Showing results by narrator "Mark Hammer" in All Categories

George V. Higgins, the internationally-acclaimed grand master of crime fiction, returns to thrill listeners with this riveting tale of cops, robbers, and big city low life. An expertly crafted story of loyalty and betrayal, it is peppered with wonderfully authentic dialogue and seedy black market atmosphere. Eddie Coyle is a small-time gun dealer with a big-time problem: who to sell out to avoid going to prison.

Detective Dave Robicheaux becomes entangled in the affairs of the Fontenot family, descendants of sharecroppers whose matriarch helped raise Dave as a child. They are in danger of losing the land they've lived on for more than a century. As Dave tries to discover who wants the land so badly, he finds himself in increasing peril from a lethal, rag tag alliance of local mobsters and a hired assassin with a shady past.

A demented serial killer, who calls himself "The Will of the People", has gained a wide audience by sending warning letters to the New York Daily News. When "Will" names a prominent criminal defense attorney as his next victim, P.I. Matt Scudder suddenly finds himself protecting an old associate. Matching his wits against the wily murderer, Matt must race to uncover "Will's" identity before he loses his lawyer friend.

The 40-year-old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has never been forgotten in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Flynn's daughter, Megan, returns to the site of her father's murder, it quickly becomes clear that her family's blood-stained past will not stay buried. Megan gives her old friend Dave Robicheaux a tip about a small-time criminal named Cool Breeze Broussard, scarcely suspecting that the seemingly innocuous case will lead Robicheaux and his partner into the midst of a deadly conspiracy.

Dual Meaders, Doc Taulbee, and their gang of city slickers set out to steal thousands of dollars worth of homemade Kentucky Whiskey from Son Martin, a hell-raising country boy, during the midst of Prohibition.

When former Klansman and piney-woods outcast Aaron Crown is finally imprisoned for a decades-old murder, it is to Detective Dave Robicheaux that he proclaims his innocence loudest. Crown seems to be a lightning rod for every kind of trouble that the state of Louisiana can unearth. A documentary film writer seeking to prove Crown's innocence is found murdered; a button man for the New Orleans mob accuses Robicheaux of taking a pay-off to ignore Crown.

But it is when Buford LaRose -- scion of an old Southern family and author of a book on the Crown case -- is elected governor that Dave Robicheaux's involvement with Aaron Crown deepens to a level he can barely fathom. And it is Buford's social-climbing wife, Karyn, with whom Robicheaux had an affair years before, who proves to be his most poisonous adversary.

Filled with thrilling adventure, lightning-paced action, and street smart realism, Cadillac Jukebox is a brilliant addition to Burke's standout Dave Robicheaux series.

Help young listeners understand the problems of poverty and hunger in Third World countries with this powerful, moving story by award-winning author Gary Paulsen. An orphan in a Mexican border town meets an American army sergeant - and hopes the sergeant will help him cross the border to a better life in the United States.

Internationally-acclaimed author George V. Higgins—a master of action and suspense—continues his gripping series in Bomber’s Law. Higgins’ riveting style enlivens this tale of cops and mobsters set in a world of fast-talking wise guys and heavily-armed exiles from Palookaville. When Brian Dennison succeeds “Bomber” Lawrence as head detective in the Massachusetts State Police Department, he soon realizes that Boston’s upwardly-mobile mobsters aren’t going to let him hang around until retirement age.

Abandon yourself to the spell of six short stories filled with thrills and dark suspense. Here are tales by the masters of mystery and horror - A. Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Oscar Wilde and Ambrose Bierce - taking on a new energy and force through performances by Recorded Books’ critically-acclaimed narrators. Ranging from dungeons to drawing rooms, and peopled with extraordinary ghouls and doomed dowagers, the tales are guaranteed to raise the hair on the back of your neck.

A bullet shot through the window of Weldon Sonnier's house propels Dave Robicheaux back into the lives of a family he's not sure he wants to be reacquainted with. Weldon Sonnier's CIA-influenced past has led to dangerous connections and commitments, including debts to local mob boss Joey 'Meatballs' Gouza. As Weldon puts himself in the line of fire, Lyle Sonnier, television evangelist and faith healer, reveals to Dave a violent family history that intersects menacingly with Dave's own.

