Charles Constant has narrated 103 audiobooks on Listento.it by 110 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 1,122 ratings. The most-rated is Secrets of the Millionaire Mind.
A Thousand Lies
Summary
Evil comes in all shapes and sizes but seems more deadly when hidden in physical beauty. Anson Poe hides behind a handsome face as he wreaks havoc upon those around him. Nothing touches his heart but power and greed; not the woman he married or the four children they share. Brendan Poe shares his father's stunning looks while trying to live down the shame. He does everything he can to stay out of Anson's world of crime until one hot Louisiana summer when he can no longer look away. When the women who matter most in Brendan's world become pawns in Anson's need for revenge, he strikes back with a blinding rage, leaving Anson with the options of fight or flight. Will he run, or will he stay? Will he live to lie another day?
©2013 Sharon Sala (P)2019 Tantor
The Real Madrid Way
Summary
Real Madrid is the most successful sports team on the planet. The soccer club has more trophies than any other sports team, including 11 UEFA Champions League trophies. However, the story behind the triumph goes beyond the players and coaches. Generally unnoticed, a management team consisting mostly of outsiders took the team from near bankruptcy to the most valuable sports organization in the world. How did Real Madrid achieve such extraordinary success? Columbia Business School adjunct professor Steven G. Mandis investigates. Given unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, Mandis is the first researcher to rigorously analyze both the on-the-field and business aspects of a sports team. What he learns is completely unexpected and challenges the conventional wisdom that moneyball-fueled data analytics are the primary instruments of success. Instead, Real Madrid's winning formula both on and off the field, from player selection to financial management, is based on aligning strategy with the culture and values of its fan base. Chasing the most talented (and most expensive) players can be a recipe for a winning record, but also financial disaster, as it was for Real Madrid in the late 1990s. Real Madrid's management believes that the club exists to serve the Real Madrid community.
©2016 Steven G. Mandis (P)2017 Tantor
Rising Star
Summary
Barack Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted the little-known state senator from Illinois into the national spotlight. Three months later Obama would win election to the US Senate; four years later he would make history as America's first black president. Now, at the end of his second presidential term, David J. Garrow delivers the most compelling and comprehensive biography ever written of Obama in the years preceding his presidency. Moving around the globe, from Hawaii to Indonesia to the American Northeast and Midwest, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama meticulously unpacks Obama's life, from his tumultuous upbringing in Honolulu and Jakarta to his formative time as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, working in some of the roughest neighborhoods, to Cambridge, where he excelled at Harvard Law School, and finally back to Chicago, where he pursued his political destiny. In voluminous detail, drawn from more than 1,000 interviews and encyclopedic documentary research, Garrow reveals as never before the ambition, the dreams, and the all-too-human struggles of an iconic president in a sure to be news-making biography that will stand as the most authoritative account of Obama's pre-presidential life for decades to come.
©2017 David J. Garrow (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers
The Boat Man
Summary
Detective Reed Mattox, just three months removed from the death of his partner, has turned invisibility into an art form. Switching to the K-9, taking over the graveyard shift, moving to a farmhouse miles outside of Columbus - his every move has become predicated on putting as much distance between himself and the outside world as possible. That distance is shattered, though, when bodies begin turning up in The Bottoms, the poverty-stricken section of town he is assigned to patrol. Grisly, horrific scenes start to pop up in the middle of the night, and the overburdened precinct has no choice but to put Reed on it. Now operating far outside of his comfort zone with a Belgian Malinois for a partner that attracts attention wherever they go, Reed is forced to unravel the murders, taking him clear across the city and back years in time, to an event that some very influential people will do anything to keep buried.
©2016 Dustin Stevens (P)2016 Tantor
Black Death at the Golden Gate
Summary
A spine-chilling saga of virulent racism, human folly, and the ultimate triumph of scientific progress. For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn't noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin - a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong's tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed 10 million lives worldwide. To local press, railroad barons, and elected officials, such a possibility was inconceivable - or inconvenient. As they mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save a city that refused to be rescued. In the tradition of Erik Larson and Steven Johnson, best-selling author David K. Randall spins a spellbinding account of Blue's race to understand the disease and contain its spread - the only hope of saving San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate.
©2019 David K. Randall (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Who Was Jesse Owens?
