Joe Clifford has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is The Lakehouse.
The Lakehouse
Summary
After being cleared of his wife’s murder, Todd Norman returns to her small Connecticut hometown in order to finish building their dream house by the lake. He is eager to restart his life and cast aside any remaining suspicions, but all of that is dashed when a young woman’s body washes up on the beach next door. When Tracy Somerset, a divorced mother from the small town of Covenant, meets a handsome stranger in a midnight Wal-Mart, she has no idea she is speaking with Todd Norman, the former Wall Street financier dubbed “The Banker Butcher” by the New York tabloids. The following morning, on the beach by Norman’s back-under-construction lake house, a young woman’s body is discovered. Sheriff Duane Sobczak’s investigation leads him to town psychiatrist Dr. Meshulum Bakshir, whose position at a troubled girls’ group home a decade ago yields disturbing ties to several local prominent players, including a radical preacher, a disgraced politician, a down-and-out PI, and Sobczak’s own daughter. Unfolding over the course of New England’s distinct four seasons, The Lakehouse is a domestic psychological thriller about the wayward and marginalized, the lies we tell those closest to us, and the price of forbidden love in an insular community, where it seems everyone has a story to tell...and a past they prefer stay buried.
©2020 Joe Clifford (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Occam's Razor
Summary
Former top-flight prospect Oz Reyes heads security for Coastal Sports Network in Los Angeles. On the eve of the annual awards show, his boss Delma Dupree summons him to Miami. Since tearing his ACL in a bar fight 18 years ago, Oz rarely returns to the city where he blew his NFL chances and lost the love of his life, Tania. At Delma’s waterfront mansion, Oz encounters a chaotic scene with police and emergency vehicles. Delma’s oldest son, Jackson, navigates the aftermath. There are three Dupree children: Jackson, Janelle, and Rodney, an adopted screw-up currently serving life in prison for the rape and murder of Janelle’s daughter, Juniper. Jackson explains his mother has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and was picked up by police wandering during the night. At first Delma seems fine to Oz, but when she asks Oz to look into Rodney’s seemingly airtight conviction, her symptoms begin to show. Despite Oz’s polite refusal, Delma insists he store a file, which she swears contains the truth of who really committed the crime. Once Oz comes in possession of that file, an open and shut case suddenly seems less so, as forces seen and unseen conspire to take Oz down. Fired from his job and attacked in his home, Oz dives headlong into South Florida’s glitzy and glamorous underbelly, reopening a case the rich and powerful would prefer stay closed. With the help of Tania and her ex-convict brother, Angel, Oz uncovers a Miami rarely seen, one crawling with shifty detectives, rogue assassins, and hard-drinking, sexual deviants - and no one and nothing is what it seems.
©2020 Joe Clifford (P)2020 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC
Give Up the Dead
Summary
Three years have passed since estate-clearing handyman Jay Porter almost lost his life following a devastating accident on the thin ice of Echo Lake. His investigative work uncovering a kids-for-cash scandal may have made his hometown of Ashton, New Hampshire, a safer place, but nothing comes without a price. The traumatic, uncredited events cost Jay his wife and his son, and left him with a permanent leg injury. Jay is just putting his life back together when a mysterious stranger stops by with an offer too good to be true: a large sum of cash in exchange for finding a missing teenage boy who may have been abducted by a radical recovery group in the northern New Hampshire wilds. Skeptical of gift horses and weary of reenlisting in the local drug war, Jay passes on the offer. The next day his boss is found beaten and left for dead, painting Jay the main suspect. As clues begin to tie the two cases together, Jay finds himself back on the job and back in the line of fire.
©2017 Joe Clifford (P)2017 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC
Skunk Train
Summary
Starting in the Humboldt wilds and ending on the Skid Row of Los Angeles, Skunk Train follows two teenagers, Kyle and Lizzie, who stumble upon stolen drug money and set off to find Kyle’s father, a Hollywood director he’s never met, with drug dealers, dirty cops, and the Mexican mob on their heels. Drawing on novels featuring teenage protagonists such as Rule of the Bone and Catcher in the Rye, Skunk Train is a modern-day love story set against the backdrop of the NorCal marijuana trade. Like No Country for Old Men, the book is steeped in the colloquial. It is a fast-paced thriller, which tests the bonds of family and shows the lengths desperate people will go to keep a secret and protect the ones they love.
