Showing results by narrator "Kevin Collins" in All Categories

Luka's carefree existence as the spoiled son of a minor noble ended the day his family was arrested and imprisoned in the Eyeless Tower. His father, a political rival to the praetor of Camdon, would never live to see freedom again. Luka should have joined his father on the scaffold but fate - or the schemes of men - intervened. Escape came. Now Luka has a chance to thwart his persecutors and avenge his family. Beginning life again in a distant province, he takes a new name - Rideon

When Rideon's scheme to rescue his brother goes horribly wrong, he forms a new plan - one that turns former allies into foes. Rebelling against the rule of the cunning thief king, he steals the dreaded Thief's Blade and leads a dangerous faction of the guild on a new mission. But the past isn't done with Rideon. A new opportunity for vengeance beckons. After the ambitious son of a noble offers a tempting deal, a deadly bargain is struck, leading Rideon down a treacherous path.

After losing his brother and being murdered by his enemies, Rideon thought there was nothing left that could hurt him. But he soon discovers life only gets more dangerous after death. Restored by magic, he must trek through a hostile wilderness while stalked by a deranged wild man. His only possessions, a cursed bow and a powerful amulet, prove as treacherous as they are necessary. Driven by the need to find his young brother before their enemies reach the boy first, Rideon must enter dangerous territory and risk the wrath of the ruthless thieves' guild.

I'm your average girl at your average high school, trying to figure out my place in life. After catching my now ex-boyfriend messing around with my now ex-best friend, I've made some big changes. No more band, no more backstabbing friends and no more boring old life. Now I have new friends, a new job and new interests. But there's a certain someone who's interested in me, and I don't get it. Jordan Tuttle could have anyone he wants. He's the most popular boy in school.

She's all I could ever want.... I have a reputation around school. Cold. Untouchable. Unfeeling. Only one girl could ever make me want to change and that's Amanda Winters. Too bad I broke her heart and drove her away. So to get through the rest of my days in high school, I tell myself I need to focus on more important things. Like taking our football team to championships. Get accepted to the college of my choice. And finish my senior year without wanting to run away from my problems.

Ten-year-old Joan was born with a rare gift: she can remember every single day of her life in perfect detail. She can tell you how many times her mother has uttered the phrase ‘it never fails’ in the last six months (twenty-seven), or what she was wearing when her grandfather took her...

Between mourning the recent loss of his wife and trying to raise his young son alone, librarian John Grant is barely surviving. And then he receives an anonymous letter promising a terrible revenge - retribution for a childhood sin John had thought long forgotten.

When Jackson McKay and his daughter are kidnapped, their captors demand his research files on a devastating chemical weapon - or they'll kill his little girl. Jackson searches desperately for a way to save his daughter and also protect his country from the terrorists. No risk is too great. His daring escape sets in motion a deadly game of cat and mouse.

Since the founding of the United States, the Barbary pirates of North Africa threatened with impunity American lives, commerce, and honor on the high seas. But in 1815, Commodore Stephen Decatur led a charge to victory. The Second Barbary War, as it became known, helped define American foreign policy and consolidate its naval power. In Decatur's Wake: The Fateful Rivalry Behind the Lightning Defeat of Barbary Terror, Daniel Wattenberg shows us how.

San Francisco Bay Area archaeologist Davis Lowry has everything - success, a fascinating profession - but he is troubled by a bout of sleepwalking. For a change of scenery, he travels to York, England, where a bog man has been unearthed. A series of macabre accidents plague the site, and Davis finds himself enmeshed in a modern-day horror with roots in the bloody past.

In his first nine years as a teacher, Brendan Halpin goes from wide-eyed idealist to cynical, heartbroken idealist. Unique among teaching memoirs, Losing My Faculties is not the story of a heroic teacher who transforms the lives of his hardbitten students; rather, it's the inspirational and often unpretty truth about people who choose to get up ridiculously early day after day and year after year to go stand in front of teenagers.

When Ryder Montgomery shows up on her doorstep 10 years after breaking her heart, Casey can't decide which burns hotter - her desire to be with him or the pain he left her with....

Mac Montgomery spent two years watching his father play matchmaker for his brothers and their wives, and as the last Montgomery standing, he knew it wouldn't be long until all eyes would be on him. While he couldn't deny that things had worked out well for his siblings, the last thing that Mac wanted was to get married and settle down.

In five years, little green men are going to invade Earth - and the only man who knows is Professor Emil Vlasov. Is Vlasov crazy? Or is something actually watching the Earth... waiting...

Fortress is America's guarantor of freedom, an orbiting arsenal of laser weapons and nuclear missiles. It was considered impregnable - until now. Former CIA officer Tom Kelley is sent to learn the secrets surrounding a dead alien found in Turkey and discovers a maze of lies and treachery that could transform America's shield into an engine of global terror.

As a student named Rick Starr experiences elementary school, middle school, and high school, he learns more about gender roles, psychological isolation, bullying, and apathy than about reading, writing, and arithmetic. After suffering through bad teachers, navigating the social ladder, confronting bullies, and completing countless standardized tests, he has a revelation about public school in America: It's comprised of sex, lies, and scantrons.

Dodging secret police on the daily, and haggling prices for dried fruit and vintage leathers in heroin-laced bazaars, My Kazakhy is filled with all the gems you wouldn't expect to find from a queer Latino boy serving in the Peace Corps in a third world, Muslim country.

San Francisco Noir lashes out with hard-biting tales exploring the shadowy nether regions of scenic "Baghdad by the Bay". In this superb collection, virtuosos of the genre meet up with the best of SF’s literary fiction community to chart a unique psycho-geography for a dark landscape. From inner city boroughs to the outlands, each contributor offers an original story based in a distinct neighborhood.

From the introduction to Philadelphia Noir: "America's first great city, first capital, and first industrial metropolis contained from the beginning the mix of poor workers and elite culture, of ethnic enclaves and religious intolerance, of easy skullduggery and flesh-pot possibilities, that led Lincoln Steffens in 1903 to famously rule it 'corrupt and contented'."

From the introduction by David L. Ulin: "For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began."