Showing results by narrator "Jane Oppenheimer" in All Categories

Nicole Graves finds herself in the crosshairs when she reluctantly agrees to babysit a witness in a high-profile rape trial. Mary Ellen Barnes is suing her university's star quarterback for rape when the authorities won't act. In the court of public opinion, Mary Ellen appears to be the quintessential, pious, good girl. But her lies and mysterious comings and goings lead Nicole to suspect that she’s not what she seems.

Adults and Other Children follows four women as they navigate life from the confusion and innocence of childhood to the bizarre and darkly humorous complexities of adulthood. Along the way, we meet a vindictive, and imaginary, nanny, who casts doubts about the true identity of a little girl’s new baby sister; a group of friends who spend their time obsessing over the gory details of a spate of recent crimes; a college professor who has her boss fired over an imagined sexual assault.

Going to Paris had always been a dream for Julia and Kathy, two women who meet at a beginning French class and become fast friends. Julia is an empty nester whose husband is leaving her, and her daughter won't return her texts. Kathy is a type-A workaholic who gave up on love after a painful secret. After both their lives implode, they say, “What the heck, let’s go to Paris!” and finally live out the dream they’ve both been too busy to live out before.

US families have been pushed to the wall. At the bottom of the economic ladder, poor and working-class adults aren't forming stable relationships and can't give their kids the start they need because of low wages and uncertain job prospects. Toward the top, professional parents' lives have become a grinding slog of long hours of paid work. Meanwhile their kids are overstressed by pressure to succeed and get into good colleges.

Coming to terms with advancing dementia, Mary has no choice other than to move into her daughter’s home. Her daughter, Kayla, caught between her cognitively impaired mother and her belligerent teenage son, soon finds caregiving is more challenging than she imagined. Sage, the family’s golden retriever, offers comfort and unconditional love, but she has her own problems, especially when it comes to dealing with Mary’s cat.

Wonderfully wide-ranging, original, and enjoyable, The Emotional Embodiment of Stars contains 27 award-winning short stories like "Mortimer", in which an unwanted guest secretly follows a family through their heartbreaking sorrows, and "Crossroads", in which a budding writer is finally preparing to meet the man she happens to exchange greetings with every morning on the way to her office.

Tate Marsdon, MD, a successful Scottsdale plastic surgeon, shows up for dinner at the home of close friends Henry and Imogen Vine to find his host stabbed to death and his hostess in a state of psychosis. Arrested and jailed, Imogen undergoes treatment for traumatic memory loss, but her attorney, Erin Fitzgerald, Tate’s current romantic interest, starts to question her client’s guilt. Erin and Imogen’s closest friends work to uncover the truth behind the cold-blooded killing. But hiding deep within the shadows is someone determined to stop them—even if it means another death—this one closer to home than anyone imagines. When Tate finds himself targeted as a prime suspect, he, too, is drawn into the investigation.

Firefly, one of the river people, yearns to be an inker and tattoo giants, just like her mother. But one morning a rogue giant kidnaps her mother and takes her up to the plateau, a dangerous place for all river people. Firefly attempts to rescue her mother then learns her mother harbors a secret that calls into question everything Firefly ever believed about her people, her family, and herself.

Revolutionizing the way we perceive and live with Alzheimer’s, Joanne Koenig Coste offers a practical approach to the emotional well-being of both patients and caregivers that emphasizes relating to patients in their own reality. Her accessible and comprehensive method, which she calls habilitation, works to enhance communication between carepartners and patients and has proven successful with thousands of people living with dementia.

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

This World War II story of teenager Sonja Schulz Verploegh Chassé, describes how she suddenly finds herself imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in the Dutch East Indies.

Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past. Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life.

Emily and Stan Remington's maiden voyage in their newly inherited, second-hand RV goes awry when a body falls off the top of their vehicle. The retired small town police officer and her husband, a retired history professor, find themselves at the center of a murder investigation involving a politician, a corporate executive, and a maverick priest.

When 63-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with another woman, she's shocked and furious...at first. But by the time her head stops spinning, Sylvia realises she hates the retirement community she's living in - it's for old people. And she certainly doesn't feel old! So, she enlists the help of her best friend, glamorous 70-year-old widow Evie, and the pair flee to Manhattan to start a new life in the city that never sleeps. Sylvia's husband may have spent her life savings, but they're scrappy and determined - and they weren't born yesterday.

Social misfit Mari Caldwell desperately wants to get on with her life. If only she could get there faster - specifically to Yale - and leave behind all the things that make her anxious: driving a car, crossing bridges, her peers, her parents' divorce. When Mari comes across an old scrapbook of her mother's, she discovers her white-collar parents were once blue-denim hippies.

Ugarit, Syria, 1450 BCE. Eighteen-year-old Leah, the eldest daughter of a wealthy winemaker, is past the traditional age of betrothal. Vowed to wed the wealthy but cruel shipbuilder Jotham, Leah declines his offer of marriage after discovering that he and his family suffer from "the falling sickness." Enraged by her refusal and his ruined reputation, he blackmails Leah's father, a punishment forgiven only by offering Leah's hand in marriage. With no more options for another suitor and no male heir for her family, Leah must seek out the cure for Jotham's sickness.

When two boys disappear from her hometown, Daphne Gauge sees eerie parallels to her brother’s disappearance 30 years earlier. What her husband dismisses as graffiti, Daphne fears are symbols harkening to an ancient Norse god. Digging more deeply, she uncovers evidence of the town’s belief that sacrifice endows wealth and power. Is this more than a bloodthirsty urban myth?

The women of The Homegrown Café Book Club are over 40, single, and loving it. Fate, however, has a different plan with a younger man, for every last one of them. CPA Deacon Jeffries has carried a torch for his favorite client for over a year, but she would probably sooner light him with it than return his affection. She makes an offer he can’t refuse to save her farm, one that makes his wish come true and gives his daughters the mother they need...

Dr. Sara Alderson isn’t used to her patients dying for no reason. When a young boy succumbs to a mysterious illness that defies all her efforts to treat it, she refuses to accept defeat. After two months of questions, Sara has attracted the attention of powerful people who don’t want their secrets uncovered, and will go to any lengths to make sure they stay hidden. Now, time is running out for Sara to unravel the mystery before anyone else falls victim to the illness. And before her career, her family and her freedom are taken from her by enemies she doesn’t even know she has.

When a severed finger shows up on her doorstep in a seedy section of Las Vegas, Helen Taylor does not freak out. She’s already crazy, as evidenced by her junk-stuffed house and its ever-growing population of cats. There’s also Bobby, her long-dead husband. Helen talks to him regularly, and Bobby talks back. The finger and the brutal murder it reveals are more than a hoarding cat lady with a phantom husband can ignore. Helen’s a suspect, and she ends up in jail. It takes power beyond the ordinary to bring the truth to light.