Showing results by narrator "Rudy Sanda" in All Categories

On a warm night in September 1985, teenagers Kimberly Dowell and Ethan Dixon were brutally murdered in Westside Park in Muncie, Indiana. Their killer has never been charged. Early on, police focused on a family member of one of the teens as a primary suspect. The investigation even ruled out fantastic scenarios, including a theory that the perpetrator was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee. The case grew cold.

When a dip-net fisherman hauls in a severed human foot, Lieutenant Jim Wekle is thrown into another whodunit on his remote island. Alaskan mayhem ensues with a rogue gang of elderly women on ATVs, a Planet Patrol environmental boat with an oil leak, and an influx of tourists, each clutching a fresh copy of a book titled, Muskeg Mama. Kram is in rare form as he decides to enter the local work force by applying his unique perspective to a series of part-time jobs.

Percy Freedman is not grieving. Absolutely not, take that back at once. No, he's entirely sure that selling his dead aunt's home and leaving the neighbors he's known for years is the sane thing to do. Who in their right mind would keep the house that smells like all the hugs he'll never have again? Nobody, that's who. Well, except his cul-de-sac neighbors. They all seem to think some paint and new furniture will clean the emotional slate. They all want him to stay. Even his nemesis, Callaghan Glover. Especially his nemesis, Callaghan Glover.

Isla Lane is an ambitious violinist, who yearns for the career her grandmother had and had always planned for her. Though determined to make her mark on Manhattan and follow her dreams, she just can't seem to get back on course. Consumed with pain from the loss of her grandmother, Isla thinks that she has found the perfect distraction, but this perfect distraction will challenge her in ways she couldn't have imagined.

Claire is a 16-year-old fangirl obsessed with the show Demon Heart. Forest is an actor on Demon Heart who dreams of bigger roles. When the two meet at a local Comic-Con panel, it's a dream come true for Claire. Until the Q&A, that is, when Forest laughs off Claire's assertion that his character is gay. Claire is devastated. After all, every last word of her super-popular fanfic revolves around the romance between Forest's character and his male frenemy. She can't believe her hero turned out to be a closed-minded jerk.

Return to the world of Wicked Lovely! Listen to an all-new Dark Court short story. "Love Hurts" catches up with Irial, Niall, and Leslie - and offers clues about the Wicked Lovely prequel novel, Cold Iron Heart. Tales of Folk & Fey also includes "Old Habits" and "Stopping Time" (previously published Wicked Lovely Dark Court stories) and two previously published selchie short stories ("Awakened" and "Love Struck"). As a bonus, the collection also includes "Carnival of Lies", a prequel story to the 2012 novel, Carnival of Secrets.

Five years removed from a life as an apprentice to a group of heroes who battled supernatural evils, the once-promising student Janzen Robinson has become a package courier. He now works the daily grind, passing time at a hole-in-the-wall bar and living in a tiny run-down apartment on the south side of Cleveland, Ohio. Then from the ancient recesses of unyielding darkness known as the Abyss, a creature has been summoned: a Stalker, a predator whose real name must never be spoken. It's a bastardization of the natural order, a formidable blend of dark magic and primal tenacity.

Meet Lawson: Vampire by birth, fixer by trade. His mission: Preserve the secret existence of living vampires by any means necessary. There's just one problem - his oldest enemy, Cosgrove, is back, killing humans and threatening to unleash an ancient unholy evil. Can Lawson stop Cosgrove and still adhere to the very laws he has sworn to uphold by not falling in love with a beautiful human ex-KGB assassin named Talya?

Once upon a time, a beautiful queen was cursed by a dark faery. That curse, inherited by twin princesses, Aura and Luna, binds their lives in the strangest of ways. At an early age, the girls were more than sisters. They were the strongest of allies until a combination of jealousy, anger, and dark magic tore their relationship to shreds. Aura took everything from Luna: her home, her family, and her love by murdering the prince who'd chosen her instead of Aura. Luna wants revenge, but she's running out of time.

