Jan Maxwell has narrated 31 audiobooks on Listento.it by 11 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 146 ratings. The most-rated is The Cinderella Murder.
We'll Meet Again
Summary
At the heart of Mary Higgins Clark's stunning new novel of suspense is a brutal murder: that of Gary Lasch, a respected and successful young Greenwich, Connecticut, doctor and hospital and HMO head. He was found dead at his desk at home, his skull crushed by a blow with a Remington bronze sculpture, a prized piece from his art collection. The news strikes Greenwich society like a thunderbolt - as does the news that Molly Carpenter Lasch, the beautiful young wife of the slain doctor, has been arrested for her husband's murder. According to the trial testimony of her housekeeper, Molly had left home in a rage against her husband to go up to their house on Cape Cod. The morning after Molly's return, the housekeeper found Gary dead in his study and Molly upstairs in bed covered with blood. Nobody believes Molly's claim to have no memory of the events of the night of the crime - not her parents, not her friends, not even her own lawyer - and evidence against her is overwhelming. To escape an inevitable conviction she accepts a plea bargain, and subsequently her lawyer wins her early parole. A few years later, on Molly's release from prison, she reasserts her innocence in front of TV cameras and reporters gathered at the prison gate. Among them is an old acquaintance and schoolmate, Fran Simmons, currently working as an investigative reporter for the True Crime television series. Determined to prove her innocence, Molly convinces Fran to research and present a program on Gary's death.
©2000 Mary Higgins Clark (P)2008 Simon and Schuster
Just Take My Heart
Summary
In her new thriller, America's #1 best-selling Queen of Suspense delves into a legal battle over the guilt or innocence of a man accused of murdering his wife. Woven into her plot is an eerie, little-understood but documented medical phenomenon - the emergence of a donor's traits and memories in the recipient of a heart transplant. Natalie Raines, one of Broadway's brightest stars, accidentally discovers who killed her former roommate and sets in motion a series of shocking events that puts more than one life in extreme peril.While Natalie and her roommate, Jamie Evans, were both struggling young actresses, Jamie had been involved with a mysterious married man to whom she referred only by nickname. Natalie comes face to face with him years later and inadvertently addresses him by the nickname Jamie had used. A few days later, Natalie is found in her home in Closter, New Jersey, dying from a gunshot wound. Immediately the police suspect Natalie's theatrical agent and soon-to-be-ex-husband, Gregg Aldrich. He had long been a "person of interest" and was known to have stalked Natalie to find out if she was seeing another man. But no charges are brought against him until two years later, when Jimmy Easton, a career criminal, suddenly comes forward to claim that Aldrich had tried to hire him to kill his wife. Easton knows details about the Aldrich home that only someone who had been there -- to plan a murder, for instance -- could possibly know.The case is a plum assignment for Emily Wallace, an attractive 32-year-old assistant prosecutor. As she spends increasingly long hours preparing for the trial, a seemingly well-meaning neighbor offers to take care of her dog in her absence. Unaware of his violent past, she gives him a key to her home....
©2009 Mary Higgins Clark (P)2009 Simon & Schuster
Where Are You Now?
Summary
It has been ten years since 21-year-old Kevin MacKenzie, Jr. ("Mac"), has been missing. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already enrolled in Duke University Law School, he walked out of his room in Manhattan's Upper West Side without a word to his college roommate and has never been seen again. However, he does make three ritual phone calls to his mother every year: on her birthday, on his birthday, and on Mother's Day. Each time, he assures her he is fine, refuses to answer her frantic questions, then hangs up. Even the death of his father, a corporate lawyer, on 9/11 does not bring him home, or break the pattern of his calls. Mac's sister Carolyn is now 26, a law school graduate, and has just been hired as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. She has endured two family tragedies -- her brother's inexplicable disappearance, and the loss of her father. Realizing that neither she nor her mother will ever be able to have closure and get on with their lives until they find her brother, she sets out to discover what happened to Mac, and why he has found it necessary to hide from them. Her journey into the world of people who willingly disappear from their own lives leads her to learn about others who may or may not still be alive, and ultimately to a deadly confrontation with someone close to her who suddenly becomes an enemy -- and cannot allow her to disclose his secret...