Summary
At the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, track and field star Jesse Owens ran himself straight into international glory by winning four gold medals. But the life of Jesse Owens is much more than a sports story. Born in rural Alabama under the oppressive Jim Crow laws, Owens' family suffered many hardships. As a boy he worked several jobs, like delivering groceries and working in a shoe repair shop, to make ends meet. But Owens defied the odds to become a sensational student athlete, eventually running track for Ohio State. He was chosen to compete in the Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany, where Adolf Hitler was promoting the idea of "Aryan superiority". Owens' winning streak at the games humiliated Hitler and crushed the myth of racial supremacy once and for all.
©2016 James Buckley (P)2016 Listening Library
Beneath the Mountain
Summary
In Luca D'Andrea's atmospheric and brilliant thriller, set in a small mountain community in the majestic Italian Dolomites, an outsider must uncover the truth about a triple murder that has gone unsolved for 30 years. New York City native Jeremiah Salinger is one half of a hot-shot documentary-making team. He and his partner, Mike, made a reality show about roadies that skyrocketed them to fame. But now Salinger's left that all behind, to move with his wife, Annelise, and young daughter, Clara, to the remote part of Italy where Annelise grew up - the Alto Adige. Nestled in the Dolomites, this breathtaking, rural region that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire remains more Austro than Italian. Locals speak a strange, ancient dialect - Ladino - and root for Germany (against Italy) in the world cup. Annelise's small town - Siebenhoch - is close-knit to say the least and does not take kindly to out-of-towners. When Salinger decides to make a documentary about the mountain rescue group, the mission goes horribly awry, leaving him the only survivor. He blames himself, and so - it seems - does everyone else in Siebenhoch. Spiraling into a deep depression, he begins having terrible, recurrent nightmares. Only his little girl, Clara, can put a smile on his face. But when he takes Clara to the Bletterbach Gorge - a canyon rich in fossil remains - he accidentally overhears a conversation that gives his life renewed focus. In 1985, three students were murdered there, their bodies savaged, limbs severed and strewn by a killer who was never found. Although Salinger knows this is a tightlipped community, one where he is definitely persona non grata, he becomes obsessed with solving this mystery and is convinced it is all that can keep him sane. And as Salinger unearths the long kept secrets of this small town one by one, the terrifying truth is eventually revealed about the horrifying crime that marked an entire village. Completely engrossing and deeply atmospheric, Beneath the Mountain is a thriller par excellence.
©2018 Luca D'Andrea (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
The President Is Dead!
Summary
Packed with fun facts and presidential trivia, The President Is Dead! tells you everything you could possibly want to know about how our presidents, from George Washington to George H. W. Bush (who was the most recent president to die), met their ends, the circumstances of their deaths, the pomp of their funerals, and their public afterlives, including stories of attempted grave robbings, reinterments, vandalism, conspiracy theories surrounding their deaths, and much more. The President Is Dead! is filled with never-before-told stories, including a suggestion by one prominent physician to resurrect George Washington from death by transfusing his body with lamb's blood. You may have heard of a plot to rob Abraham Lincoln's body from its grave site, but did you know that there was also attempts to steal Benjamin Harrison's and Andrew Jackson's remains? The book also includes "Critical Death Information", which prefaces each chapter, and a complete visitor's guide to each grave site and death-related historical landmark. An "Almost Presidents" section includes chapters on John Hanson (first president under the Articles of Confederation), Sam Houston (former president of the Republic of Texas), David Rice Atchison (president for a day), and Jefferson Davis.
©2016, 2020 Louis L. Picone (P)2021 Tantor
Blurred Lines
Summary
Jade Matthews and Reid Cole have been best friends all their lives. He was the boy who chased away the monsters from under her bed, and she was the girl he knew he was going to spend the rest of his life with. But some friendships aren't always built to last. This is a story about two best friends whose lives change after one night - a night that not even fate could have stopped. In the aftermath, Reid and Jade lose their friendship but soon find that they were destined to be so much more. Contains mature themes.
©2015 Tamsyn Bester (P)2015 Tantor
Mind
Summary
I'm a magnet for evil and controlling men. Chase, my big business tycoon and love of my life, thinks he can protect me, but he can't. No one can. It became clear far too late how serious my stalker was, that his threats weren't idle. He proved more than once that he would do what it takes, that there were no stakes too high for his sick and twisted games and delusions of worship. We should have been better prepared. The roses, images, lingerie soaked in his seed, even his calling card written in blood didn't penetrate. I had faith that my love could make it go away, that eventually he'd be caught. I was wrong. Contains mature themes.
