Showing results by narrator "Lorna Raver" in All Categories

A starlet's plot to blackmail a film-studio executive results in her murder. Only the "trouble chaser" can clear her volatile lover and solve the crime.

From Coney Island sideshows to the brand-new Yankee Stadium, Diamond Ruby chronicles the extraordinary life and times of a girl who rises from utter poverty to the kind of renown only the Roaring Twenties can bestow. But her fame comes with a price, and Ruby must escape a deadly web of conspiracy and threats from Prohibition rumrunners, the Ku Klux Klan, and the gangster underworld.

Employing the popular Don't Know Much About style, with its familiar question-and-answer format, DON'T KNOW MUCH ABOUT MYTHOLOGY will explore the myths of the world, their impact on history, and their continuing role in our lives. It will offer listeners a wide-ranging, comprehensive...

The Great Death arrived with the man from downriver, the one who came with the light-colored strangers and had little red spots covering his body. Thirteen-year-old Millie and her younger sister, Maura, are fascinated by the guests, but soon sickness takes over their village and they have little...

Far and near. Lost and found. Four girls. Four generations. Georgia cannot figure out what's going on in her family. Her mother, Francie, is extremely overprotective. Her grandmother, Dana, and her great-grandmother, Abby, don't speak to each other. And Georgia's great-great-grandmother also had...

An eccentric boarding house denizen winds up dead; his presumed killer, a fellow boarder, has vanished. The baffling case unfolds through the testimony of witnesses, who are themselves suspect.

A beautifully told, inspiring true story of one woman’s volunteer experiences at an orphanage in rural Cambodia—a book that embodies the belief that love, compassion, and generosity of spirit can overcome even the most fearsome of obstacles. Gail Gutradt was at a crossroads in her life when...

This exciting novel about Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, and Lillian Hellman, author of The Children’s Hour, reintroduces their larger-than-life personalities and the vicissitudes of their affair that spanned three decades.

On January 26, 1948, a public health official arrives at a branch of the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo. There has been an outbreak of dysentery in the neighborhood, he tells the manager, and he has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat all locals who might have been exposed.

Written by his wife of twenty years, The Magnificent Elmer is the first book about Elmer Bernstein, a seminal figure of movie music. In this book, Elmer's former wife Pearl tells in vivid anecdotes of their move from a fifth-floor Manhattan walk-up to the red carpets of Hollywood. Pearl participated in the ups and downs of McCarthy, Will Hays, and Otto Preminger. She presents an array of Hollywood's leading men, warts and all, from Sinatra to Odets, from DeMille to Elmer's eponymous rival, Leonard Bernstein.

Ever since the magnificent Miss Loucien gave up teaching to join the Bright Lights Theater Company, school days have lacked a certain . . . drama . . . especially for Cissy, who longs for a life in show business, and Kookie, who craves adventure. But when a diphtheria outbreak interrupts the...

In this classic tale of the death of childhood, there is a savage comedy that owes much to Dickens. But for his portrayal of the child’s capacity for intelligent wonder, James summons all the subtlety he devotes elsewhere to his most celebrated adult protagonists. In the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself shuttled back and forth between her father and mother and their new spouses, all of whom are monstrously self-involved. Neglected and exploited by everyone around her, Maisie herself becomes a pretext for sexual intrigue when her stepparents become attracted to each other.

A challenge to narrow, profit-driven conceptions of school success and an argument for protecting public education to ensure that all students become competent citizens in a vibrant democracy In These Schools Belong to You and Me, MacArthur award–winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah...

Most people think of the morgue as that cold and sterile facility where medical examiners do their necessary, albeit dreadful, work. Less familiar is the other type of morgue, the dry and dusty version, the newspaper morgue, usually housed in the basements and backrooms of newspaper buildings, where old news clippings are filed away. Dolly Madison Sprowls has been in charge of the Hannawa Herald-Union’s morgue for more than forty years. She is gruff and salty, well past the age of retirement, and the unchallenged queen of her ink-stained domain.

A moving love story inspired by a true story and perfect for fans of The Help In a time of hate, would you stand up for love? Shalerville, Kentucky, 1939. A world where black maids and handymen are trusted to raise white children and tend to white houses, but from which they are banished after...

Charity Royall, a young New England woman of humble origins, meets and falls in love with the worldly Lucius Harney, an architect from the city. In evocative and descriptive prose, Edith Wharton conveys the ecstasy of Charity's first experience in sexual and romantic love, and pulls her heroine through the throes of loving a man who ultimately cannot choose her. Wharton's tale elicits the passion and despair of all great but ill-fated love affairs and enthralls the contemporary audience with its pathos just as it did nearly 100 years ago.

Portia Kane is having a meltdown. After escaping her cheating husband and their posh Florida life, she finds herself transported back home and back to square one. In need of saving herself, she sets out to find and resurrect a beloved high-school English teacher who has retired after a violent...

Blackstone Audio presents An American Family Shakespeare Entertainment: Based on Charles & Lamb's 20 Tales From Shakespeare, augmented by miscellaneous scenes and soliloquies from Shakespeare's plays. Featuring Elizabethan songs and dances in new arrangements for stringed instruments.

Maddy Sprowls, newspaper librarian for the Hannawa Herald-Union, prefers to stay in the newspaper morgue and do her job. But one Saturday, she sees four elderly women get out of a taxicab at a garage sale. She figures that those women must hire that cabby every week to drive them from garage sale to garage sale, and wouldn't that make a great feature story for the paper? Shortly after the story runs, one of the four women, retired antiques dealer Violeta Bell, is murdered.

After the start of the Civil War, Emily Hudson - an orphan who lost her family to consumption and fever - finds herself the begrudged guest at the home of her relatives in Newport. Emily's longing to be an artist is dismissed by her puritanical uncle, who wants nothing more than to rid himself of her through marriage. Her only friend is her aesthete cousin, William, an ailing young writer.