©2008 Mary Higgins Clark (P)2008 Simon & Schuster Audio
The Switch
Summary
It isn't the first time that identical twins Gillian and Melina Lloyd have switched identities. Melina, the more impetuous twin, proposes that her circumspect sister take her place as a media escort to NASA astronaut and national hero Colonel Christopher "Chief" Heart. Although it's an enticing offer, Gillian declines for a very personal reason. Besides, she warns Melina, such a switch could have unexpected consequences. Media-savvy Chief turns out to be an easy assignment for Melina. But the following morning, police arrive at Melina's door with the worst possible news: her beloved twin has been murdered, and on the walls, scrawled in blood, are obscenities directed at Gillian, along with insults that indisputably link Chief to the crime. Dissatisfied with the official police investigation, Chief and Melina form a grudging alliance. Striking out on their own, they uncover more questions than answers, and are eventually led to the threshold of an inner sanctum, where a megalomaniac lies in wait for Gillian's replacement, her identical twin: Melina. A story that reveals the powerful, almost mystical bond between twins, a bond that compels a woman to go to impossible lengths to avenge her sister, The Switch defies every prediction.
©2000 Sandra Brown Management Ltd (P)2000 Simon and Schuster Inc.
Before I Say Good-Bye
Summary
When Adam Cauliff's new cabin cruiser, the Cornelia II, blows up in a New York harbor with him and several close business associates aboard, his wife, Nell McDermott, is not only distraught at the loss but wracked with guilt because she and Adam had had a serious quarrel, and she had told him not to come home. As the investigation into the boat's explosion proceeds, Nell is shocked by the official confirmations that it was not an accident but foul play. Was Adam the target of the explosion? As Nell searches for the truth about Adam's death, she receives messages from Adam transmitted by a medium. What she doesn't know is that she is being closely watched, and the nearer she comes to learning what actually happened on the boat that night, the nearer she is to becoming the next victim of a ruthless killer.
©2000 Mary Higgins Clark, All Rights Reserved (P)2000 Simon & Schuster, Inc., All Rights Reserved, AUDIOWORKS Is an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster, Inc.
A Covert Affair
Summary
Best-selling author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning account of Julia and Paul Child's experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II. She also details the tumultuous years when they were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved with bravery and honor. It is a fascinating portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political warfare in remote outposts in Ceylon, India, and China. The eager, inexperienced 6-foot, 2-inch Julia springs to life in these pages, a gangly golf-playing California girl who had never been farther abroad than Tijuana. Single and 30 years old when she joined the staff of Colonel William Donovan, Julia volunteered to be part of the OSS's ambitious mission to develop a secret intelligence network across Southeast Asia.
©2011 Jennet Conant (P)2011 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Hush Hush
Summary
The award-winning New York Times best-selling author of After I’m Gone, The Most Dangerous Thing, I’d Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know brings back private detective Tess Monaghan, introduced in the classic Baltimore Blues, in an absorbing mystery that plunges the new parent into a disturbing case involving murder and a manipulative mother. On a searing August day, Melisandre Harris Dawes committed the unthinkable: She left her two-month-old daughter locked in a car while she sat nearby on the shores of the Patapsco River. Melisandre was found not guilty by reason of criminal insanity, although there was much skepticism about her mental state. Freed, she left the country, her husband, and her two surviving children, determined to start over. But now Melisandre has returned Baltimore to meet with her estranged teenage daughters and wants to film the reunion for a documentary. The problem is she relinquished custody, and her ex, now remarried, isn't sure he approves. Now that's she's a mother herself - short on time and patience - Tess Monaghan wants nothing to do with a woman crazy enough to have killed her own child. But her mentor and close friend, Tyner Gray, Melisandre's lawyer, has asked Tess and her new partner, retired Baltimore P.D. homicide detective Sandy Sanchez, to assess Melisandre's security needs. As a former reporter and private investigator, Tess tries to understand why other people break the rules and the law. Yet the imperious Melisandre is something far different from anyone she's encountered. A decade ago a judge ruled that Melisandre was beyond rational thought. But was she? Tess tries to ignore the discomfort she feels around the confident, manipulative Melisandre. But that gets tricky after Melisandre becomes a prime suspect in a murder. Yet as her suspicions deepen, Tess realizes that just as she's been scrutinizing Melisandre, a judgmental stalker has been watching her every move as well...
