Showing results by narrator "Susan Denaker" in All Categories

Plucky pair Winnie and Miss Drake are traveling back in time to the 1915 San Francisco World's Fair. Waiting in the past are Winnie's great-grandfather Caleb, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a centuries-old mystery: Who stole the Heart of Kubera necklace? Despite the excitement, Winnie's only wish is to lose Rowan, an unusual boy who has the annoying habit of showing up at inconvenient times. But the wise Miss Drake knows her pet Winnie should be careful what she wishes for - especially when her wish-granting souvenirs follow them home.

Three-thousand-year-old Miss Drake has arranged to send her dear pet Winnie to The Spriggs Academy, an extraordinary school for humans and magicals alike. Winnie is particularly excited about magic class and having Sir Isaac Newton for science. She's also making new friends - and frenemies.... When a plot to snatch Winnie from her San Francisco home is uncovered, Miss Drake is ready to use all her cunning and magic to thwart it. Not that feisty Winnie needs the help....

For English teacher Amanda Pepper, the champagne gala on behalf of Philly Prep's library is her introduction to the ultrarich Main Line society - an evening so extravagant that nothing can tarnish the party...not even a group of protesters outside burning the host in effigy. The Moral Ecologists, who vehemently claim that "reading pollutes the mind", will do anything to advance their agenda. And - when her affluent new acquaintances, Neddy and Tea Roederer, prove to be just as deceitful and violent - Amanda learns firsthand that the bluest blood bleeds just as red.

No matter the season, the Philadelphia private school where Amanda Pepper teaches English is never a center of tranquility. But with Halloween and the annual Mischief Night party only days away, the hope is that nothing more than old-fashioned vandalism and pranks will take place. No such luck. Trouble erupts long before the witching hour, as the school is plagued by a series of mishaps ranging from the trivial to the potentially deadly - and most of which seem to center on a group of popular seniors.

Well-known Broadway playwright and TV producer Lyle Zacharias is throwing himself a lavish birthday party in his hometown of Philadelphia. Guests include his current wife, ex-wives, friends, former partners - not to mention Amanda Pepper and her own irrepressible mother, Bea. Yet when Lyle drops dead in the middle of a speech, it appears the likely perpetrator is none other than Bea, whose gift was 50 delicious, but apparently poisoned, tarts!

Book three in the Anthony Award-winning mystery series featuring Amanda Pepper, the resourceful English teacher at Philly Prep. Amanda is sorting books for a school fundraiser, when she comes across a book for battered women that contains a special and frightening message from its original, anonymous owner. Desperate to learn who donated the books, Amanda's search leads her to deliberate brutality and its cold-blooded consequences.

New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard captured the heart of a nation with The Deep End of the Ocean, her celebrated debut novel about mother Beth Cappadora, a child kidnapped, a family in crisis. Now, in No Time to Wave Goodbye, the unforgettable Cappadoras are in peril once again, forced to confront an unimaginable evil.

It has been twenty-two years since Beth Cappadora’s three-year-old son Ben was abducted. By some miracle, he returned nine years later, and the family began to pick up the pieces of their lives. But their peace has always been fragile: Ben returned from the deep end as another child and has never felt entirely at ease with the family he was born into. Now the Cappadora children are grown: Ben is married with a baby girl, Kerry is studying to be an opera singer, and Vincent has emerged from his troubled adolescence as a fledgling filmmaker.

The subject of Vincent’s new documentary, “No Time to Wave Goodbye,” shakes Vincent’s unsuspecting family to the core; it focuses on five families caught in the tortuous web of never knowing the fate of their abducted children. Though Beth tries to stave off the torrent of buried emotions, she is left wondering if she and her family are fated to relive the past forever.

The film earns tremendous acclaim, but just as the Cappadoras are about to celebrate the culmination of Vincent’s artistic success, what Beth fears the most occurs, and the Cappadoras are cast back into the past, revisiting the worst moment of their lives–with only hours to find the truth that can save a life. High in a rugged California mountain range, their rescue becomes a desperate struggle for survival.

