Showing results by narrator "Shannon McManus" in All Categories

All the four-leaf clovers in the world couldn't make Brooke Justice feel lucky these days. When her soon-to-be ex refuses to stay out of her business, she decides a fresh start will turn her luck around. She retreats to the small town of Adams Grove, Virginia. But when someone breaks into her new home, she immediately suspects her ex. Frightened for her safety, Brooke calls a private investigator - but she doesn't expect her whole body to tingle when he asks if she needs his protection.

Maddie Baker just wants to make ends meet. She gave up her school librarian career to return to her hometown and take care of her elderly aunt. So when she starts making Uber runs to supplement her barista job, she never dreamt she’d not only drop a man off to his murder but be labeled a person of interest in his death. Detective Noah Langley is looking for a fresh start in a city with a lower crime rate and a fraction of the population of Memphis. It’s just what he needs to recover from a nightmare that left him severely injured and his teenage mentee dead.

A demon army is descending on Asheville, prepared to drag Piper and her friends to hell for defying Okeus, the god of war and hell, a threat her band of battered and weary defenders is nowhere near strong enough to hold off. To add to her worries, a crescent moon is destined to appear on her left palm that will compel her to kill Kieran Abel, the demi-god son of Okeus. Now that Okeus has discovered his long coveted human son, he will torture Piper for eons if she follows through.

After yet another heartbreak, Flynn Crane is pretty much done with dating. She's not even sure she can keep her grandparents' struggling bed-and-breakfast afloat. But just as she's about to give up on both her business and her dream of settling down in Boot Creek, Ford Morton walks back into her life.

Welcome to Adams Grove…where the wedding cakes are sweet but the recipe is murder. In Adams Grove, Virginia, wedding fever is in full bloom as the townsfolk prepare for the long-awaited nuptials of Jill Clemmons and Garrett Malloy. Amid the pre-wedding bustle, maid of honor Carolanne Baxter is hoping for a fresh start of her own. After years away, she has finally returned home to reconnect with her estranged father, Ben.

America's beloved country superstar Cody Tuggle never expected to be one of America's most wanted. At least that's how he feels since he's been accused of murdering his scheming agent. Desperate to prove he's innocent, he turns to his only alibi, award-winning photographer Kasey Phillips, who recently toured with him and his band. After an exciting life on the road, Kasey has settled down in small-town Adams Grove with her five-year-old son. Unexpectedly reunited with Cody, she finds herself open to love again.

Meet Chloe and Elizabeth Yetti: antisocial, semi-homicidal, 18-year-old twins casually surviving the AI apocalypse. Ten years ago, a powerful machine intelligence unleashed a nano-engineered superdrug on humanity. Having escaped and grown up in the forests of Northern California alongside their younger brother and brilliant scientist/survivalist mother, Clo and El stayed safe while society collapsed around them. But when a mysterious stranger and a demonic woodland creature appear and threaten their family, the twins are drawn back to a disintegrating, drug-addled San Francisco.

Two decades of unanswered questions. One woman determined to find the truth. Maddie Baker has spent nearly twenty years haunted by her mother's murder—a case shrouded in mystery and buried in a grave of police negligence. When Noah Langley, the new detective on the force, claimed to have solved the crime, Maddie believed she could finally close this agonizing chapter in her life. But Noah got it wrong. A chance meeting with the original detective reignites Maddie’s quest for justice. Fueled with new determination, Maddie vows to uncover the truth herself, no matter the cost. Noah vows to help.

If driving a piece-of-crap tow truck through the seediest part of town with a Smith & Wesson beside her means putting a roof over her son’s head, then Samantha Jones is going to be the best damn repo woman on the books. The streetwalkers, the drug pushers, the bands of looking-for-trouble punks haunting the mean streets at midnight don’t intimidate her. These are her people. The guy she finds bound and bloodied in the trunk of her latest conquest, a flashy new BMW, is a different breed entirely.

Nine months after Catherine Leary’s father, a literature professor, passed away, she still has not fulfilled his final wish: that she scatter his ashes in the Seaboro River in South Carolina. The scene of a childhood tragedy that forced her family to move, Seaboro is the last place Catherine wants to see again. But on the evening of her thirtieth birthday, her father’s young colleague - whom she once dated – pays a visit.