©2015 Laura Lippman (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
The Goodbye Summer
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of the much-beloved The Saving Graces is back with a warm, winning new novel about daring to love, braving a loss, and learning to live a little. How much change can one summer bring? If you're Caddie Winger, 32 years old, still living with her grandmother and giving piano lessons to neighborhood children, one summer can make the whole world look different. Caddie's mother died when she was nine, and her grandmother raised her. Now their roles are reversed, and it's Caddie who takes care of Nana. When her grandmother breaks a leg and insists on going into a convalescent home, Caddie finds herself being pulled out of her comfy, self-made nest. Living alone for the first time since college, she uncovers some startling truths from her past. Jolted, she looks at the world with new eyes and begins to take charge of her future. As she makes a new best friend, takes risks she never dreamed she could, and navigates the depths and shallows of true love and devastating heartbreak, Caddie learns how to trust other people and, ultimately, how to trust herself. Wise, moving, and reassuringly real, The Goodbye Summer offers us a deeper understanding of the perplexing and invigorating magic that is life itself.
©2004 Patricia Gaffney (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
The New York Stories
Summary
Collected for the first time, the New York stories of John O'Hara, "among the greatest short story writers in English, or in any other language" (Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker) Collected for the first time, here are the New York stories of one of the 20th century's definitive chroniclers of the city - the speakeasies and highballs, social climbers and cinema stars, mistresses and powerbrokers, unsparingly observed by a popular American master of realism. Spanning his four-decade career, these more than 30 refreshingly frank, sparely written stories are among John O'Hara's finest work, exploring the materialist aspirations and sexual exploits of flawed, prodigally human characters and showcasing the snappy dialogue, telling details, and ironic narrative twists that made him the most-published short story writer in the history of the New Yorker.
©1932 John O'Hara (P)2014 Penguin Audio
I'll Walk Alone
Summary
The queen of suspense is back! Mary Higgins Clark's new novel - the 30th and most spine-chilling of her long career as America's most beloved author of suspense fiction - is about the newest and most up-to-date of crimes: identity theft. Who has not read about - or experienced - with a sinking feeling the fear that someone else out there may be using your credit cards, accessing your bank account, even stealing your entire identity. In I'll Walk Alone, Alexandra "Zan" Moreland, a gifted, beautiful interior designer on the threshold of a successful Manhattan career, is terrified to discover that somebody is not only using her credit cards and manipulating her financial accounts to bankrupt her and destroy her reputation, but may also be impersonating her in a scheme that may involve the much more brutal crimes of kidnapping and murder. Zan is already haunted by the disappearance of her own son, Matthew, kidnapped in broad daylight two years ago in Central Park - a tragedy that has left her torn between hope and despair. Now, on what would be Matthew's fifth birthday, photos surface that seem to show Zan kidnapping her own child, followed by a chain of events that suggests somebody (but who, Zan asks herself desperately, and why?) has stolen her identity. Hounded by the press, under investigation by the police, attacked by both her angry ex-husband and a vindictive business rival, Zan, wracked by fear and pain and sustained only by her belief, which nobody else shares, that Matthew is still alive, sets out to discover who is behind this cruel hoax. What she does not realize is that with every step she takes toward the truth, she is putting herself - and those she loves most - in mortal danger from the person who has ingeniously plotted out her destruction.
©2011 Mary Higgins Clark (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
The View from Saturday
Summary
Did Mrs. Olinsky choose the four members of the sixth grade Academic Bowl Team, or did they choose her--and one another? Four stories-within-in-a-story, interspersed with the ongoing narrative of the team's triumphant march to the state championship, introduce each member of the team in his own her own voice, and bring the dynamics of the group into focus.
©1998 E. L. Konigsburg (P)2009 Simon & Schuster