Showing results by narrator "Caroline Shaffer" in All Categories

We've all heard the saying "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Luckily, for Jack, this collection offers more than 20 stories filled with the art of sexual play at work to make even Jack more lively. Here the most mundane 9-to-5 job can lead to a rowdy romp that's sure to leave people talking by the water coolers.

For Kate Mitchell, finishing her master's thesis on reclusive photographer Reed O'Connor was just another item to check off her list. She knew exactly what she was doing. Or did she? There's just one portrait that doesn't fit. One portrait... and the passion she sees behind it. Finding the story behind O'Connor's picture becomes Kate's obsession, and the people she meets will challenge everything she thought she knew about life, love, and inspiration. A single picture can tell more than one story.

Making rounds to homes one wet spring morning, veterinarian Dr. Kate Turner rescues a family's hamster from a vacuum cleaner then visits an estate whose owners breed champion Cavalier King Charles spaniels. Instead of sharing traditional tea with the couple, she confronts a bloody scene of bodies and 27 blue-ribbon dogs running wild. Police initially suspect a murder-suicide, but when Dr. Kate proves the famous best-in-show champion is missing, a darker reality intrudes.

Halliday resumes the story of Maddie Springer, shoe designer and amateur sleuth, a week before her marriage to hunky Los Angeles police detective Jack Ramirez. When she finds her wedding planner face down in frosting with a knife sticking out of her back, she knows that to leave on time for their honeymoon, she needs to help Jack solve the case. Her two best friends step in, not only to help find the killer, but also to serve as her new wedding planners.

Morning sickness sucks. Which is why fashion designer turned amateur sleuth Maddie Springer has spent the last six weeks being a couch potato and Moonlight vampire movie devotee. But when Maddie's best friends finally convince her to venture out, Maddie stumbles on a dead body of a girl who has been bitten on the neck, and life suddenly imitates art in the most deadliest of ways. Now Maddie is smack in the middle of a murder investigation involving a deadly dance club and a coven of Hollywood "vampires".

Professor Emily Cavanaugh has left Windy Corner behind and is back at Bede College on her sabbatical, determined to finish writing her book on Dostoevsky. She is soon reunited with one of her promising students, Daniel Razumov, as well as familiar faces on the teaching staff - her friend, Marguerite Grenier; her half-brother, Oscar Lansing; the abrasive division chair, Richard McClintock; and the predatory Taylor Curzon, known for her relentless pursuit of young male students - and Taylor now has Daniel firmly in her sights.

In one night, Leanne Summers has lost her home, her every possession, and learned that everything she's ever believed is a lie. So when she witnesses a bank robbery in progress, she doesn't think of the consequences. She steals a gun, barges in - and finds herself being held captive within minutes.

Plus-sized Rachel Simon has settled into her life. But in a lifetime of not-quite fitting in and battling demon food issues, she has given up on finding love, despite the nagging of her close circle of friends. Now, Rachel has received some big news: a fashion blog, which she secretly wrote on the side, has caught the eye of a major fashion magazine, who not only want her to write a column, but are giving her an award at an upcoming banquet. The problem? She used Lisa’s picture on her bio and believes they expect a tall beautiful blonde to walk through the doors of the magazine.

Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns with her first story collection in over eight years. In Acts of God, she has crafted 10 different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will. For Marie James, a teenager from Fayetteville, Arkansas, the future changes when she joins a group of friends in their effort to find survivors among the debris left when a tornado destroys a neighboring town.

In a Russia where the Decembrists’ rebellion was successful and the Trans-Siberian railroad was completed before 1854, Sasha Trubetskaya wants nothing more than to have a decent debut ball in St. Petersburg. But her aunt’s feud with the emperor lands Sasha at university, where she becomes one of its first female students - an experiment, she suspects, designed more to prove female unsuitability for such pursuits than offer them education.

In a time when many women feel lonely and isolated, Girls' Club calls us to embrace the delight and comfort that can be found in life-giving friendships with women - and to cultivate relationships that not only offer emotional affirmation and acceptance, but also inspire, educate, and stretch us to live out our God-given potential.

Charlotte Kingsley loves to write and dreams of having her reimagined fairy tales published, but she keeps getting rejected over and over. And to top it all off, her best friend, Anders, gets engaged, making her realize she’s going to lose the Prince Charming who lives next door. After yet another rejection letter, Charlotte decides to switch gears. What if she wrote a book about celebrating women for who they really are instead of trying to create a fantasy world for them to visit? Then she discovers that Anders has called off his engagement....

Thirty-year-old Max Maguire, detective with the New York Police Department, finds herself in France again when she is sent as a bodyguard for one of America's most famous wine critics, who is traveling to Bordeaux to taste some of the most expensive wines in the world. In the tragic circumstances that follow, Max is once again paired with French examining magistrate Olivier Chaumont, with whom she had had a fling the year before while solving a case in Champagne.

Jerry Marcus fooled them all. He was “a nice guy,” always helped at home, did well in school, an athlete, and always employed. When things went wrong, he was the first to help clean up the mess. He was the last person anyone suspected of being a serial killer. After Marcus was caught and sentenced to life in prison in the late 1970s, author Linda Lou Long spent years corresponding with him. The Tuskegee Strangler gives an inside look into the workings of a man who is not your typical serial killer.

Tess Dyer’s husband, Jason, promised to love her forever. That was eleven years ago, before the fights, before the pain, before the bitter divorce. Now he is just another in a long line of people who rejected Tess, from her coldly distant mother to the seemingly endless string of one-night stands from her youth whose names she can’t remember. Desperate to escape the pain of the past, Tess flees her small Maine hometown of Brookfield for the even smaller New Mills. There, she hopes to start over and forget what she left behind…with the help, perhaps, of her handsome new neighbor, Brian.

Carter is an insurance adjuster whose longing for creative expression spills over sometimes into his accident reports. Abby works for her adoptive father, Uncle Mannie, in the family bookstore, the ReadMore Cafe. Carter barely tolerates Christmas; Abby loves it. She can't wait past October to build her favorite display, the annual Christmas book tree stack, which Carter despises. When an automobile accident throws Carter and Abby together, Uncle Mannie, who is harboring secrets of his own, sees a chance for lasting happiness for his little girl.

Having finished transforming Windy Corner, the grand Victorian mansion she inherited from her great aunt, into a writers’ retreat, widowed literature professor Emily Cavanaugh is ready to receive her first set of guests. But her careful planning is thrown into disarray by the unexpected arrival of outrageous true-crime writer whose unpardonably rude behavior is causing great offence. As a ferocious ice storm rages outside, the guests entertain one another with a game of charades. But their revelries are brought to a sudden halt by the discovery of a body in one of the guest bedrooms.

Hidden among the photographs, uniforms, revolvers, and war medals of the Civil War are the remarkable stories of some of the most unlikely heroes: women. This audiobook brings to light the incredible stories of women from the Civil War that remain relevant to our nation today. Each woman's experience helps us see a truer, fuller, richer version of what really happened in this country during this time period.

Our decisions are expressions of who we are and how we move through the world. Rarely, though, do we examine our decisions or even look inward to consider the psychology of our decision-making. Instead, we often make decisions based on what we call instinct—which relies on cognitive bias, false assumptions, mis-remembering, and mental mistakes. Truthfully, we don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.

Ballerina Lucia del Mar has two great passions: dance, which consumes most of her waking hours, and the Internet, which brings the outside world into her tightly regimented life. These two passions collide when a White House performance and reception leads to an encounter with handsome Moroccan businessman Rashid al-Jazari, creator of a brilliant technology that has set the Internet rumor mill ablaze.