Carrington MacDuffie has narrated 113 audiobooks on Listento.it by 92 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 355 ratings. The most-rated is Night Pleasures.
Hot Flash Holidays
Summary
The intrepid women of The Hot Flash Club are back for the holidays, soothing jingled nerves and stressed shoppers in their exclusive spa and celebrating the joys of the season. In her witty and delightfully wisecracking prose, Nancy Thayer tells a heartwarming tale packed with fun, secrets, romance, and an ample dose of good cheer. When the Hot Flash friends gather at the spa to trim the Christmas tree, they share steaming mugs of hot chocolate, a few laughs, and a vow to make this holiday one to remember. And it is, but not in the cheerful, ho-ho-ho way they expected. Instead, Christmas brings family conflicts, household accidents, plane delays, and that's just the beginning. After a hazardous holiday season, the women make resolutions that they intend to keep, in a perfect world. But life, and their friends and relatives, cause complications. Shirley lends financial support to her boyfriend's schemes, which infuriates Alice, whose own son commits an act she's not sure she can accept. Marilyn travels to Scotland and falls in love, but her octogenarian mother needs her at home. And when Polly and Faye find themselves pitted against each other by a younger woman, can they overcome this clash to make a new, entrepreneurial dream come true? Then real disaster strikes, bringing new challenges and surprising revelations. Just as every month of the year throws new problems at us all, so too does the end of the year give us the chance to reunite and put these problems into their proper perspective. And when the Hot Flash Five get together for the holidays, we should expect nothing less than the unexpected.
©2005 Nancy Thayer (P)2005 Books on Tape
From Barcelona, with Love
Summary
Bibi Fortunata was the hottest ticket in town; singer, actress, and celebrity. Two years ago she was arrested on suspicion of murdering her lover and his new mistress, who was also Bibi's best friend. Bibi was front-page news in a way her publicists had never dreamed. But the police were never able to prove anything and Bibi was set free, with the cloud of suspicion and murder still hanging over her. Bibi left for Barcelona where she quite simply disappeared. But when Bibi's daughter comes to Mac Reilly and Sunny Alvarez for help, they can't resist the temptation to solve this mystery once and for all. Who really killed Bibi's husband and her lover? Who would want to frame Bibi? And who is beckoning them from Barcelona? Filled with Adler's trademark lush descriptions, twisty plots, and decadent luxury, From Barcelona With Love is the perfect escapist novel.
©2011 Elizabeth Adler. All rights reserved. (P)2011 AudioGo
The History of Now
Summary
Small, almost imperceptible changes are rippling through the New England village of Grandville, altering it in ways its inhabitants cannot yet imagine. Laced through a narrative of one recent year in Grandville's history are stories that reach back to a 17th century family in Rotterdam, and 18th century migration by a farmer's lonely son in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a 19th century underground railway journey by a gifted runaway slave.Each episode comes to bear on the lives of Grandville's current residents. Does every event, no matter how small or distant in the past influence all events that follow?
©2009 Daniel Klein (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Must Love Dogs
Summary
Voluptuous, sensuous, alluring, and fun. Barely 40 DWF seeks special man to share starlit nights. Must love dogs. Life after divorce for Sarah Hurlihy consists of juggling her job as a preschool teacher and the demands of her interfering family. Then her bossy big sister decides to place a personal ad for her, and the unexpected becomes a daily event. Everybody wants Sarah to put the past behind her and take a bold step towards a fresh start. But when Sarah winds up with a lot of new men and rambunctious dogs in her life, along with plenty of awkward situations, unexpected emotions, and not-so-easy decisions, she wonders whether those mindless evenings sitting alone and watching The Brady Bunch were really so bad.
©2002 Claire Cook (P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks
Where Is the Mango Princess?
Summary
Humorist Cathy Crimmins has written a deeply personal, wrenching, and often hilarious account of the effects of traumatic brain injury, not only on the victim, in this case her husband, but on the family. When her husband, Alan, is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins’ husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality - and the complexities of the heart.
