Showing results by narrator "Michael Paul" in All Categories

A child of World War II, Peter Debauer grew up with his mother and scant memories of his father, a victim of war. Now an adult, Peter embarks upon a search for the truth surrounding his mother's unwavering - but shaky - history and the possibility of finding his missing father after all these years. The search takes him across Europe, to the United States, and back.

In "The Pit and the Pendulum," one of his most famous short works, a condemned man is judged guilty by the Spanish Inquisition and sentenced to die. Locked away in a pitch-black cell, he soon discovers a pit in the center of the room, a watery grave at its base. Above him hangs a large, razor-sharp pendulum. As the man is slowly tortured, he must face either the pit or the pendulum.

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.

The Mysterious Affair At Styles is Agatha Christie's first ever published novel, and is the first to feature the famously eccentric detective Hercule Poirot, as well as other classic characters including Inspector Japp and Arthur Hastings.

Kevin Canty tells a story based on a real incident that begins with a disastrous fire in an isolated silver-mining town in Idaho in the 1970s. Everyone in town had a friend, lover, brother, or a husband killed in the mine. The Underworld traces the lives of the handful of survivors and their loved ones - a young widow with twin children, a college student trying to make a life for himself in another town, a lifelong hard-rock miner - as they struggle to come to terms with the loss.

Heloise and her allies are marching on the Imperial Capital. The villagers, the Kipti, and the Red Lords are united only in their loyalty to Heloise, though dissenting voices are many and they are loud. The unstable alliance faces internal conflicts and external strife, yet they’re united in their common goal. But when the first of the devils start pouring through a rent in the veil between worlds, Heloise must strike a bargain with an unlikely ally, or doom her people to death and her world to ruin.

Kommissar Erik Wolf steht vor einem Rätsel: Warum wurde Magdalena Feddersen so gewaltsam umgebracht? Zumal der Hauptverdächtige Mathis Feddersen, der Neffe der Toten, ein perfektes Alibi hat. Zu allem Überfluss findet sich am nächsten Tag im versiegelten Haus des Opfers eine weitere Leiche. Mamma Carlotta, Wolfs italienische Schwiegermutter, die auf der norddeutschen Ferieninsel zu Besuch ist, mischt sich unverzüglich in die Ermittlungen ein - schließlich handelt es sich bei der zweiten Toten um ihre nette Reisebekanntschaft aus dem Flugzeug.

A child of Hell’s Kitchen and the bastard son of a beloved former police commissioner, Fritz Malone is all too familiar with New York City’s rougher side. So when a gunman opens fire at the crowded Thanksgiving Day parade, Fritz steps into action, giving chase. He then learns that someone dubbed “Nightmare” has been taunting the city’s leaders for weeks—and there’s more carnage to come, unless the city meets the madman’s impossible demands. The nervous police need an outside man, and Fritz fits the bill.

When Cora Holman’s mother dies, she assumes the inevitable: that her mother overdosed on the painkillers she’d been taking for years. So she’s shocked to learn that her mother and a neighbor both died of a brain aneurysm the same night. When Cora and other neighborhood teens become ill with a mysterious flu, and government-type strangers arrive in her small town, they all fear the unthinkable - a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, a world away in Pakistan, a 16-year-old computer genius named Shahzad is working as a virtual spy....

While many investors fear a rapid rise in inflation, author Gary Shilling, an award-winning economic forecaster, argues that the global economy is going through a long period of deleveraging and weak growth, which makes deflation far more likely and a far greater threat to investors than inflation. Shilling explains with clear language and compelling logic why the world economy will struggle for several more years and what investors can do to protect and grow their wealth in the difficult times ahead.

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?

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a Protestant, after a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi, realizes he has a Jewish soul.

During a live television broadcast on the night of a lunar eclipse, renowned astrophysicist Andrew Leland is suddenly lifted into the sky by a giant spacecraft and taken away for all to see. Six years later, he turns up wandering in the Sonoran Desert, thin, bearded, a ghost of his former self. Upon his return he denies ever having been abducted, refuses to cooperate with the government or media, and disappears from the public eye, supposedly becoming a hermit somewhere in the woodlands of the Midwest.

Roj Blake and the President of the Terran Federation stand face to face. Two men with polar opposite political views, meeting for the first and last time. The long crusade is at an end. And Blake stands to lose everything that matters in his life.

In 1920s Munich, the body of Anna Gross, a young society wife, has been found in the English Gardens, still clothed in finery. Soon a second body is discovered, also a woman of high society. When a third body is found, homicide detective Axel Berg realizes he's dealing with unprecedented evil. Is the murderer politically motivated? Is he a lone madman? Or worse, is the killer possessed by both political and personal demons?

In the last days of pre-World War II China and the rise of Communism, Jim Dahlgren, representative of the Amalgamated Aeronautical Company, has had enough of the fatalistic brand of diplomacy from other nations that claim to want a united China, one that can resist invasion from without and treason within - but which refuses to intervene and prevent it's demise. When Dahlgren disappears - purportedly to find a mysterious aviator, the man called "Wind-Gone-Mad" - he ignites a series of actions which just may spell disaster.

In the fall of 1940, the Nazis are at the height of their power—France is occupied, Britain is enduring the Blitz and is under threat of invasion, America is neutral, and Russia is in an uneasy alliance with Germany. Stephen Metcalfe, the younger son of a prominent American family, is a well-known man about town in occupied Paris. He’s also a minor asset in the U.S.’s secret intelligence forces in Europe....

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol. Within minutes of his arrival, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object is discovered in the Capitol Building. The object is an ancient invitation, meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of hidden esoteric wisdom. And when Langdon's mentor is kidnapped, Langdon's only hope of saving him is to accept this invitation and follow wherever it leads him.

Each soul's journey through life on planet Earth is an adventure. The greater picture of the billions of lives and their stories is a cosmic phenomenon we can never fully comprehend. But with our God-given intuition and creative power, we can imagine. And in our lives, we learn that there is inner guidance available to us if we merely tune in.

In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for 40 years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences", London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Here is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.