Showing results by narrator "Chris Andrew Ciulla" in All Categories

Told against the backdrop of the American landscape of the late '80s to the mid-'90s, Growing Up Dead is the story of Peter Conners's journey from straight-laced suburban kid to touring Deadhead. Peter discovered the Grateful Dead in 1985, at the age of 15, through friends who exchanged bootleg tapes of live Grateful Dead concerts. A teenager living in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, he became exposed to an entirely new way of life, and friends who were enjoying more freedom and less parental guidance.

In the mid-1990s, facing severe cuts to its public funding, the University of Oregon - like so many colleges across the country - was desperate for cash. Luckily, the Oregon Ducks' 1995 Rose Bowl berth caught the attention of the school's wealthiest alumnus: Nike founder Phil Knight, who was seeking new marketing angles at the collegiate level. And so the University of Nike was born. But as journalist Joshua Hunt reveals in University of Nike, Oregon has paid dearly for the veneer of financial prosperity and athletic success that has come with this brand partnering.

In The Coming of Democracy, Mark R. Cheathem examines the evolution of presidential campaigning from 1824 to 1840. Drawing on period newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and public and private correspondence, The Coming of Democracy is the first book-length treatment to reveal how presidents and presidential candidates used both old and new forms of cultural politics to woo voters and win elections in the Jacksonian era.

A perfect storm materializes when Patrick Bouchard, an underwater welder working in the shipyards of San Pedro, California, loses his only child, Gabriel, to cancer. Driven by grief and rage, he sets out on a quest to make those he feels responsible pay, specifically, Standard Pharmaceutical, the megacorporation owning the HMO that denied radical treatment to his stage-four terminal son. That wasn't right, and someone had to be held accountable.

Barnabas has made some enemies - enemies who want to track him down through space and kill him. But he's more than ready to take on this challenge.

Anthony “Tony” Costa grew up admiring his Uncle Dom - a made member of the New England mafia - so when Dom asks him to collect gambling debts from around the neighborhood, Tony is happy to help. Even after his uncle gets thrown in jail, he does his nephew a good turn from behind bars, getting him a job as a longshoreman on the Boston waterfront. The year is 1958, and Tony is only 18. His new job quickly teaches him what it will take to survive on the docks.

It’s the middle of the night when Detective Chris Bailey is called to the side of a rural Tennessee highway. A young woman’s body is found sprawled on the shoulder of the winding country road, a glossy dark pool of blood around her head. The victim has been shot five times. She isn’t wearing a coat, though it’s late February. Her empty purse is discarded a few feet away, a single high-heeled pump obscenely alone in a pile of last year’s fallen leaves tinted with frost. Her other foot is bare.

Welcome to Danforth Putnam, boarding school for the elite, sprawled across its own private island off the coast of New England. Sam, a war vet who feels sure he’s seen it all, has been called here to find a stolen rare book. But as he corners D&D nerds, grills steroid-raging linemen, and interviews filthy-rich actresses, he soon senses that something far stranger—“witchy”, in fact—is afoot. When students start to meet mysterious and gruesome deaths, Sam realizes just how fast the clock is ticking.

From Emmy Award-winning author David Quantick, All My Colors is a darkly comic novel about a man who remembers a book that may not exist, with dire consequences. A bizarre, mind-bending story at the intersection of Richard Bachman, Charlie Kaufman, and Franz Kafka.

From his working class roots in New Jersey to the “tune in, turn on, drop out” cliffs of Big Sur and the pinnacles of the human potential movement; from launching his company Age Wave and coming to terms with his own aging process, Ken Dychtwald’s Radical Curiosity makes sense of his first 70 years of life, offering invaluable life lessons through the lens of a man constantly seeking truth and self-discovery - giving listeners a glimpse into a visionary's extraordinary world, and a guide for claiming a powerful vision of one’s own.

Barnabas has destroyed the Committee’s research facility, but his victory came at a cost: his friend Jeltor remains captive and brainwashed. He isn’t going to stand for that. He is going to find and rescue his friend, no matter what it takes. But what will he do when he has to decide between saving his friend and saving an entire planet?

In Jonathan Dee’s elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road. Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down, and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions. He seems to have escaped his former self. But can he?

Someone sent three fully armed ships to High Tortuga to back the slave-owners running the mines, and Barnabas and Shinigami are determined to find out who.

Small-time magician Oscar Diggs's life suddenly changes when he's hurled from uneventful Kansas into the enchanting Land of Oz. The inhabitants there see Oscar as a powerful wizard, and they shower him with the fame and fortune he has always imagined would be his. That is, until three very powerful witches start to question Oscar's abilities.

Decades of groundwork. Countless civilians abducted, experimented on, and killed. The perfect plan has taken shape, and soon, the entire sector will be under the control of the shadowy Committee. That was the plan anyway. But some human has decided to blow the whole thing up. What do you do when one of those pathetic little newcomers tries to ruin your plans? Make him pay. On the other hand, maybe you should have found out more about this “Barnabas” guy before trying that. But it can’t possibly go too far wrong, can it? Soon you’ll have an entire fleet under your control.

Max is a cheery xeno-archeologist from Earth, stranded and trying to find a way home. Lahra is a stern warrior of a nearly extinct race, searching for her people's heir. Wheel is the couple's cybernetic pilot, running from her past and toward an unknown future. On Wheel's ship the Kettle, the trio traverses the galaxy, dodging Imperial patrols and searching ancient temples and ruins for anything they can sell. Back on the Wreck, their home and base of operations, they're deeply in debt to the drifting city's most powerful gangster, and she wants her money back.

She was leaning against the door. Her smile was a sickly twisted grimace; the sort a prisoner gives a judge when he's asked if he has anything to say before he's sentenced. Russell Haxby is a ruthless used-car salesman obsessed with manipulating and cavorting with married women. In this classic of hard-boiled fiction, Charles Willeford crafts a wry, sardonic tale of hypocrisy, intrigue, and lust set in San Francisco in the early '50s.

Ania Throne is devoted to her jewelry company. The daughter of one of the world’s most famous jewelers, she arrives in Cannes with a stunning new collection. But a shocking theft by the notorious thief known as the Leopard throws her into upheaval - and plunges her on an unexpected hunt that challenges everything she believes.

When a widower receives notice from a doctor that he doesn't have long left to live, he is struck by the question of who will care for his adult son - a son whom he fiercely loves, a boy with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind, and with a desire to see the country on one last trip, the man signs up as a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and leaves town with his son.

The third collection in the Music and Murder Mystery Series, Back in Black features one story for each song from the seminal hard rock album of the same name. This book showcases ten brilliant mystery writers at the top of their game, including Reed Farrel Coleman, Heather Graham, Tori Eldridge, Ward Larsen, and Andrew Child, among others.