©2000 Cathy Crimmins (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Winter of Secrets
Summary
Sometimes the smallest towns have the darkest secrets. Siblings Wendy and Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth and their friends are in British Columbia, enjoying a two-week vacation. Tragedy strikes the group of privileged students when two of them crash through the ice into the frozen river. It's Christmas Eve and the snowstorm of the decade has settled over the peaceful Canadian mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia. Constables Smith and Evans have a busy shift, attending fender-benders, tumbling pedestrians, and Christmas-tree fires. At the stroke of midnight, they arrive at the scene of a car accident: a vehicle has gone off the snowy road into the icy river. It seems to be an accident. But when the autopsy reveals a shocking secret, Constable Molly Smith and Sergeant John Winters are plunged into the world of sexual predators, recreational drugs, privilege, and high living. Meanwhile, Charlie Bassing is out of jail and looking for revenge, a handsome Mountie is giving Molly the eye, and her mother, Lucky, is cheerfully interfering in the investigation.
©2009 Vicki Delany (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Spree of '83
Summary
The Los Angeles Times affectionately referred to Freddy Powers as the "Ol Blue Eyes' of Country Music" and wrote that if you were to "ask country superstars Willie Nelson, George Jones or Merle Haggard (they'll)...tell you that he's one of country music's best-kept secrets". The Texas Country Music Hall of Fame inductee has been to the top of the charts as both a producer for Willie Nelson's Grammy-winning LP Over the Rainbow and a songwriter for many of country music legend Merle Haggard's number one hits. Now, for the first time, Freddy recounts the entertaining and emotional stories behind his decades-long roller-coaster ride through the music business, his voyage to the top of the charts, and his inspiring battle against Parkinson's disease. Helping Freddy tell his story are exclusive interviews from fellow country music legends Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, John Rich, Tanya Tucker, and The Voice finalist and Powers' protégé Mary Sarah along with a host of other Nashville luminaries. Full cast of narrators includes Marguerite Gavin, Mark Bramhall, Renée Raudman, Lloyd James, Tanya Tucker, and Traber Burns.
©2017 Freddy and Catherine Powers (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Oakland Noir
Summary
Brand-new stories by: Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller. In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir - all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series - comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the "Czar of Noir", this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint. From the introduction: Jerry Thompson: "Discovering the wang-dang-doodle jams of the Pointer Sisters shifted my entire focus. Stunning black women were scatting and bebopping all the way into my soul. I think what we've put together in Oakland Noir is a volume where this city is a character in every story. He's a slick brother strutting over a bacon-grease bass line and tambourine duet. She's a white chick with a bucket of hot muffins heading to farmer and flea markets, to sell crafts and get hooked up with some fine kat with dreadlocks and a criminal record. And it's in the faces of young fearless muthaf - kers pounding keyboards and snapping fingers, lips, Snapchats, and Facebook timelines. It's the core of not only Black Lives Matter but all lives matter. We are the children of fantasy and of the funk." Eddie Muller: "These days, writers and [listeners] aren't denying the darker parts of our existence as much as they used to, especially in crime fiction. Some writers just do it for fun because it's become the fashionable way to get published. You know, 'gritty violence' and all that bullshit. The genuine darkness in noir stories comes from two places - the cruelty of the world's innate indifference and the cruelty that people foster within themselves. If you're not seriously dealing with one, the other, or both, then you're not really writing noir." The complete list of narrators includes Traber Burns, Keith Szarabajka, Adenrele Ojo, Kevin Kenerly, Hillary Huber, Carrington MacDuffie, Mirron Willis, Kirby Heyborne, Priya Ayyar, Neil Shah, Thom Rivera, and Scott Brick.
©2017 Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
What Are We Doing Here?
Summary
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still." A BuzzFeed Books Pick of Most Exciting New Books of 2018.