Princess Raya of Paruth lived alone on a deserted island in a towering lighthouse, forgotten by time. With only a loyal albatross as a friend, she had little hope or joy in her life until he washed up on her shore in the middle of a raging winter storm. Prince Trevor of Galder left his father and kingdom behind to travel north in search of a wife. It was time to settle down and forget Ella Carina, the woman who chose to love a peasant and follow her heart instead of choosing Trevor and fulfilling her duty to her people.

I didn't realize my mother was a person until I was 13 years old and she pulled me out of bed and put me in the back of her car, and we left home and my dad with no explanations. I thought that Ma was all that she was and all she had ever wanted to be. I was wrong. As we made our way from Virginia to California, returning to the places where she'd lived as a kid in foster care and as a teenager on the run, repaying debts and keeping promises, I learned who she was in her life-before-me and the secrets she had kept - even from herself.

When life with his loving family takes a sudden turn, Toby finds himself fighting to survive in the unforgiving world of the county animal shelter. But he's not alone - a motley cast of homeless dogs and a devoted pair of shelter workers will give anything to make sure he finds his forever home.

Over his long career as witness to an extreme 20th century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind" - what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity.

It's always darkest before the dawn. As New Orleans continues to burn and the flood waters rise, Dax Harper must get his band of survivors to safety. The dark forces overrunning the city need him - for reasons explained by the enigmatic voodoo priest, Papa Midnight. But as the situation deteriorates, Dax will have to dig deep to save himself, his loved ones, and his beloved city.

At a time 79 percent of employees quit their jobs because they don't feel appreciated at their workplace, Building Corporate Soul sets out to transform the performance and value of organizations - and to make soulless companies a thing of the past.

Often hired by a secret government agency to do undercover work, Bob Devaney was escorting a mysterious woman named Novak to the White House when they were ambushed by gunmen. Novak used a device like an invisibility field to make an impossible escape - and then knocked Devaney out with some kind of ray-tube. When he woke up, Novak was about to terminate him for knowing too much, but a message arrived from a mysterious individual known as Mr. Inconnu: Devaney was to be recruited for something called the Prometheus Project. The Project turned out to be the largest disinformation operation in history, targeted at the aliens who ruled the galaxy.

When Drake and I arrived at our new home, I could pretend it had been all a dream. A nightmare. Here, we are safe and happy - and together. Our safety and comfort are only temporary. Drake and I know that to reach the peace we seek, to be really free of the past, we need to return and fight back. We need to put an end to this chaos and madness. We need to face the vampires, the witches, the werewolves, and we need to win. But since fleeing the last battle, I've been sick, and it's only getting worse.

In the newest Wolfe-family adventure from James Carlos Blake, Rudy and Frank Wolfe are engaging in routine miscellaneous business - some legitimate and some less so - for their family when they stumble upon a stash of high-quality pornographic films in a raid. The plot thickens when their Aunt Catalina, the family matriarch aged 115, recognizes a resemblance to her long-lost sister in one of the young performers. Catalina tasks the boys with tracking the girl down, however improbable a connection may be. This proves to be no simple task.

What's left of the world is divided between the highly regimented life of those inside dome-cities that are protected from natural light (and natural shadows), and those forced to the dangerous, hardscrabble life in the wilds outside. In rural Texas, Mira, her shadow-addicted friend Murk, and an ex-Domer named Bale search for a possible mythological cure to the shadow sickness - but they must do so, it is said, before the return of Halley's Comet, which is only days away.

Anyone who has ever crammed for a test, capitulated to a grade-grubbing student, or fretted over a child's report card knows that the way we assess student learning in American schools is freighted with unintended consequences. As experts agree, our primary assessment technologies—grading, rating, and ranking—don't actually provide an accurate picture of how students are doing in school. In Off the Mark, Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt explain how we got into this predicament, why we remain beholden to outmoded forms of assessment, and what we can do to change course.