©2015 Waterhouse Press, LLC (P)2016 Tantor
The Ghosts of Langley
Summary
During his first visit to Langley, the CIA's Virginia headquarters, President Donald Trump told those gathered, "I am so behind you...there's nobody I respect more", hinting that he was going to put more CIA operations officers into the field so the CIA could smite its enemies ever more forcefully. But while Trump was making these promises, behind the scenes the CIA was still reeling from blowback from the very tactics that Trump touted - including secret overseas prisons and torture - that it had resorted to a decade earlier during President George W. Bush's war on terror. Under the latest regime it seemed that the CIA was doomed to repeat its past failures rather than put its house in order. The Ghosts of Langley is a provocative and panoramic new history of the Central Intelligence Agency that relates the agency's current predicament to its founding and earlier years, telling the story of the agency through the eyes of key figures in CIA history, including some of its most troubling covert actions around the world. It reveals how the agency, over seven decades, has resisted government accountability, going rogue in a series of highly questionable ventures that reach their apotheosis with the secret overseas prisons and torture programs of the war on terror.
©2017 John Prados (P)2017 Tantor
Identity Crisis
Summary
Renowned forensic anthropologist Bill Bass - founder of the Body Farm - tackles one of his most baffling cases ever in this real-life spellbinder. In 1978, 56-year-old Leoma Patterson left a bar in Clinton, Tennessee, and was never seen again. Six months later, a female skeleton was found on a wooded lakeshore in a neighboring county. The bones were consistent with those of the missing woman, and one of Patterson's daughters recognized a ring found at the death scene as her mother's. The bones were buried, and six years later, a relative of Patterson's - one of the men she was last seen alive with - confessed to killing her. Case closed. But the tentative identification - made years before DNA testing was available to confirm it - failed to convince some of Patterson's relatives. And so it was that in 2005 Dr. Bass found himself winding around hairpin curves to the mountainside grave, where he would unearth the disputed remains and collect DNA samples. The forensic twists and turns that followed would test the limits of DNA technology...and of Dr. Bass's half-century of forensic knowledge.
©2015 Jefferson Bass LLC (P)2020 Tantor
Ahab's Return
Summary
A bold and intriguing fabulist novel that reimagines two of the most legendary characters in American literature - Captain Ahab and Ishmael of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick - from the critically acclaimed Edgar and World Fantasy award-winning author of The Girl in the Glass and The Shadow Year. At the end of a long journey, Captain Ahab returns to the mainland to confront the true author of the novel Moby-Dick, his former shipmate, Ishmael. For Ahab was not pulled into the ocean’s depths by a harpoon line, and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his untimely death have caused him grievous harm - after hearing about Ahab’s demise, his wife and child left Nantucket for New York, and now Ahab is on a desperate quest to find them. Ahab’s pursuit leads him to The Gorgon’s Mirror, the sensationalist tabloid newspaper that employed Ishmael as a copy editor while he wrote the harrowing story of the ill-fated Pequod. In the penny press’s office, Ahab meets George Harrow, who makes a deal with the captain: the newspaperman will help Ahab navigate the city in exchange for the exclusive story of his salvation from the mouth of the great white whale. But their investigation - like Ahab’s own story - will take unexpected, dangerous, and ultimately tragic turns. Told with wisdom, suspense, a modicum of dry humor and horror, and a vigorous stretching of the truth, Ahab’s Return charts an inventive and intriguing voyage involving one of the most memorable characters in classic literature, and pays homage to one of the greatest novels ever written.
©2018 Jeffrey Ford (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Saving a Legend
Summary
His family's gym has produced a roster of mixed martial arts legends, but so far Kieran Kavanagh hasn't followed in their footsteps. After a brawl lands him in jail, Kieran is assigned to work at a center for at-risk youth. Though given a second chance, Kieran's simply going through the motions - until he meets one very special kid, Shea Doherty, and falls hard for her very beautiful, very grown-up big sister, Fiona. The trouble is, Kieran's best opening moves are getting him nowhere fast. Fiona Doherty has too many responsibilities to fool around, especially now that she has custody of Shea. Sure, she'd love to find a devoted partner. But she won't jeopardize her sister's happiness - or risk revealing her tortured past - on a love-'em-and-leave-'em type of guy like Kieran, so it's up to him to prove her wrong. As Fiona spends more time with Kieran, she starts to see a softer side of the reckless warrior. Now she must admit that when it comes to the possibility of real love, well, there's a fighting chance.
