Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in African American

When Ruby Lamont’s young son Jake starts telling tall tales about the dad who walked out on them six years ago, it’s time to find out the truth. It’s not that she wants Kenny back in her life—her charming commitment-phobe Griffin, has always been more of a father-figure to Jake—but if she can understand why Kenny broke her heart, perhaps she can finally move on.

Born into slavery, Dahlia never knew her mother - or what happened to her. When Dahlia’s father, the owner of Vesterville plantation, takes her to work in his home as a servant, she’s desperately lonely. Forced to leave behind her best friend, Bo, she lives in a world between black and white, belonging to neither. Ten years later, Dahlia meets Timothy Ross, an Englishman in need of a wife. Reinventing herself as Lily Dove, Dahlia allows Timothy to believe she’s white, with no family to speak of, and agrees to marry him.

Haitian-American Vodou priestess Mambo Reina Dumond runs a healing practice from her New Orleans home. Gifted with water magic since she was a child, Reina is devoted to the benevolent traditions of her ancestors. After a ritual slaying in the French Quarter, police arrest a fellow vodouisant. Detective Roman Frost, Reina’s ex-boyfriend - a fierce nonbeliever - is eager to tie the crime, and half a dozen others, to the Vodou practitioners of New Orleans. Reina resolves to find the real killer and defend the Vodou practice and customs.

Nona “Peaches” Davenport, abandoned by the man she loved and betrayed by family, left her Natchez, Mississippi, home fifteen years ago and never looked back. She’s forged a promising future in Chicago as a professor of African American Studies. Nona even finds her once-closed heart persuaded by a new love. But that’s all shaken when her father’s death forces her to return to everything she’s tried to forget.

Rashid is a young Black man from Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, with a complicated life. Looking for an escape from a neighborhood few ever leave, he finds it in Rachel - married, twenty years his senior, and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. It begins with a flirtation and a tryst. It becomes an intense romance, exhilarating and enriching, that defies the expectations of Rashid’s friends and family. What draws Rachel to Rashid is his curiosity, his need for intimacy, and his adoration - everything lacking in her crumbling marriage.

International hit man Gideon never misses his target, but when a job in Detroit goes bad, he should have killed his client - a cold-blooded woman who hired him to kill her husband - when he had the chance. Now the city's mayor and with money and power to spare, this woman will stop at nothing to see that Gideon gets what he deserves.

Until his untimely death, Nena’s mentor was the backbone of the Tribe. With his leadership position unfilled and despite the Tribe’s newfound misgivings about her, Nena has stepped into a new role she never wanted. Politics is an entirely new venture for her, and now one of the Tribe’s own has been kidnapped, forcing her back to her origins as an assassin. But the only person qualified for such a rescue mission is Nena Knight—and a new team whose trust in her continues to waver.

Black rookie cop Trevor “Finn” Finnegan aspires to become a top-ranking officer in the Los Angeles Police Department and fix a broken department. A fast-track promotion to detective in the coveted Robbery-Homicide Division puts him closer to achieving his goal. Four years later, calls for police accountability rule the headlines. The city is teeming with protests for racial justice. When the body of a murdered black academy recruit is found in the Angeles National Forest, Finn is tasked to investigate.

Penelope Grand has scrapped her failed career as an artist in Pittsburgh and moved back to Brooklyn to keep an eye on her ailing father. She's accepted that her future won't be what she'd dreamed, but now, as gentrification has completely reshaped her old neighborhood, even her past is unrecognizable. Old haunts have been razed, and wealthy white strangers have replaced every familiar face in Bed-Stuy. Even her mother, Mirella, has abandoned the family to reclaim her roots in the Dominican Republic. That took courage. It's also unforgivable.

After solving a crime blamed on Vodou in New Orleans’s French Quarter, Vodou priestess turned amateur detective Reina Dumond has returned to her benevolent work as a healer. But when her friend and enigmatic client Evangeline “Vangie” Stiles comes to her for a spell, Mambo Reina quickly realizes what Vangie really needs is a sleuth.

A northern white couple has relocated to the South to operate a vineyard on a North Carolina plantation. There, they pass their idle hours listening to the stories of one Uncle Julius, who has a deep knowledge of the land. These stories, however, are more than mere entertainments. They all have their time and place, and they offer not only a quiet commentary on the events of the day but also a deeper reckoning with the plantation’s disturbing past.