No Time to Wave Goodbye is Jacquelyn Mitchard at her best, a spellbinding novel about family loyalty, and love pushed to the limits of endurance.


From the Hardcover edition.

Barring the usual teenage pranks, all seems peaceful at Philly Prep, the private school in Philadelphia where Amanda Pepper teaches English. No doubt the money that appears to be missing from funds collected to aid victims of a catastrophic hurricane Down South will turn up. Probably the rumor that some of Amanda’s students have discovered the thrills of gambling is totally unfounded. In any case, Amanda has other things to think about. Her husband, private investigator C. K. MacKenzie, is struggling to help his Louisiana kinfolk reconstruct their post-hurricane lives.

Who are you? It’s the most fundamental of human questions. Are you the type of person who tilts at windmills, or the one who prefers to view them from the comfort of an air-conditioned motorcoach? Our personalities are endlessly fascinating—not just to ourselves but also to our spouses, our parents, our children, our co-workers, our neighbors. As a highly social species, humans have to navigate among an astonishing variety of personalities.

In the City of Brotherly Love, nobody knows a thing about Emmie Cade, a young widow who “appeared from nowhere,” and in the blink of an eye was engaged to Leo Fairchild, a middle-aged bachelor with a fortune. However, as her marriage date approaches, Emmie’s mother-in-law to be, the ailing, autocratic Claire Fairchild, receives anonymous letters. They suggest, none too subtly, that there’s a great deal to learn about the mysterious young woman, none of it good, and much of it involving the violent deaths of the men in her life.

"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about angels. Heather survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents’ murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen....

After a tough year of teaching at Philly Prep, Amanda Pepper decides to go to Atlantic City with her friend Sasha Berg. Yet a beach vacation turns deadly when a bludgeoned corpse shows up in their hotel room - and Sasha is the prime suspect.

So Amanda hits the boardwalk to track down the real killer, chasing down clues around the surf and in the casinos, and discovering along the way that appearances are more than deceiving: They can be criminal and, sometimes, downright murderous....

German immigrant and farm wife Hulda Klager possesses only an eighth-grade education - and a burning desire to create something beautiful. What begins as a hobby to create an easy-peeling apple for her pies becomes Hulda’s driving purpose: a time-consuming interest in plant hybridization that puts her at odds with family and community, as she challenges the early-twentieth-century expectations for a simple housewife.

Did photography replace an absence in her life or expose the truth of her heart’s emptiness? While growing in confidence as a photographer, 18-year-old Jessie Ann Gaebele’s personal life is at a crossroads. Hoping she’s put an unfortunate romantic longing behind her as “water under the bridge”, she exiles herself to Milwaukee to operate photographic studios for those owners who have fallen ill with mercury poisoning. Jessie gains footing in her dream to one day operate her own studio and soon finds herself in other Midwest towns, pursuing her profession.

In Thinking about Leadership, Nannerl Keohane draws on her experience as the first woman president of Duke University and former president of Wellesley College, as well as her expertise as a leading political theorist, to deepen our understanding of what leaders do, how and why they do it, and the pitfalls and challenges they face.

When a boat drifts into a New England port with all its crew dead, only a shipboard statue knows what took place. Can a boy carved from wood reveal the secret? Can a love-struck apprentice find the girl of his dreams by following a weathervane with a figure of Saint Crispin, patron saint of shoemakers? After a lifetime of making statues of the wealthy and powerful, what will the Italian sculptor Zorelli do when he is hired not by a human, but a ghost?

Twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Diehl is happy toiling away as a criminal law associate at an old line New England firm where she very much appreciates that most of her clients are behind bars. Everyone at Traynor, Hand knows she abhors face-to-face contact, but one weekend, with all the big partners away, Sophie must handle the intake interview for the daughter of the firm's most important client....