©2016 Sarah Robinson (P)2016 Tantor
The Line Between
Summary
There's a fine line between love and hate, so fine that you don't know you've lost balance until it's too late. Kennedy is not sure exactly when she lost her balance. All she knows is that he was to blame. Dane Winters. The boy who'd spent most of his life hating her for reasons she never understood. It was no secret that Dane hated Kennedy, but only he knew why. She was off-limits. And then their separate worlds collided with one tragedy. It wasn't her fault, he knew that, but he wanted her to hurt the way he did, and he needed someone to blame. She was an easy target. Kennedy Monroe. The girl he'd picked on all their lives. And the woman he barely tolerated. Until the line between love and hate was no longer visible.... Contains mature themes.
©2015 Tamsyn Bester (P)2015 Tantor
The Game That Breaks Us
Summary
Bennett James has built his career at being the best, on and off the ice, and now it's come back to bite him. The media has turned against him, and with a near career-ending injury, he needs to clean up his act and prove that he's serious about the game. For Bennett, working with his old coach at his alma mater feels like a step back, but it might be just what he needs. Grace Wentworth has always been the good girl, and she's tired of that stigma. She wants to prove that she can get down and dirty with the best of them. The problem? She doesn't know how. Bennett will teach the good girl how to be bad, if she pretends to be his goody-two-shoes girlfriend in front of the media. But what happens when the game becomes real?
©2016 Micalea Smeltzer (P)2016 Tantor
The Man He Became
Summary
When polio paralyzed Franklin Roosevelt at the age of thirty-nine, people wept to think that the young man of golden promise must live out his days as a helpless invalid. He never again walked on his own. But in just over a decade, he regained his strength and seized the presidency. This was the most remarkable comeback in the history of American politics. And, as author James Tobin shows, it was the pivot of Roosevelt's life-the triumphant struggle that tempered and revealed his true character. With enormous ambition, canny resourcefulness, and sheer grit, FDR willed himself back into contention and turned personal disaster to his political advantage. Tobin's dramatic account of Roosevelt's ordeal and victory offers central insights into the forging of one of our greatest presidents.
©2013 James Tobin (P)2013 Tantor
Out of Body
Summary
Out of Body is a dark fantasy thriller from multi-award-winning author Jeffrey Ford. A small-town librarian witnesses a murder at his local deli, and what had been routine sleep paralysis begins to transform into something far more disturbing. The trauma of holding a dying girl in his arms drives him out of his own body. The town he knows so well is suddenly revealed to him from a whole new perspective. Secrets are everywhere and demons fester behind closed doors. Worst of all, he discovers a serial killer who has been preying on the area for over a century, one capable of traveling with him through his dreams.
©2020 Jeffrey Ford (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Christ in Crisis
Summary
Writing in response to our current “constitutional crisis”, New York Times best-selling author and Christian activist Jim Wallis urges America to return to the tenets of Jesus once again as the means to save us from the polarizing bitterness and anger of our tribal nation. In Christ in Crisis Jim Wallis provides a path of spiritual healing and solidarity to help us heal the divide separating Americans today. Building on “Reclaiming Jesus” - the declaration he and other church leaders wrote in May 2018 to address America’s current crisis - Wallis argues that Christians have become disconnected from Jesus and need to revisit their spiritual foundations. By pointing to eight questions Jesus asked or is asked, Wallis provides a means to measure whether we are truly aligned with the moral and spiritual foundations of our Christian faith. “Christians have often remembered, re-discovered, and returned to their obedient discipleship of Jesus Christ - both personal and public - in times of trouble. It’s called coming home,” Wallis reminds us. While he addresses the dividing lines and dangers facing our nation, the religious and cultural commentator’s focus isn’t politics; it’s faith. As he has done throughout his career, Wallis offers comfort, empathy, and a practical roadmap. Christ in Crisis is a constructive field guide for all those involved in resistance and renewal initiatives in faith communities in the post-2016 political context.
©2019 Jim Wallis (P)2019 HarperAudio
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
Summary
When Nick Flynn was 7 years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it's only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann. With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother's suicide. This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire unravels the story of the fire that Flynn had to escape, and the ways in which, as an adult, he has carried that fire with him until it threatens to burn down his own house. Here Nick confronts his failings with fierce candor, even as they threaten to tear his family apart. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him he has "the ethics of a drowning man." This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire takes us on the journey of a man struggling to hold himself together in prose that is raw and moving, sharp-edged and wry. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas.
©2020 Nick Flynn (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books