Showing results by narrator "Erica Sullivan" in All Categories

After losing everything, Katie Wilk is starting life over in Columbia, Minnesota, with a new career—giving up cryptanalysis in favor of teaching school—and a canine companion, Maverick, a black Labrador retriever. But on one of their first outings, Katie and Maverick discover a dead body in a nearby marshland. Doctor Pete Erickson enters her life. As the county coroner, he’s one of the first on the scene; as the doctor that day in the ER, he’s the one who stitches up Katie’s head; as the son of the police chief, Pete is also in on the investigation.

Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past. Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life.

Third-grader Aven Green is a real professional musician! She just needs to choose what instrument to play. When she decides to try the piano, Aven is disappointed when she can’t master Mozart in one whole day. To pick up Aven’s beat, her parents take her for a four-hour drive to see someone just like her play the guitar. With new inspiration and a special gift from her great-grandma, Aven is ready to take on the school talent show. Will she be ready in time? Or will she blow her big chance?

Aven knows she is an expert baker of cakes and cookies since she has been baking with her mom for a really long time. Plus no one bakes quite like she does. She cracks eggs with her feet and measures sugar and flour with her feet—plus measuring cups—since she was born without arms. And now Aven has her eye on the prize: a beautiful blue ribbon for baking at the county fair. So she teams up with her friends Kayla, Emily, and Sujata. But it turns out they all have very different tastes and a lot of opinions about baking.

Third-grader Aven Green has been solving mysteries for a really long time—a whole month! She has solved many important cases like The Mystery of the Cranky Mom, The Mystery of the Missing Ice Cream, and The Mystery of the Smelly Feet. Her record is nearly 100 percent, with only The Mystery of the Cereal in My Underpants remaining unsolved to this day. Aven asks all the right questions, wields her detective kit carefully, and follows up on every clue. Then her teacher’s lunch bag, with her lunch still in it, is taken, and Aven’s great-grandma’s beloved dog goes missing.

Early in her career, Katie Pryal learned that being a professor isn’t easy if your brain isn’t quite right. “I was a junior in college when I finally realized that I was different in a way that my medically inclined parents would call ‘clinical.’” In these deeply personal, fiery essays, Pryal tells her story of transformation that began the moment she chose to publicly disclose her own mental illness and leave her career in higher education to begin fighting for a better world for people with psychiatric disabilities.

Two young women attending college decide to have a summer adventure canoeing the rapids-strewn Thelon River that runs 450 miles through the uninhabited Barren Lands of subarctic Canada. Holly made the trip once before with a group of skilled paddlers she trained with at camp, and she wants to share that experience with her friend and lover, Lee, believing it will draw them closer. But a week in, Holly, the risk-taker, falls while taking a selfie near the edge of a cliff. She is left injured and comatose, and soon dies.

In How We Disappear, award-winning author Tara Lynn Masih offers listeners transporting and compelling stories of those taken, those missing, and those neither here nor gone—runaways, exiles, wanderers, ghosts, even the elusive Dame Agatha Christie. From the remote Siberian taiga to the harsh American frontier, from rural Long Island to postwar Belgium, Masih’s characters are diverse in identity and circumstance, defying the burden of erasure by disappearing into or emerging from physical and emotional landscapes.

What would you do if your country was counting on you to deliver an important message? That’s the story of 16-year-old Sybil Ludington’s famous midnight ride. In 1777, Sybil and her family believe the American colonies should be free from British control, and Sybil’s father leads a regiment of New York militiamen. Using spy tactics and codes, the Ludingtons gather intelligence, hoping to stay one step ahead of their enemies. When British troops raid nearby Danbury, Connecticut, Sybil gallops through the night to call out her father’s men.

On the fast track at a Philadelphia consulting firm, Abigail McKenna has put her personal life on hold, content to focus on her professional success. But when she’s suddenly laid off, Abby finds herself with a dwindling savings account and no promising job prospects. So when a letter arrives holding the solution to all her financial problems, Abby is relieved but saddened: her dear Aunt Leila has passed away, naming Abby the sole beneficiary of her majestic Victorian estate in North Carolina. But Abby is in for a few surprises.

After 15 years of marriage and seven children, British singer-songwriter J. D. Borders and his American wife, Maggie, were an idyllic superstar couple. They were destined to be together, forever…until the morning Maggie walked into their London hotel suite and found J. D. with another woman. Now as they face one last public interview, J. D. must risk exposing their darkest secrets - on national television - in order to win Maggie back.

When underwater archaeologist Sam McGowan is asked to help salvage a sunken Confederate blockade runner, he’s eager for the opportunity to investigate his own family history - especially since the project is being handled by Gordon Chandler, a notable authority in underwater salvaging. When he finds Gordon’s daughter Rachel in charge, Sam is not pleased. She can’t possibly be her father’s match. But not only has Sam wildly underestimated Rachel’s professional abilities, he has yet to discover the many other facets of this complex woman.

Quincannon’s pursuit of two con men who have absconded to Hawaii with a considerable sum of his employer’s assets dovetails nicely with Sabina’s vision of a second honeymoon. But neither is wont to stay out of trouble, and Sabina inadvertently becomes involved in a locked room/dying message murder in Honolulu.

Worst. Birthday. Ever. My first boyfriend dumped me - happy birthday, Josie! - my dad is who knows where; I have some weird virus that makes me want to hurl; and now my ex is licking another girl’s tonsils. Oh, and I’m officially the same age as my brother was when he died. Yeah, today is about as fun-filled as the swamps of Dagobah. But then weird things start happening. Like I make something materialize just by thinking about it.

When novelist Mia Gladwell attempts to reinvent herself by moving into the house of a famous writer, she discovers that life there is not what she expected.

Lonely and broke, Cleveland divorce survivor Allie Harper believes all her problems would be solved if she could find a nice, smart, hot guy and enough money to get her car fixed. The hot guy arrives first: He's in a crosswalk clutching a bag of groceries while a blonde in a Hummer is leaning hard on her horn, sending the man's groceries and white cane flying. How has this woman missed the fact that the man is blind? From the curb, an outraged Allie jumps to his rescue, rebagging the groceries as well. The money is in the bag - literally.

The friendship of two tightly knit New York City couples whose bond isn't quite what it seems threatens to unravel after the publication of a story in a well-known literary magazine that bears a strange resemblance to their real life. This wry, urban novelette blurs the lines between love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, laying bare the power of literature to expose parts of ourselves we may not want to see. Christine Benvenuto oh-so-lightly pokes fun at Manhattan's privileged class, and her observations are all the more biting for their subtlety.

In Nest. Flight. Sky: On Love and Loss, One Wing at a Time, award-winning memoirist Beth Kephart returns to the form for the first time in years to reckon with the loss of her mother and a slow-growing but soon inescapable obsession with birds and flight. Kephart finds herself drawn to the startle of the winter finch, the quick pulse of hummingbirds, and the hungry circling of hawks. She discovers birds in the stories she tells and the novels she writes.

Lloyd Bunker's obsession with avoiding stoplights has run him and his '67 Pontiac GTO off the road, maybe for keeps. As they race to figure out what happened to Lloyd, T&A recruits Allie's former nemesis, Officer Tony Valerio, plus her best friend and ex-landlady, Margo, and television reporter Lisa Cole to help them follow a lethal trail of escalating crimes ranging from scrapping to pushing opioids to multiple murders. It's no longer just about Lloyd.

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being.