetize civil war. After the infamous business tycoon launches a hit TV show that pits American and Confederate gladiators in brutal battles, his grisly spectacle draws the attention of psychopaths across the nation.

A coming-of-age novel that is as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, There’s No Turning Back centers on eight women with radically different backgrounds who attend the same college in Rome. Some are there to study, others to escape a scandal, or keep a secret, and during their time there, they experience the challenges of love, work, and emancipation.

When Eli leaves the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that he now inhabits her body. Not only have he and his wife traded bodies, but Elizabeth, living as Eli, has disappeared without a trace. What follows is Eli’s search across Europe and to America for his missing wife—and a roving, no-holds-barred exploration of gender and embodied experience.

When Malena Sevilla's tidy, carefully planned world collapses following her father’s mysterious suicide, she finds a letter - signed with an “A” - that reveals that her mother, whom she thought dead, is very much alive in San Isidro, a quaint town tucked in the Andes Mountains. Intent on meeting her, Malena arrives at Alameda Street and meets four sisters who couldn’t be more different from one another, but who share one thing in common: all of their names begin with an A.

The Murder Mystery Book Club has found a treasure map that might lead to Ernest Hemingway’s secret treasure. When they head out to uncover this priceless treasure, nothing will stand in their way. Even a dead body only motivates them further. Can they solve a murder mystery and find a long lost treasure?