Bonny Blankenship's most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend, Lainey McKay. Now in her early 50s, Bonny is desperate to clear her head after a tragic mistake threatens her career as an emergency room doctor, and her marriage crumbles around her. With her troubled teenage daughter, Piper, in tow, she goes back to the beloved river house, where she is soon joined by Lainey and her two young children.

When her family relocated to rural China in 2003, Kay Bratt was thrust into a new world, one where boys were considered more valuable than girls and poverty and the one-child policy had created an epidemic of abandoned infants. As a volunteer at a local orphanage, Bratt witnessed conditions that were unfathomable to a middle-class mother of two from South Carolina. Based on Bratt’s diary of her four years at the orphanage, Silent Tears offers a searing account of young lives rendered disposable.

Everyone thinks fourteen-year-old Violet is a murderer. After a summer-night swim with her best friend, Ainsley, Violet is found confused, wandering in the forest - and Ainsley’s never seen again. But without a body, murder charges won’t stick, so Violet is sent away. After more than a decade in a psychiatric ward, Violet returns to her broken-down hometown of Normal, Alabama, to claim her dead mother’s inheritance and help her overworked sister care for their unstable, alcoholic father.

Jenny Caudill grows up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a home that feels more like a trap. Shy, ignored by boys, and wearing her sisters’ hand-me-downs, Jenny spends her time lost in the promises of romantic pop songs and daydreaming in the back seat of her daddy’s junked Bel Air. There’s got to be more to life.

Professor Wogglebug gets the characters of Oz thinking about their genealogy and where they came from because he wants to write The Royal Book of Oz recording all this information. This topic especially upsets the Scarecrow, as he knows that he was discovered by Dorothy hanging from a beanpole in a cornfield and he thinks that this mean he can't possibly have a family history. Woggleburg agrees and hurts Scarecrow's feelings by noting that because of Dorothy's discovery, Scarecrow has no family tree and should get the slightest mention in their Royal Book of Oz.

After weathering the first gut-wrenching year since her husband's death, Lily Declan is trying to move past her grief and find a place of healing for herself and her two young sons. But when a strange sympathy letter arrives, the quiet life Lily has rebuilt from her sorrow comes under stealthy, sinister attack. On her wedding anniversary, an intimate bridal gift is delivered to her door. Then, a bizarre home invasion shatters her sense of security, and a mysterious Facebook memorial appears.

As America plunges into the Great Depression, Marthanne Hendrix finds herself in rural Vidalia, Georgia, with no memory of how she got there.

Bewildered when the neighbors call her Oma, Marthanne is haunted by memories of another life—and another self. With the help of Comfort, a domestic worker living with her own tremendous loss, Marthanne discovers that Oma is another distinct personality inhabiting her body. In a time when mental illness is taboo, Marthanne and Oma’s simple, small-town life is fraught with complexity and danger.

With gossip running rampant, Marthanne and Oma will do anything to avoid their greatest fear: commitment to an insane asylum. Only by relying on Comfort’s kindness can they navigate their uncertain future. Friendship becomes sanctuary, and the quest for an ordinary life leads to an extraordinary bond.

Deeply moving and exquisitely wrought, Show Me a Kindness is a haunting novel of love, survival, and hiding in plain sight.

Teen rebellion is seen as a cultural norm, but Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach begs to differ. In Why I Didn't Rebel - based on a viral blog post that has been read by more than 750,000 people - Lindenbach shows how rebellion is neither unavoidable nor completely understood. Based on interviews with her peers and combining the latest research in psychology and social science with stories from her own life, she gives parents a new paradigm for raising kids who don't go off the rails.

Savannah Dey politely agreed to attend her ex-husband's wedding, but she'd be grateful for any reason to get out of it...which is why the speeding ticket from the handsome sheriff of Adams Grove is both a surprise and a reprieve. With one quick call to her editor, the aspiring columnist finds herself with a new assignment and the perfect excuse to get closer to the man who pulled her over. Now, all she needs is a way to deal with all the bad memories the small town dredges up.

When Eva Tilling wakes up in the hospital, she's confused - who in her sleepy little North Carolina town could have hit her with their car? And why? It seems impossible that anyone would have it out for the town darling. Thanks to her family's distinguished history and her own unassailable reputation in old-money Jessup, Eva is universally liked. But she has little time to consider the question when she finds that she's awoken with a strange new skill: the ability to foresee people's deaths when they touch her.