Eugene Morner liked the feel of the Colt .45 against his thigh. But it was probably boredom that made him put a bullet into a man named Curly one starless night. He felt a slow euphoria creep over him as he watched the man whimper into slow death.

When Janet’s parents divorce, the 15-year-old moved with her mother to the isolated artist colony in Tres Pinos, New Mexico. As the only Anglo girl in her class, Janet feels like an outsider. At night she dreams of an exquisite moonlit stream. On its banks a delicate doe gently sips from the cool waters. Then an Indian warrior appears, an almost poetic vision from a past tie with his bow drawn, ready to strike. Janet’s first encounter with a local Indian proves to be anything but dramatic.

A routine assignment transporting two death-row prisoners to their executions goes fatally wrong, leaving Dave Robicheaux brutally wounded and his partner dead. Obsessed with revenge, Dave is persuaded by the DEA to go undercover into the torrid sleepy depths of New Orleans, a volatile world of Mafia drug-running and Cajun voodoo magic. He becomes irrevocably snarled in the nightmarish web surrounding Mafia don Tony Cardo and must put himself against his own worst fears in order to survive.

Dave Robicheaux is trying to put a life of violence and crime behind him, leaving homicide to run a boat-rental business in Louisiana's bayou country. One day while fishing in the Gulf with his wife Annie, he witnesses an event that will change his life forever. A two-engine plane suddenly crashes into the sea and Robicheaux dives down to the wreckage to find four bodies and one survivor; a little girl miraculously trapped in a pocket of air. When the authorities insist only three bodies were recovered from the plane, Robicheaux decides to investigate the mystery of the missing man.

When small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is convicted on a felony, he's looking at three years in the pen - that is, unless he sells out one of his big-fish clients to the DA. But which of the many hoods, gunmen and executioners he calls his friends should he send up river? Set on the mean streets of Boston and told almost entirely in crackling dialogue by a vivid cast of cops and lowlifes, The Friends of Eddie Coyle set a standard for authentically gritty crime fiction that has never been bettered.

When a Nazi submarine is discovered lying in 60 feet of water off the Louisiana coast, some troubled ghosts are ready to be released. A local businessman is offering Detective Dave Robicheaux big money to bring the wreck to the surface, but he is not the only one after the submarine and its mysterious cargo. Neo-Nazis are on the march in New Orleans, a new spirit of hatred is abroad, and its terrifying embodiment, an icy psychopath called Will Buchalter, is stalking Robicheaux's wife.

When Amanda Boudreau is raped and murdered, it's small-time black hustler Tee Bobby Hulin's prints that are found at the crime scene. Tee Bobby pleads innocence, but then attempts suicide in his holding cell. Why? Lawyer Perry LaSalles takes on the defence, but his motives are fuelled by guilt.

Personal tragedy has left Dave Robicheaux close to the edge. Battling against his old addiction to alcohol and haunted nightly by vivid dreams and visitations, Dave finds his only tranquillity at home with his young ward, Alafair. But even this fragile peace is shattered by the arrival of Dixie Lee Pugh who brings with him a brutal trail of murder and violence. Robicheaux reluctantly agrees to help out his old friend but becomes more involved than he bargained for when he finds himself suspect number one in the series of bloody killings.

Hunting a sadistic killer who targets young prostitutes, Detective Dave Robicheaux has no mind to be sidetracked into persuading ex-schoolmate mobster Julie 'Baby Feet' Balboni to leave town. And it turns out that Balboni is the money behind a Civil War movie that's bringing in good business. But then the film crew stumble on a skeleton out in the bayou, and the links between a thirty-year-old lynching, a Civil War general, Balboni and the serial killer lead Dave into treacherous waters, with only a handful of unexpected allies to help him protect his own.

It is a rainy late-summer's night in New Orleans. Detective Dave Robicheaux is about to confront the man who may have savagely assaulted his friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest who's always at the center of controversy. But things are never as they seem and soon Robicheaux is back in New Iberia, probing a car crash that killed three teenage girls. A grief-crazed father and a maniacal assassin are just a few of the characters Robicheaux meets as he is drawn deeper into a web of secrets and violence.