Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Comedy & Humour

Quinn McKenzie has always lived what she calls a "beige" life. But when Quinn decides to change her life by adopting a stray dog over everyone's objections, everything begins to spiral out of control. Now she's coping with dog-napping, breaking and entering, seduction, sabotage, stalking, and more secrets than she really wants to know.

Fred Van Lente's brilliant debut is both an homage to the Golden Age of Mystery and a thoroughly contemporary show-business satire. As the story opens, nine comedians of various acclaim are summoned to the island retreat of legendary Hollywood funnyman Dustin Walker. The group includes a former late-night TV host, a washed-up improv instructor, a ridiculously wealthy "blue collar" comic, and a past-her-prime Vegas icon.

At fifty-three, Maggie Harris has a good marriage and two mostly happy children. Perpetually anxious, she’s also accumulated a list of semi-reasonable fears: falling air conditioners, the IRS, identity theft, skydiving, and airbag recalls. But never once did Maggie worry that her husband of nearly thirty years would leave her.

Summer Butler had no idea that Darling Investigations would be such a smash. But ratings don’t lie—fans love watching the former star solve real-life crimes in her hometown. With the first season wrapped, the reality-show PI is feeling the pressure to make the next one an even bigger success. It seems the town is harboring an arsonist, and all the smoldering signs point to the same culprit: her cousin Dixie.

Following on the heels of Robert Brockway's comedic horror novel The Unnoticeables, The Empty Ones reveals the next chapter in the lives of a few misfits attempting to fight back against the mysterious Unnoticeables. The Empty Ones follows Carey and Randall to London where they go to rescue Gus and fight more of these mysterious angel-like creatures, and stumble on a powerful and unexpected ally.

After the events of the first two books of the Vicious Circle series, Carey and Randall reached LA during the early '80s punk scene, which was heavily mixed up with Chinatown. A young Chinese girl with silver hair is the Empty One that seems to run things there, and her ex-lover, an Empty One named Zang, has apparently turned against them and may or may not be on Carey's side.

Tiny McAllister never thought she’d get married. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t think girls from Connecticut married other girls. Yet here she is with Caroline, the love of her life, at their destination wedding on the Bermuda coast. In attendance - their respective families and a few choice friends. The conflict-phobic Tiny hopes for a beautiful weekend with her bride-to-be. But as the weekend unfolds, it starts to feel like there’s a skeleton in every closet of the resort.

Oliver Clock has everything arranged just so. A steady job running the family funeral parlour. A fridge stocked with ready meals. A drawer full of colour-coded socks. A plan (of sorts) to stay trim enough for a standard-sized coffin. And in florist Marie, he’s even found the love of his life - not that she’s aware of it. When a terrible tragedy takes Marie out of his life but leaves him with her private journal, he discovers too late that she secretly loved him back. Faced now with a fast-approaching fortieth birthday, Oliver resolves to open himself up to love.

In Familyhood, Reiser shares his observations on parenting, marriage, and mid-life with the wit, warmth, and humor that he’s so well-known for. From the first experience of sending his two boys off to summer camp to maneuvering the minefield of bad words learned at school, this hilarious new book captures the spirit of familyhood, the logical next frontier for Reiser’s trademark perspective on the universal truths of life, love, and relationships.

Tamika Cleary takes a wrong turn up a one-way street - and straight into Thibault Delacroix's leg as he steps into the road. But Mika's in a hurry, and she certainly doesn't have time for a guy who can't even look both ways before crossing, even if he does have a cute face, a body to die for, and the darkest, thickest eyelashes she's ever seen. Unfortunately for Mika, fate has other ideas. When she's threatened by her employer, a Russian mafia boss known as "The Thief", she's forced to accept Thibault's help.

When Houston reporter Lucy Resnick cashes in her retirement to buy her grandmother's farm in Buttercup, Texas, she's looking forward to a simple life as a homesteader. But Lucy has barely finished putting up her first batch of Killer Dewberry Jam when an oil exploration truck rolls up to the farm and announces plans to replace her broccoli patch with an oil derrick.

For hyper-particular publishing heir Jonathan Grief, the day starts like any other - with a strict morning fitness regimen that’ll keep his divorced, easily irritated, cynical, forty-two-year-old self in absolutely flawless physical condition. But all it takes to put a crimp in his routine is one small annoyance. Someone has left a leather-bound day planner with the handwritten title Your Perfect Year in his spot on his mountain bike at his fitness course!

Widowed Samantha Arias hasn’t spoken to Holly Dunfee in forever. It’s for the best. Samantha prefers to avoid conflict. The blisteringly honest Holly craves it. What they still have in common puts them both back on speed dial: a mutual love for Katie, their best friend of twenty-five years, now hospitalized with cancer and needing one little errand from her old college roomies. It’s simple: travel cross-country together, steal her loathsome ex-husband’s VW camper, find Katie’s diabetic Great Pyrenees at a Utah pound, and drive him back home to Wisconsin.

Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper despite, or perhaps because of, his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor's ear, if the poor are a responsibility they are also an imposition.

The year is 1018 and the war with England is finally over, but the unified kingdom ruled by Cnut of Denmark is far from peaceful. Halfdan has lost everything to the war but his sense of humor. Once a proud nobleman, now he wanders the country aimlessly powered only by his considerable charm and some petty theft. When he finds an unlikely ally in Winston, a bookish former monk, the two set out together for Oxford, the seat of the new king.

Valencia, a timid debt collector with crippling OCD, is afraid of many things, but the two that scare her most are flying and turning thirty-five. To confront those fears, Valencia’s therapist suggests that she fly somewhere - anywhere - before her upcoming birthday. And as Valencia begins a telephone romance with a man from New York, she suddenly has a destination in mind. There’s only one problem - he might not actually exist.

Ex-model Paige McCarty is fed up with being just a pretty face. After her ex-husband’s gambling problem left her royally screwed and tragically shoeless, she started Fool Me Once Investigations with her best friends, Lorlei and Kennedy, to prevent other women from being similarly played and dismayed.

Messiah traces the collapse of Christianity and the rise of the next great religion of Western civilization: Cavism. Founded by undertaker John Cave, Cavism holds that it is a holy thing to die. Packaged by a marketing genius, the new religion conquers the world more quickly than any prior memeplex, but pockets of resistance remain. Eugene Luther, formerly an apostle of Cavism, now a hunted apostate, writes his memoirs as a last gesture of freedom while the noose of a totalitarian religious state tightens around him.

"The Big Guys" - Flash fiction, winner of the Derringer Award. "A Fistful of Cozy" - A satire of the mystery cozy genre. "Cleansing" - An ancient crime of biblical proportions. "Lying Eyes" - Solve it yourself, given the clues."Perfect Plan" - Another solve it yourself. Don't you remember One Minute Mysteries and Encyclopedia Brown? "Piece of Cake" - Another solve it yourself, originally featured in Woman's World.

Jack had two dying wishes: that his wife scatter his ashes somewhere "exotic", and that she not give up on life once he was gone. He intended to spur her on to new adventures, but despite clinging to her red suitcase, Geraldine Verne hasn’t left the house for three months. It takes an accident for Geri to accept help from her friends, but when Meals on Wheels arrive she is mortified. Yet heartbroken volunteer Lottie brings with her more than cottage pie and custard. Like Geri, she too is struggling to cut loose.