©2018 Marilynne Robinson (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Warrior of the People
Summary
On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree - becoming the first Native American doctor in US history. She earned her degree 31 years before women could vote and 35 years before Indians could become citizens in their own country. By age 26, this fragile but indomitable Indian woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside with few roads. Her patients often were desperately poor and desperately sick with tuberculosis, small pox, measles, and influenza, with their families scattered miles apart, and whose last hope was a young woman who spoke their language and knew their customs. This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people - physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually. A Warrior of the People is the moving biography of Susan La Flesche's inspirational life, the subject of the PBS documentary Medicine Woman, and it will finally shine a light on her numerous accomplishments.
©2016 Joe Starita (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Don't You Forget About Me
Summary
Jancee Dunn won fans and hearts with her sparkling memoir But Enough about Me, detailing her transition from small-town square to hip journalist in the rocking 1980s. Now she channels her wit and humor into a story of the clash of cultures in the distinctive era in which she grew up.Lillian Curtis, a 30-something high-powered New York City television producer, finds her past and present colliding when she moves back in with her parents after a devastating divorce. There, in her old room, time seems frozen in 1988, with a Rick Springfield tape still on her dresser and Duran Duran posters hanging on the wall.After 20 years away, she is forced to confront not only her '80s nostalgia but also all the people she thought she'd left behind, including her high-school boyfriend.
©2008 Jancee Dunn (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Arnold Falls
Summary
Spend time in the funny, oddball village of Arnold Falls, where larger-than-life characters deal with the smallest of problems. Somehow, it all comes out right in the end. Arnold Falls is a novel that tips its hat to Armistead Maupin and P. G. Wodehouse, creating a world in which food, music, friendship, love, and tending your own garden are connected in surprising ways. Given the choice of go big or go home, nine times out of 10 the townspeople of Arnold Falls will go home, get back into their house slippers, and forget about the whole thing, whatever the whole thing was this time. Tempests great and small (mostly small) are always brewing in this tiny, upstate hamlet where half of the residents are fighting to preserve Arnold Falls as it was in its red-light-district heyday, half are up to no good, and another half are sleeping it off. And that math is correct. Jeebie Walker moved north out of the city hoping to find a house with his then-boyfriend and a quieter life. He found the house but lost the boyfriend, and is still searching for the elusive tranquility. Just now, he's helping a pal become the first female mayor of Arnold Falls; he's fighting against a plan to build a noxious tire factory by the river; and he's working to save Chaplin, a beloved turkey, from Thanksgiving. What he's not doing, in no uncertain terms, is looking for love. Not even with the handsome orchard worker-slash-volunteer fireman-slash-cartoon artist who has an eye for him. Definitely not. And yet, hapless though it may be, Arnold Falls will have its way when it comes to love. First, Jeebie and the town's unruly cast of characters, (which includes the 93-year-old daughter of a bordello madam, a theatrical agent/recidivist pickpocket, a doltish mayor, a social worker who sings like a dream, and a television chef who does not take kindly to prune clafoutis sabotage) will have to wage epically tiny battles to restore the disorder that makes perfect sense in Arnold Falls.
©2020 Charles Suisman (P)2020 Charles Suisman
The Headshrinker's Brigade
Summary
Julia Longley is determined not to repeat her mother's mistake and marry the wrong guy. She thinks she has found the perfect one in Nick - a handsome, charming, and successful star reporter for the newspaper where Julia is a photojournalist. But when her coverage of a tragic and bloody accident leaves her in a temporary state of blindness, Nick is anything but loving and supportive, and Julia must search alone for a career more suited to her. Her choice: go back to school and get a degree in counseling. Soon, Julia finds herself juggling the demands of finishing her education along with planning their wedding, while Nick resorts to anger and manipulation to compromise with the dictates of his very imposing socialite mother. How long before Nick treats her this way, Julia wonders, as she gives in, time and time again. Part of her school assignment lands Julia at the county mental health free clinic as an intern, where her first mission is to learn to moderate a group therapy session. Nothing in any textbook, however, has prepared Julia for the Headshrinker's Brigade. What Julia learns from this motley band of suffering souls gives her the strength to make some tough decisions in her effort to find love and something even more important: herself.
©2018 Leslie Tourish (P)2020 Leslie Tourish