Showing results by narrator "Liza Ross" in All Categories

When V. I. Warshawski, the hardest-working of private eyes, goes out one night, a stranger is shot and dies in her arms. V.I. has been visiting Club Gouge, where a woman known as the Body Artist turns her naked body into a canvas for the audience to paint on. The show attracts all kinds of people, from Ukrainian mobsters and Iraq war veterans. A tormented young painter shows up too, and the intricate designs she creates drive one of the soldiers into a violent rage.

The Last Time They Met focuses on the relationship between childhood sweethearts Linda Fallon and poet Thomas Janes. We begin in the year 2000 at a writers' festival in Toronto and are propelled backwards in time, via the politically repressive Naiobi, to the small town in Massachusetts for their school days in the 1960s. Along the way the novel delves deeply into the destructive nature of life and the need for forgiveness.

When Joseph Weissmann divorced his wife, Betty, he was 78 years old and she was 75. The Weissmann sisters, Miranda, a successful literary agent, and Annie, a library director, unexpectedly find themselves the middle-aged products of a broken home. Dumped by her husband of nearly 50 years and exiled from their elegant New York apartment, Betty moves to a small, run-down Westport beach cottage. Joining her are Miranda and Annie, who comes along to keep an eye on her capricious mother and sister.

Loyalties are tested when worlds collide.... Every 2,000 years the dark star Oma appears in the sky, bringing with it a tide of death and destruction. And those who survive must contend with friends and enemies newly imbued with violent powers. The kingdom of Saiduan already lies in ruin, decimated by invaders from another world who share the faces of those they seek to destroy. Now the nation of Dhai is under siege by the same force.

The Dhai nation has broken apart under the onslaught of the Tai Kao, invaders from a parallel world. With the Dhai in retreat, Kirana, leader of the Tai Kao, establishes a base in Oma's temple and instructs her astrologers to discover how they can use the ancient holy place to close the way between worlds. With all the connected worlds ravaged by war and Oma failing, only one world can survive. Who will be sacrificed, and what will the desperate people of these worlds do to protect themselves?

>Little Women, closely based on Louisa M. Alcott’s own experience of family life, was first published in 1869 and has never lost its extraordinary power to move and delight - from the heartrending story of gentle Beth to the humorous adventures of tomboyish Jo, and Meg’s vain attempts to cut a fashionable figure in "society".

In this spellbinding collection, Sara Paretsky showcases her extraordinary talents with 14 short stories, including one new V.I. story and seven other classics featuring the indomitable detective. In 'Miss Bianca' a young girl becomes involved in espionage when she befriends a mouse in a laboratory that is conducting dark experiments. Ten-year-old V.I. Warshawski appears in 'Wildcat', embarking on her very first investigation to save her father.

Now Anne is sixteen and a half and is about to start teaching at the very same school she hefself attended. Those of you who know Anne will realise that she has always been delighfully, accident prone, falling into scrapes because of her plans and adventures.

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's summer house on a remote Minnesota lake. Her mother and two sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she leaves the house to her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability - a way to give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning....

As far as Carol Spencer is concerned, the war has spoiled everything. She and Don had been engaged for years and were on the verge of marriage when he was shot down in the South Pacific, leaving Carol on the verge of spinsterhood at 24. She wants to take some kind of job in the war effort, but her invalid mother demands that Carol accompany her to the family's summer home in Maine. But when they arrive at the faded mansion, they find it completely locked up. The servants are gone, the lights are dark - and there is a body in the closet.

The March sisters are among the most beloved characters in children's literature, and Little Men picks up the story of fiery, headstrong Jo where Good Wives left off. Intelligent, funny, perceptive, and genuinely touching, the novel is set at a rather unusual boarding school run by Jo and her husband, where the pupils are encouraged to pillow fight and keep pets. When the penniless but talented orphan Nat Blake shows up on her doorstep, Jo takes him in, and his arrival sets in motion a chain of events that will affect all their lives.

This intensely dramatic and moving novel has remained a best-selling classic since it was first published in 1852. The slaves Eliza and George make a desperate bid to escape to Canada, while Uncle Tom is sold to two successive and very different owners. Abraham Lincoln himself acknowledged the role played by this seminal text in the Civil War, the aim of which was (in part) to emancipate the slaves of the southern states.

The March sisters are among the most beloved characters in children's literature, and Good Wives - the second volume of Little Women - picks up where its predecessor left off. As Meg marries John, Jo is faced with a romantic dilemma of her own, Amy travels to Europe, and Beth becomes increasingly ill. In this sensitive and lively novel, Alcott - "the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the schoolroom", as Henry James called her - is on sparkling form.

Here are eight stories from master American writers of the 19th century. They vary from sinister tales by Ambrose Bierce - why is that window boarded up? - and a reflective moment in the life of a woman without children, but forced to look after children, to classic short stories by O. Henry and Stephen Crane. There is even an elegiac description of an eclipse by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans.

This great children's classic, written in 1900 and immortalised in the Judy Garland film The Wizard of Oz, retains its charm in this reading by Liza Ross. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion are all here in L. Frank Baum's literary technicolor - along with some of the music that made the film unforgettable.

Some people do not know that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was actually the first of a 13-story series. The Marvelous Land of Oz, the second story, brings the Scarecrow and the Tin Man into new adventures in the Land of Oz. In this story, which is as equally entertaining as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man and Scarecrow are persuaded to help out a young boy who finds himself in difficulty. There is also flying furniture among the oddities.

Women's Short Stories - Volume 4. The art of writing a short story can be barely noticed by a reader such is the quality with which they are usually written. It is a difficult trade, an unforgiving discipline but for those who master it the rewards is many.

RCMP Constable Danutia Dranchuk is investigating a mysterious death at Sitting Lady Falls. The evidence she gathers points to three separate stories, leaving her with more questions than answers. Is this murder connected to two earlier killings of Aboriginal women? Are all three the work of the same killer? Some of the details are hitting a little too close to home, and Danutia is forced to examine her friendship with forensics head Corporal Surinder Sharma and his family.

Jean Mason has a doppelganger. She's never seen her, but others swear they have. Apparently, her identical twin hangs out in Kensington Market, where she sometimes buys churros and drags an empty shopping cart down the streets, like she's looking for something to put in it. Jean's a grown woman with a husband and two kids as well as a thriving bookstore in downtown Toronto, and she doesn't rattle easily - not like she used to. But after two customers insist they've seen her double, Jean decides to investigate....

Disfigured by the blow of an abusive husband, the widow Mary McAllister has spent almost 60 years secluded in a white marble mansion overlooking the town of Mill River, Vermont. Most longtime residents of consider the marble house and its occupant peculiar, and few have ever seen Mary. But three newcomers - a police officer, his daughter, and a new schoolteacher - are curious about the reclusive old woman. Only the town priest truly knows the Mill River recluse, and the secret she keeps... a secret that, once revealed, will change the town, and the lives of its residents, forever.