Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Ikeda" in All Categories

Hailed as “simply beautiful” by Kirkus Reviews, this is the poetic tale of Wabi Sabi, a Japanese cat who doesn’t understand her name. As she travels across the country searching for answers, she begins to understand the most wonderful things are often those that seem most ordinary. Author Mark Reibstein’s innovative use of haiku makes Wabi Sabi perfect for listening.

From the author of the acclaimed Women of the Otherworld series comes an exciting new heroine whose most secret identity is both lucrative and lethal. Regulars at Nadia' s nature lodge don' t ask what she does in the off season. And that's a good thing. If she told them, she' d have to kill them. She's a hit woman for a Mafia family. Tough and self-sufficient, Nadia doesn't owe anyone any explanations. But that doesn't mean she always works alone. One of her contacts has recruited her in the hunt for a ruthlessly efficient serial killer cutting a swath of terror across the country.

A collection of short stories that portray a very American loneliness. All stories are set in or around Corpus Christi, Texas.

Life in the Trench is harsh but simple - until a young girl braves an unknown path in a bracing coming-of-age short story by the New York Times bestselling author of Sweet Tooth and the Gideon Falls comics.

When Kitty Tylney's best friend, Catherine Howard, worms her way into King Henry VIII's heart and brings Kitty to court, she's thrust into a world filled with fabulous gowns, sparkling jewels, and elegant parties. No longer stuck in Cat's shadow, Kitty is now caught between two men - the object of her affection and the object of her desire. But court is also full of secrets, lies, and sordid affairs, and as Kitty witnesses Cat's meteoric rise and fall as queen, she must figure out how to keep being a good friend.

In The Wild Beasts of Wuhan, Wong Changxing, a rich Chinese powerbroker, has just been bilked out of $100 million in an elaborate art forgery con. His one hope of recovering the money, and of saving face, is Ava Lee—a forensic accountant with a talent for tracking down untraceable funds. With the help of her mentor, the Triad-connected Uncle, Ava traces the provenance of the meticulously forged paintings to Denmark, the Faroe Islands, New York, and London. As she infiltrates one of the most prestigious auction houses in the world, she uncovers a massive web of corruption.

People just can't live together without telling stories. We tell stories that are funny, ironic, insightful, or just simply pleasing to the tongue and ear. Stories just seem to happen. When a story happens with the force of universality, it finds its way into that pantheon of tales that is the common denominator of cultural exchange. Here are 33 such tales, collected from Brazil, China, Korea, Russia, Tibet, Africa, from America's native peoples, and other lands, and chosen for the universality…

In The Wild Beasts of Wuhan, Uncle and Ava are summoned by Wong Changxing, "The Emperor of Hubei" and one of the most powerful men in China, when he discovers that the Fauvist paintings he recently acquired are in fact forgeries.

Ava uncovers a ring of fraudulent art dealers and follows their twisted trail to Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Dublin, London, and New York. But the job is further complicated by Wong's second wife, the cunning and seductive May Ling, who threatens to interfere in Ava's inestigation.

The woman in the purple skirt seems to live in a world of her own. She appears to glide through crowded streets without acknowledging any reaction her presence elicits. Each afternoon, she sits on the same park bench, eating a pastry and ignoring the local children who make a game of trying to get her attention. She may not know it, but the woman in the purple skirt being watched. Someone is following her, always perched just out of sight, monitoring which buses she takes, what she eats, whom she speaks to.

Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap medicines for those who can't otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail is an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his indentured robotic partner, Paladin.

Nadia Stafford isn't your typical nature lodge owner. An ex-cop with a legal code all her own, she's known only as "Dee" to her current employer: a New York crime family that pays her handsomely to bump off traitors. But when Nadia discovers that a troubled teenage employee and her baby have vanished in the Canadian woods, the memory of a past loss comes back with a vengeance and her old instincts go into overdrive. With her enigmatic mentor, Jack, covering her back, Nadia unearths sinister clues that point to an increasingly darker and deadlier mystery.

In The Moment Between by critically acclaimed author Nicole Baart, a woman is pushed to the brink of obsession after her sister's suicide. From Florida's beaches to British Columbia's vineyards, Abigail pursues a handsome, charis­matic man. On her quest, she is awash with memories of her beautiful yet vulnerable sister. But as past and present converge, Abigail's mission becomes even more complicated.

Three Mormon high school friends, perky Nikki, studious Alicia, and football player Sam, make a pact of the Pygmalion style—they decide to help the “untapped” students at their school. Their plan is to transform three classmates and take them to the prom. But the experiment doesn’t go exactly as planned. They slowly begin to realize that there is more to most people than meets the eye.

Anne Dayton and May Vanderbilt bring a refreshing new edge to Christian literature with Emily Ever After. Emily has always wanted to live a sophisticated New York City life. After college, she gets the chance. Her uncle Matthew helps her land her dream job and everything is finally perfect - until she realizes that living with her traditional morals in the big city isn’t as easy as she hoped. She must constantly deal with bar-hopping coworkers and an over-eager boyfriend. Will Emily be able to survive the big city with her morals and faith intact?

When Haley shows up at her uncle’s Sedona, Arizona, bed and breakfast ranch to help for a couple weeks, she is met with panic: a guest cabin is on fire! Everyone is ok, so good-natured Uncle Jake writes it off as just another stroke of bad luck - but Haley isn’t so sure. Soon, Haley is certain something is up. It looks like the fire may have been intentional, because more weird things are going on at the ranch. The horses are spooked, Uncle Jake is getting threatening postcards, and computer viruses are erasing important information.

Sage Singer has a past that makes her want to hide from the world. But when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Josef Weber, a quiet old man and respected pillar of the community, she feels that finally, she may have found someone she can open up to. Until Josef tells her the evil secret he's kept for sixty years…

Paul Acampora makes his exciting debut in young-adult fiction with this poignant tale of a girl coping with the recent death of her father. When her mother moves the family to California, Dulcie decides to drive her father's pick-up truck back to Connecticut on her own.

Pushcart Prize-winner Suzanne Rivecca quickly made a name for herself as a talented new voice in the literary world. Praised as “gripping, distinctive, and altogether impressive” ( Booklist), Rivecca’s debut short-story collection Death Is Not an Option will captivate listeners with its raw and insightful tales featuring young women grappling with life’s many uncertainties.

In The Disciple of Las Vegas, forensic accountant Ava Lee is hired by the richest man in the Philippines to recover $50 million from a Canadian land swindle. With the billionaire's reputation on the line, she follows the money from Vancouver to Las Vegas, to the Costa Rican accounts of the Moneida, a First Nations band that owns The River, a poker website.

In moving verse, Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis gives new voice to seventeen heroes of civil rights. This commanding collection of poems invites the listener to hear in each verse the thunder that lies in every voice, no matter how small. Featuring civil rights luminaries Coretta Scott King, Harvey Milk, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Sylvia Mendez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mamie Carthan Till, Helen Zia, Josh Gibson, Dennis James Banks, Mitsuye Endo, Ellison Onizuka, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Yunus, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.