Baker extraordinaire Rylee Harris has a recipe for everything—except love. It’s been five years since she lost her husband, but romance is still a struggle for Rylee. In her small hamlet of Honey Hill, North Carolina, Rylee knows she’ll be the talk of the town when she finds someone new. To ease her mother’s worries about her love life, Rylee impulsively invents a fake relationship with the only man who’s caught her eye: the town sheriff, Canten Barnes. It’s supposed to be a secret, but secrets don’t last long in Honey Hill.

Cow Tom, born into slavery in Alabama in 1810 and sold to a Creek Indian chief before his 10th birthday, possessed an extraordinary gift: the ability to master languages. As the new country developed westward, and Indians, settlers, and blacks came into constant contact, Cow Tom became a key translator for his Creek master and was hired out to US military generals.

Alisha Blake works her magic in the kitchen, creating delectable desserts for her grandfather’s restaurant in rural Illinois. Though Alisha relishes the close relationship she has with her family, she can’t help but dream about opening a cookie shop in Chicago. She may be a small-town baker, but Alisha has big ambitions. Then a dinosaur bone turns up in her grandparents’ backyard. When paleontologist Quentin Harris arrives to see the discovery for himself, he’s hoping that the fossil will distract him from a recent painful breakup. Instead, he finds Alisha - and sparks fly.

Defiant, eloquent, and thoroughly modern, Claude McKay’s early collection of celebrated poems is widely recognized as having helped to spark the Harlem Renaissance. In Harlem Shadows, McKay gives precise and poignant expression to the injustices of white oppression in many forms. He also paints a vivid picture of Harlem at the dawn of its rebirth and shows the tremendous vitality of the neighborhood as well as the many threats it faced.

A thousand years into the future, a Black elite class reigns while the underclass toils at their feet. With her society’s future hanging in the balance, young Avi Jore enters into an arranged marriage. But the ceremony turns violent when the servants rebel and kill Avi’s father. In the aftermath of General Jore’s death, Avi and her sister Jade vie for power in a vicious contest. As the rightful heir, Avi has no choice but to defend what’s hers—at any cost. With her loyalties tested and her enemies closing in, Avi must rely on her sister Saige, who searches for allies outside the Union’s walls.

A thousand years in the future, a Black elite class reigns. The lower classes toil in the fields or scrape by in blighted cities, serving their rulers in a cruel, divided world. Among the Elites is eighteen-year-old Avi Jore, born to a powerful father and destined to rule. But as she comes of age, Avi cannot help but notice the injustices in her world - the treatment of enslaved workers, the oppression of the lower classes. Her disillusionment grows when she meets Saige Wilde, a mixed-race enslaved girl whose only goal is escaping beyond the borders of their brutal nation.

Honeybees, history, and small-town charm are what Honey Hill, North Carolina, is all about. Its mayor, Lunden Pierce, will stop at nothing to protect the town’s historical landmarks and distinctive character. She’s Honey Hill’s greatest champion. But everything changes when Lunden’s childhood sweetheart, Quade Cannon, returns to town. Though Quade has fond memories of his summers in Honey Hill, he has no use for the historic inn he’s inherited - or the honeybees living in its yard. His plan is to sell the inn and reap the rewards.

When Rita McCall discovers her husband’s affair, there isn’t a lick of surprise—not a single tear or broken heart. Just a wife and mother who’s over it and ready to watch her twenty-three-year marriage go up in flames. Sticking close, thick as thieves since childhood, Rita’s unfailingly loyal cousins Jemel and Sharae become her lifeline. They stand beside her as she contemplates a new career and navigates the murky waters of being a preacher’s daughter disgraced by scandal.

A Cadillac, a pistol, and a corpse make for another morning in Chicago. The body belongs to Walter Griffin, a prominent Black Chicagoan insider hailing from the city’s West Side. He ascended to the upper echelons of the mayor’s office only to meet his end in a watery grave at Wolf Point. Forensics finds his prints on the gun; it’s ruled a suicide. But grizzled private investigator Ashe Cayne knows better. Griffin’s children plead with a reluctant Ashe to hunt their father’s killer.