Showing results by narrator "Joy Osmanski" in All Categories

When Marty returns to Pennsylvania after living in California for 10 years, he’s happily welcomed by his father and younger brother, Jody. The joyful reunion is short-lived. Two days later, Jody enters the house to find his father and Marty shot dead as their masked killer flees out the back door. Without any answers from the local police, Jody heads to Los Angeles looking for who murdered his family and why. Soon, he finds a trove of strange videos recorded by his brother that leads him into the city’s most dangerous corners.

Katsuyamas never quit - but 17-year-old CJ doesn’t even know where to start. She’s never lived up to her mom’s type A ambition, and she’s perfectly happy just helping her aunt Hannah at their family’s flower shop. She doesn’t buy into Hannah’s romantic ideas about flowers and their hidden meanings, but when it comes to arranging the perfect bouquet, CJ discovers a knack she never knew she had. A skill of which she might even be proud. Then her mom decides to sell the shop - to the family who swindled CJ’s grandparents during WWII.

In the vein of The Bitch in the House, 15 powerful women offer captivating, intimate, and candid explorations about what it’s really like turning 40 - and life beyond.

When Kantkiss Neverclean replaces her sister as a contestant on the Hunger Games - the second-highest-rated reality TV show in Peaceland, behind Extreme Home Makeover - she has no idea what to expect. Having lived her entire life in the telemarketing district’s worst neighborhood, the Crack, Kantkiss feels unprepared to fight to the death while simultaneously winking and looking adorable for the cameras. Soon, her survival rests on choosing between the dreamy hunk from home, Carol Handsomestein, or the doughy klutz, Pita Malarkey....

Allie, Des, and Cara, each having her own reasons for wanting a share of their father's estate, meet in the grand Victorian home in which he grew up, only to be greeted by another secret he purposely hid from them: his sister Bonnie. The women reluctantly band together to take on Fritz's challenge, working with a local contractor to begin the renovations financed by an account Fritz had set up for the task. While the restoration appears to go smoothly at first, it soon becomes apparent that the work will be more extensive than originally thought.

Can Sloane and James survive the lies and secrets surrounding them, or will The Program claim them in the end? Find out in this sequel to The Program, which Publishers Weekly called “chilling and suspenseful.” Sloane and James are on the run after barely surviving the suicide epidemic and The Program. But they’re not out of danger. Huge pieces of their memories are still missing, and although Sloane and James have found their way back to each other, The Program isn’t ready to let them go.

California girl Allie Hudson Monroe can’t wait for the day when the renovations on the Sugarhouse Theater are complete so she can finally collect the inheritance from her father and move on with her life. After all, her life and her 14-year-old daughter are in Los Angeles. But Allie’s divorce left her tottering on the edge of bankruptcy, so to keep up on payments for her house and her daughter’s private-school tuition, Allie packed up and flew out east. But fate has a curveball or two to toss in Allie’s direction.

The Storm Dragons are here! Three new girls share an incredible secret—they can transform into powerful Storm Dragons when they travel to the Magic Forest! They must work together to banish an all-new villain, the Chaos Queen.

Gwenn LeMoine sees the world through the lens of hair. The daughter of two hairstylists, she has taken her natural talent to an entrepreneurial level and is now the owner of Parlor, a wildly popular, two-location hair salon in the East Village and Brooklyn. In Becoming a Hair Stylist, Atlantic columnist and New York Times notable author Kate Bolick provides a compelling profile of a career in hair styling through the life of LeMoine and offers us a glance at a day in the life at Parlor.

They said that the first generation of man was brought low by its appetites: for knowledge, for power, for wealth. They said mankind's voracity was so great, the Lord sent his own Daughter to bring fire and devastation to the world. The survivors were few, but over the course of centuries they banded together to form a new civilization - the Descendancy - founded on the belief that the mistakes of the past must never be repeated. Brothers Clive and Clover Hamill, the sons of a well-respected Descendant minister, have spent their lives spreading that gospel.

Carousel Court is the story of Nick and Phoebe Maguire, a young couple who move cross-country to Southern California in search of a fresh start for themselves and their infant son. They arrive at the worst possible economic time. Instead of landing in a beachside property, they find themselves cemented into the dark heart of foreclosure alley, surrounded by neighbors being drowned by their underwater homes. Nick and Phoebe each devise their own plan to claw their way back into the middle class and beyond.

At thirty-nine, Nicole Mueller’s life is on the rocks in “this brilliant, tangled web of lies, cover ups and deception” (Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author). Her once brilliant law career is falling apart. She and her husband, Dan, are about to be forced out of the apartment they love. After a warning from her firm’s senior partners, she receives an invitation from an exclusive women’s networking group, Panthera Leo. Membership is anonymous, but every member is a successful professional.

When celebrated and respected agent Fritz Hudson passes away, he leaves a trail of Hollywood glory in his wake - and two separate families who never knew the other existed. Allie and Des Hudson are products of Fritz's first marriage to Honora, a beautiful but troubled starlet whose life ended in a tragic overdose. Meanwhile, Fritz was falling in love on the Delaware Bay with New Age hippie Susa Pratt - they had a daughter together, Cara, and while Fritz loved Susa with everything he had, he never quite managed to tell her or Cara about his West Coast family.

Always believing she was an ugly duckling, Chrissy Jenkins thought she had finally turned into a swan when her real-life Prince Charming swept her off her feet. But as his true character began to crack his perfect facade, Chrissy realized that she was better off without him. Returning to her ancestral home on Cannonball Island, she reboots her life, successfully reinventing herself as a chef at Blossoms, an up-and-coming restaurant. But despite her newfound self-confidence, she still doesn’t trust her taste in men. So when she meets Jared Chandler, a handsome ship salvager, Chrissy’s certain she can keep him as a friend....

Don’t read the comments. It’s advice that feels as old as the internet, yet more relevant than ever. The tools we once hailed for their power to connect people and spark creativity can also be hotbeds of hate and harassment. Gupta interviews people who have built and sustained fascinating online communities in our unpredictable digital climate, and dives deep with activists, organizers, journalists, and executives to find out what strategies work best for them. Is there really such a thing as a recipe for success?

Everyone knows that opening a restaurant is a risky business, a venture with an astounding rate of failure. Patric Kuh’s Becoming a Restaurateur takes listeners behind the scenes of one of America’s trendiest new restaurants, revealing how Lien Ta and chef Jonathan Whitener of LA’s Here’s Looking at You managed to beat the odds. With valuable information about what daily life for a professional is like, this is an entertaining, practical guide to what makes a master restaurateur, from writing the business plan to opening night and beyond.

Bestselling author Lily Lee is on a short deadline to deliver her new career guide How to Land the Perfect Job, and she’s been interviewing at all the top companies around town. But when she’s offered a coveted position at her dream company, the employer’s background check reveals she never actually finished her college degree. Unbelievably, her worst nightmare has come true.

From the beloved nanny to stars like Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, and Cash Warren and Jessica Alba comes a loving yet no-nonsense guide to the first four months of parenthood so you can raise a happy baby - and be happy parents.

This powerful essay collection is a natural extension of the #MeToo movement, revealing the interior experience of women after they’ve inevitably been underestimated or hurt—the epiphany that the world is different than they thought it to be—and how they’ve used this knowledge to make change.

In a perfect world, we would all be able to fit a year’s worth of waste in a mason jar. But for most of us​,​ doing so can be immensely intimidating or simply not feasible. But even if you can’t be perfectly zero waste, you can still have a profound impact on our environment, climate, and health by making some simple changes to your lifestyle and habits.