Showing results by narrator "Mara Thomas" in All Categories

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh is the sad tragedy of a young girl, who, while being away from home for work in Manchester, commits the sin of adultery and becomes pregnant with an illegitimate child. She decides not to return home for fear of her harsh father’s reaction. Not knowing whether her daughter is still alive, her mother decides to take her two sons and go to Manchester to look for her. The narrative then follows Lizzie’s poignant existence, as she tries to purge her soul from sin.

On the pivotal edge of the 20th century, the beautiful and determined Ivey Rose Grady falls in love with the captain and owner of a steamboat. Things go horribly wrong - not at all as she wished in her young, innocent dreams. Into the story strides her younger brother, Jody Lee, a nearly perfect replica of his grandfather, Jack Grady, only bigger. The young man deals out his own very special brand of justice to those who would harm his beloved sister.

The Murder by the Yard book group has been going strong for six months, and Megan Clark is eager to celebrate - and increase membership. For fun and publicity, she volunteers her friend, Dr. Ryan Stevens, to lead tours of famous Amarillo murder sites. One of the sites witnessed the strangling of a young bride and the subsequent suicide of her husband. The case was never solved - but one of the Gormans wants to know what really happened, and urges the group to reopen the investigation. Megan dives into the research with her usual enthusiasm. But it's soon clear that the killer doesn't take kindly to amateur sleuths....

Reference librarian Megan Clark has a passion for fictional crime - but when she and her fellow book group members go from reading mysteries to solving them, they discover that real-life crime is more complex than the most puzzling whodunit.

Revelation chapter 6 clearly says that God's wrath begins at some point after the midpoint of the Tribulation. That means Christians will be here for the first four or five years. In Wrath, the first in a three-book series, D. R. Roquemore follows a fictional family in Texas who discovers the truth about the Rapture. Their story begins a few months before the start of the Tribulation period and follows their attempts to survive the rise of the Antichrist and the subsequent wars and famines.

Celia Landrey is guiding her last walking-tour of the season in historic Pass Creek. Myriad tasks await her attention, such as planning her wedding to handsome cowboy real estate agent, Jake Flagg. Discovery of Smoke Allenby's bones wasn't on the agenda. But there they are, turned up in the removal project of an old underground fuel tank at Jolly Hoffman's service station. A situation Celia, town leader, can hardly ignore.

Celia Landrey, walking-tour guide and innkeeper, must deal with a mysterious female newcomer to her small town; a woman bent on destroying their most famous structure, a house where Clark Gable lived as a young man. She dons an additional role as sleuth, and struggles through a maze of secrets and lies, murder and romance to save Gable House, her town, and her life.

Never bet more than you can afford to lose. Caroline Pruett should have heeded that advice, because once she lost her stake, there was no going back. Or was there? Desperation has clouded Caroline's judgment, because when she loses King, her thoroughbred stallion, to Micah Sutton in a poker game, the first thing she does is steal him back. The adventure is not quite a success, however, and after accidentally shooting Micah, Caroline and King are on the run.

Joshua Ryder, ashamed of being an outlaw's son and convinced he carries bad blood, leaves Texas in the spring of 1876 with a trail herd of longhorns bound for Montana. The following spring, he heads west with plans to settle near the Pacific Ocean and live in solitude with just his books and his horses for company. But a Nez Perce woman and her baby change his plans, and he ends up in Virginia City, Montana.

Young Gincy Tate's father is murdered before he can fulfill a contract to supply the Army with remounts. In order to pay his debts and save the ranch, she must make the sale in his place. Afraid the lien-holder, whom she suspects of being the murderer, will foreclose before June 7, 1883, she tells no one Morris Tate is dead. Instead, she says he is here, there, or elsewhere. Gincy hires two cowboys to help trail the herd to Fort Spokane.

Joshua Ryder is eight when his mother is murdered. An old cowboy becomes the father he has never had and, when he is dying, asks Josh, now 18, to leave the ranch with their neighbor, Miguel, and get some experience working for another outfit. Riding Shadow, the buckskin he's raised from a colt, Josh comes to the Rawlins' ranch and hires on to help drive a herd of longhorns to Kansas.

The New Year bells have barely finished tolling before murder strikes in the quiet beach resort of Pear Cove in this third book in the Faraday Murder Series. Charles and Carrie Faraday discover the body of Ginny Ellwood only yards from their home in the resort community. Ginny is the fiancée of Norton, Carrie's brother, and it isn't long before police have him targeted as their prime suspect. Ginny was a popular girl - everyone liked her. No one would think she had an enemy in the world...but then, who murdered her?

After a disastrous foul up in Boothenay's latest time-travel adventure, her long-time love, a traveler himself, has called their relationship quits. And, as if getting dumped isn't bad enough, she and her dog McDuff are inadvertently kidnapped, hijacked away to an alternate America that for all her extra abilities she never guessed existed. Boothenay soon finds herself embroiled in a strange mixture of family feud, political brouhaha and the fight over ownership of an immensely valuable energy source.

Twenty-three years ago, local actress Danielle Moyer vanished after starring in a play at the Bayside Theater. Her body was never found. Now the specter of her ghost has returned to haunt the Bayside Theater or - so it seems. A series of pranks is plaguing the theater, and someone is leaving bizarre clues in the abandoned Moyer cabin. Door County Gazette reporter Leigh Girard, who's writing an article on the theater, chalks the pranks up to theatrical hijinks.

On a cold dark evening on February 6, 2000, what was called the Millennium year, around five pm, Rosie was getting ready to prepare the teatime meal before going out that evening. She was heading off into Edinburgh to meet up with other dance associates, who all belonged to the regular dancing core she met up with on a weekly basis to learn to dance.

In the midst of a bad drought, the shores of a local lake recede to reveal an old abandoned car. Megan is intrigued by the Depression-era jalopy and puzzled when her fellow amateur sleuths would rather get back to discussing Agatha Christie. Then bodies start popping up all over town, ritually murdered, and current crimes take precedence over old secrets. It’s Megan who discovers the corpses, making her the prime suspect.

The members of the Murder by the Yard book club are spending a pleasant afternoon hiking in Palo Duro Canyon, when one of the Megan Clark’s dogs slips his leash and digs up a human skeleton. Megan’s background in anthropology places her in a position to help police unearth the remains and to find another body: a mummy clothed in Comanche garments. Autopsies reveal that foul play caused both deaths, one less than five years earlier, and the other more than a century ago. Now, Megan must connect the two murders, before she finds herself six feet under.

Grandpa Says Story Set is a series of children's books that showcase the love between a grandpa and his grandchildren. Often humorous, Grandpa gives advice, responds to his grandchildren's observation about him, and doles out lots of love and hugs. The stories are enlivened with the narration help of the author's actual grandchildren.

Moods, Louisa May Alcott's first novel, was published in 1864, four years before the best-selling Little Women. The novel unconventionally presents a "little woman" a true-hearted abolitionist spinster, and a fallen Cuban beauty, their lives intersecting in Alcott's first major depiction of the "woman problem." Sylvia Yule, the heroine of Moods, is a passionate tomboy who yearns for adventure. The novel opens as she embarks on a river camping trip with her brother and his two friends, both of whom fall in love with her.

Can we escape our fate? What if we have been foretold of our doom? The Doom of the Griffiths follows the multi-generational prophecy borne upon the head of Owen Griffiths. The young Welsh squire, once the most beloved person to his father's heart, has been pushed aside by his stepmother. In secrecy, he marries a young girl, who gives birth to his son. What might befall Owen Griffiths that he may fulfill the long-held prophecy?