©2019 Joe Clifford (P)2020 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC
Broken Ground
Summary
At an AA meeting, handyman and part-time investigator Jay Porter meets a recovering addict who needs his help. In the midst of another grueling northern New Hampshire winter, Amy Lupus’ younger sister, Emily, has gone missing from the Coos County Center, the newly opened rehab run by Jay’s old nemeses, Adam and Michael Lombardi. As Jay begins looking into Emily’s disappearance, he finds that all who knew Emily swear that she’s never used drugs. She’s a straight shooter and an intern at a newspaper investigating the Center and the horrendous secret hidden in it - or beneath it. When Jay learns of a “missing” hard drive, he is flung back to five years ago when his own junkie brother, Chris, found a hard drive belonging to Lombardi Construction. For years, Jay assumed that the much-sought-after hard drive contained incriminating photos of Adam and Michael’s father, which contributed to Chris’ death. But now he believes that hard drive may have harbored a secret far more sinister, which the missing Lupus sister may have unwittingly discovered. The deeper Jay digs, the more poisoned the ground gets, and the two cases become one, yielding a toxic truth with local fallout - and far-reaching ramifications.
©2018 Joe Clifford (P)2018 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC
December Boys
Summary
Jay Porter, the newest employee at NorthEastern Insurance in New Hampshire, is investigating an accident claim when he learns the teenager behind the wheel was arrested for minor drug possession and sentenced to a hardcore behavioral modification center. At the county courthouse, Jay meets Nicki, a young college intern, who tips him off to a possible scandal - first-time juvenile offenders being shipped to private institutions for political kickbacks. He learns that longtime family nemeses, Adam and Michael Lombardi, may have a stake in the scheme. Is Jay's mission to help these kids a legitimate crusade? Or is his thirst for revenge driven by the guilt he feels over his own junkie brother's death? These questions conspire to tear apart tranquility and drive a wedge between Jay and his wife, Jenny. With help from new friend Nicki and a couple of old friends, Jay finds himself thrust back into a past he had hoped to leave behind, putting everything - and everyone he loves - at risk in pursuit of the truth.
©2016 Joe Clifford (P)2016 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC
Rag and Bone
Summary
Having spent 10 months on the run after he was framed for the murder of an estate-clearing associate, handyman Jay Porter returns to his hometown of Ashton, New Hampshire. During his time as a fugitive, he searched for a hard drive - evidence that would put his longtime nemeses Adam and Michael Lombardi behind bars. But he came up empty handed. He has nothing. No hard drive, no hope. He hasn’t spoken to his ex-wife and son in almost a year and he’s broke. With his reputation tarnished and employment opportunities nonexistent, Jay takes a charity assignment from old friend/flame Alison Rodgers and learns of a fire at Alison’s former rehab farm. Jay is convinced that the Lombardis started a fire as a scare tactic to pressure Alison to sell. As Jay begins to look into the origins of the fire, he hopes he will finally be able to put away his enemies. But he soon discovers that evil isn’t so easy to define, and that sometimes, we need to take the law into our own hands if we want justice.
©2019 Joe Clifford (P)2019 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC
The One That Got Away
Summary
In the early 2000s, a string of abductions rocked the small upstate town of Reine, New York. Only one girl survived: Alex Salerno. The killer, Ken Parsons, was sent away. Life returned to normal. No more girls would have to die. Until another one did. It’s been seven years since Kira Shanks was reported missing and presumed dead. Alex Salerno has been living in New York City, piecemealing paychecks to earn a livable wage, trying to forget those three days locked underground and her affair with Sean Riley, the married detective who rescued her. When Noah Lee, hometown reporter with a journalistic pedigree, requests an interview, Alex returns to Reine and Riley, reopening old wounds. What begins as a Q&A for a newspaper article soon turns into an opportunity for money, closure - and justice. The disappearance of Kira Shanks has long been hung on Benny Brudzienski, a hulking man-child who is currently a brain-addled guest at the Galloway State Mental Hospital. But after Alex reconnects with ex-classmates and frenemies, doubts are cast on that guilt. Alex is drawn into a dangerous game of show and tell in an insular town where everyone has a secret to hide. And as more details emerge about the night Kira Shanks went missing, Alex discovers there are some willing to kill to protect the horrific truth. Contains mature themes.
©2018 Joe Clifford (P)2019 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC
Lamentation
Summary
In a frigid New Hampshire winter, Jay Porter is trying to eke out a living and maintain some semblance of a relationship with his former girlfriend and their two-year-old son. When he receives an urgent call that Chris, his drug-addicted brother, is being questioned by the sheriff about his missing junkie business partner, Jay feels obliged to come to his rescue. After Jay negotiates his brother's release from the county jail, Chris disappears into the night. As Jay begins to search for him, he is plunged into a cauldron of ugly lies and long-kept secrets that could tear apart his small hometown and threaten the lives of Jay and all those he holds dear. Powerful forces come into play that will stop at nothing until Chris is dead and the information he harbors is destroyed.
©2014 Joe Clifford (P)2015 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC