Showing results by narrator "Liza Ross" in All Categories

San Francisco in the 1890s is a town of contradictions. Lizzie Hayes, a docile, middle-aged spinster, is praised for her volunteer work with the Ladies' Relief and Protection Society Home. When the wealthy but ill-reputed Mary Ellen Pleasant shows up with an orphan in tow, Lizzie is drawn to them both. For it is the beautiful Mrs. Pleasant, object of suspicion because of her rumoured voodoo practise, who holds the key to freeing Lizzie's rebellious nature.

The first in the new Sissy Sawyer series. When Fidelio Valdes, a disaffected young Puerto Rican, and Robert Touche, a drunk and aggressive businessman who has lost his job and his wife, meet, they begin a spree of random shootings. The Connecticut Police are baffled until widowed fortune-teller Sissy Sawyer contacts them to say that her cards are predicting the murders and giving her clues to the identity of the killers...

A dangerous, depressed place reeking of bad memories, South Chicago is a neighbourhood private investigator V.I. Warshawski left a long time ago. But now she's back, drawn to the streets of her childhood once again to do a favour for a friend. It was never going to be easy - and when the mother of a local girl asks her to look into claims of sabotage at the factory where she works, V.I. quickly finds herself caught up in something far more sinister.

An engrossing history of the science of one of the four fundamental physical forces in the universe, electromagnetism, right up to the latest indications that the poles are soon to reverse and destroy the world's power grids and electronic communications. A cataclysmic planetary phenomenon is gathering force deep within the Earth. The magnetic North Pole will eventually trade places with the South Pole. Satellite evidence suggests to some scientists that the move has already begun, but most still think it won't happen for many decades.

When V. I. Warshawski, the hardest-working of private eyes, goes out one night, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms. V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, where a woman known as the Body Artist turns her naked body into a canvas for the audience to paint on. The show attracts all kinds of people, from Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war veterans. A tormented young painter shows up too, and the intricate designs she creates drive one of the soldiers into a violent rage.

This great children's classic, written in 1900 and immortalised in the Judy Garland film The Wizard of Oz, retains its charm in this reading by Liza Ross. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion are all here in L. Frank Baum's literary technicolor - along with some of the music that made the film unforgettable.

Women's Short Stories - Volume 4. The art of writing a short story can be barely noticed by a reader such is the quality with which they are usually written. It is a difficult trade, an unforgiving discipline but for those who master it the rewards is many.

When private eye V.I. Warshawski is called out to a derelict drug house in a rural town just south of Chicago, she discovers something she wasn't expecting: the mutilated corpse of a man, dumped in a cornfield. It is a discovery that throws V.I. into the fascinating world of physics and invention: a design that sparked the construction of the computer as we know it, the development of nuclear weapons, the wonder of Newton's prisms and a train of dramatic events that occurred in wartime Vienna.

The day 28-year-old Willie Upton returns to her hometown of Templeton, New York, in disgrace is the day an enormous monster surfaces in Lake Glimmerglass. So begins The Monsters of Templeton, a novel of mystery, hubris, obession, passion and revenge spanning two centuries, where the dead rise up to tell their sides of the story and the living are haunted by the sins of the past.

Libby’s life seems picture-perfect. She lives in her dream home, raising two precious children and supported by her loving husband, Victor. Sure, he’s away a lot with his job, but she has always accepted that he works hard to make their beautiful life possible. But then, one day, Victor asks for a divorce, and suddenly Libby’s whole world falls apart. Libby never expected to find herself a single mom, and when she receives a letter from the bank, it’s clear that Victor hasn’t been paying the mortgage. Her husband has been keeping secrets from her, and this isn’t the only one.

When V. I. Warshawski is asked to find a man who’s been missing for decades, a search she thought would be futile turns lethal. Old skeletons from the city’s racially charged history rise up to force her back – a nun who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. dies without revealing crucial evidence, and the elderly sisters who hired her are also keeping important information to themselves. Then V.I. finds that her family is keeping secrets of its own. Afraid to learn that her adored father might have been a bent cop....

This is a story from the More Classic American Short Stories collection.

During a routine stake-out of a major client's former home, V.I. stumbles upon something she didn't expect to find: a body. The police immediately dismiss the victim as a drunken intruder, but V.I. sees things differently. Hired by the dead man's family to investigate, V.I. is lead back to the blacklists of the McCarthy era as well as into the murky operations of modern American government. Stopping at nothing in her quest for justice, V.I. soon discovers the perilous cost of bringing dark secrets to light....

While driving home after celebrating friend Murray Ryerson's big break into TV hosting, V.I. almost collides with a fatally wounded woman lying in the street. The deceased is Nicola Aguinaldo, former employee of security giant B.B. Baladine and recent prison runaway. Taking on the case, V.I. finds herself plunged into a sinister network of corruption that pits her against the police, the prison and the entertainment industry - with potentially lethal results.

On her way home from an all-night surveillance job, V.I. Warshawski's dogs lead her on a mad chase that ends when they find a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan. The girl only regains consciousness long enough to utter one enigmatic word. V.I. helps bring her to a hospital, but not long after, she vanishes before anyone can discover her identity. As V.I. attempts to find her, the detective uncovers an ugly consortium of Chicago power brokers and mobsters who are prepared to kill the girl before VI can save her.

When V.I.'s close friend Lotty Herschel is approached by a man claiming to be a fellow Holocaust survivor, she's forced to recall a painful past she's tried desperately to forget. Coming to Lotty's aid, V.I. decides to investigate the mysterious stranger. But her findings lead to the exposure of something much darker involving an international conspiracy reaching all the way back to Nazi Europe - as well as a shocking truth which could potentially devastate her friend....

Danutia is observing a youth rehabilitation program in England when Arthur returns to the Peak District to attend his mother’s funeral. Suspecting foul play in her death, Danutia and Arthur question the feuding village. They soon discover that the practice of ancient Celtic rituals persists and has evolved into a dangerous and deadly ceremony....

V.I. Warshawski's Chicago neighbourhood is prospering. As it's out with the old and in with the new, long-term residents like elderly Hattie Frizell find themselves viciously under threat.... But that's not all that's troubling V.I. When the body of her neighbour's friend is found washed up in the Sanitary Canal, her investigations lead her to uncover a world of corporate conspiracy and political corruption involving some of Chicago's most prestigious industrial players. And after several attempts on her life, it seems that this time, V.I. may have dug too deep....

This is the moving and powerful story of Edna Pontellier, a beautiful young wife and mother who discovers her true feelings and identity through her love for Robert Lebrun, and in so doing challenges the bourgeois assumptions of her day. First published in 1899 in America, it prompted shock and outrage, but has since come to be recognized as a modern classic.

The art of writing a short story can be barely noticed by a reader or listener - such is the quality with which they are usually written. It is a difficult trade, an unforgiving discipline, but for those who master it, the rewards are many. In this series of works by our greatest female writers we bring you a selection of those we consider the best. In Volume 1 we bring you the classics 'A Dill Pickle' by Katherine Mansfield, 'The Storm' by Kate Chopin, and 'The Sexton’s Hero' by Elizabeth Gaskell.