JD Jackson has narrated 111 audiobooks on Listento.it by 131 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 415 ratings. The most-rated is The Racketeer.
Time Out
Summary
The riveting true story of the crime, punishment, and transformation of a Seattle boy who came of age inside the adult prison system and who, once on the outside, rebuilt a new life as a man. After twenty years of incarceration, little was familiar to newly released Willard Jimerson. His once-gritty city was a technology hub. An African American was president. And with a six-inch screen, he could access a vastly changed world. From Claudia Rowe, author of The Spider and the Fly, comes the story of the life Willard took and the life taken from Willard, the story of everything he had to regain and was yet to discover. Claudia Rowe’s Time Out is part of Missing, a collection of six true stories about finding, restoring, or accepting the losses that define our lives - from the mysterious to the inspiring. Each story can be listened to in a single sitting.
©2018 Claudia Rowe (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved
The Tragedy of Brady Sims
Summary
A courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order - in the final novella by the beloved Ernest J. Gaines. After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims - an honorable, just, and unsparing man who, with his tough love, had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana, in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small Southern town divided by race and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northward during the Great Migration.
©2017 Ernest J. Gaines (P)2017 Random House Audio
Takeoff
Summary
High-octane action, celebrity glamour, and endless possibilities for danger meet in this fast-paced debut for fans of John Sandford and Lee Child. Still reeling from a devastating personal tragedy, air marshal turned investigator Seth Walker embarks on his first case. All he has to do is accompany female pop star Max Magic to Los Angeles and deliver her to the FBI. But when their routine flight ends in a hail of gunfire at LAX, Walker has no choice but to take the frightened diva on the run. After a second attack leaves him battered and bloody, Walker realizes he cannot trust the FBI. To keep his client alive, he must use a patchwork of trusted aviation contacts to get her home to Austin, where the key suspects await. But as they race to stay one step ahead of their deadly pursuers, the biggest danger of all may be what they’re heading toward—the dark secrets that Max herself has been keeping…
©2018 Joseph Patrick Reid (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved
Crusade
Summary
A newborn alliance forged to stop the destroyers of worlds. A potential ally with secrets hidden by a thousand lies. A long-doomed star whose ruins hold a vital answer. Isaac Lestroud, admiral of the Exilium Space Fleet, has spent the last three years working with Ambassador Amelie Lestroud to build an alliance against the Rogue Matrices, AIs bent on converting every world into a paradise, regardless of whether anyone lives on it. As Isaac hunts the Rogue that destroyed one of their allies’ homeworlds, Amelie begins negotiations with a potential new ally that could tip the balance. The Governance is a power to rival the human homeworlds from which the Lestrouds were exiled. But like those homeworlds, not all is as it seems. And far from the war, Octavio Catalan leads an expedition into the shattered wreckage of the home system of the Matrices’ builders. Among those dead worlds, he hopes to find the answer to the question that haunts the survivors of that race: Why did their AIs go genocidally insane?
©2019 Glynn Stewart (P)2021 Podium Audio
A Tangled Mercy
Summary
Told in alternating tales at once haunting and redemptive, A Tangled Mercy is a quintessentially American epic rooted in heartbreaking true events examining the harrowing depths of human brutality and betrayal, and our enduring hope for freedom and forgiveness. After the sudden death of her troubled mother, struggling Harvard grad student Kate Drayton walks out on her lecture - and her entire New England life. Haunted by unanswered questions and her own uncertain future, she flees to Charleston, South Carolina, the place where her parents met, convinced it holds the key to understanding her fractured family and saving her career in academics. Kate is determined to unearth groundbreaking information on a failed 1822 slave revolt - the subject of her mother's own research. Nearly two centuries earlier, Tom Russell, a gifted blacksmith and slave, grappled with a terrible choice: arm the uprising spearheaded by members of the fiercely independent African Methodist Episcopal Church or keep his own neck out of the noose and protect the woman he loves. Kate's attempts to discover what drove her mother's dangerous obsession with Charleston's tumultuous history are derailed by a horrific massacre in the very same landmark church. In the unimaginable aftermath, Kate discovers a family she never knew existed as the city unites with a powerful message of hope and forgiveness for the world.
©2017 Joy Jordan-Lake (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
Summary
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. When Elwood Curtis, a Black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood’s only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner’s conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and “should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best" (Entertainment Weekly). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize One of the Best Books of the Year: Time, Esquire, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Slate, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Vox, Variety, Christian Science Monitor, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Literary Hub, BuzzFeed, The New York Public Library. New York Times best seller National Book Critics Circle Award finalist One of Time Magazine's 10 Best Fiction Books of the Decade Winner of the Kirkus Prize Longlisted for the National Book Award Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020
©2019 Colson Whitehead (P)2019 Random House Audio
The Great War
Summary
In a powerful collection, eleven internationally acclaimed fiction writers draw on personal objects to bring the First World War to life for listeners of all ages. A toy soldier. A butter dish. A compass. Mundane objects, perhaps, but to the remarkable authors in this collection, artifacts such as these have inspired stories that go to the heart of the human experience of World War I. Each author was invited to choose an object that had a connection to the war - a writing kit for David Almond, a helmet for Michael Morpurgo - and use it as the inspiration for an original short story. What results is an extraordinary collection, illustrated throughout by the award-winning Jim Kay and featuring photographs of the objects with accounts of their history and the authors' reasons for selecting them. A blend of fiction and real-life events, this unique anthology provides young listeners with a personal window into the Great War and the people affected by it, and serves as an invaluable resource for families and teachers alike.
©2014 Walker Books Ltd., first U.S. edition published by Candlewick Press. (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. "Our Jacko" © 2014 by Michael Morpurgo. "Another Kind of Missing" © 2014 by A. L. Kennedy. "Don't Call It Glory" © 2014 by Marcus Sedgwick. "The Country You Called Home" © 2014 by John Boyne. "When They Were Needed Most" © 2014 by Tracy Chevalier. "A World That Has No War in It" © 2014 by David Almond. "A Harlem Hellfighter and His Horn" © 2014 by Tanya Lee Stone. "Maud's Story" © 2014 by Adèle Geras. "Captain Rosalie" © 2014 by Timothée de Fombelle; translation © 2014 by Sam Gordon. "Each Slow Dusk" © 2014 by Sheena Wilkinson. "Little Wars" © 2014 by Ursula Dubosarsky.
Heaven, My Home
Summary
In this "captivating" crime novel (People), Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is on the hunt for a missing child - but it's the boy's family of white supremacists who are his real target. Nine-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him - and all goes dark. Darren Mathews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of rebuilding, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who's never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she's not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage. An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for antebellum Texas - and some of the era's racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi's disappearance has links to Darren's last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy's grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson. Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself. A Best Book of the Year New York Times • Houston Chronicle • NPR • Wall Street Journal • Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel • BookPage • Financial Times • Kirkus • SheReads • Sunday Times • LitHub • Guardian • Book Riot • South Florida Sun Sentinel Longlisted for the Orwell Political Fiction Book Prize
©2019 Attica Locke (P)2019 Hachette Audio
How Beautiful We Were
Summary
From the celebrated author of the New York Times best seller Behold the Dreamers comes a sweeping, wrenching story about the collision of a small African village and an American oil company. "A novel with the richness and power of a great contemporary fable, and a heroine for our time." (Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend, winner of the National Book Award) We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
©2020 Imbolo Mbue (P)2020 Random House Audio
Rising Above
Summary
Team USA goalkeeper Tim Howard was diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome in sixth grade. He went on to become a national treasure after single-handedly keeping America competitive in the 2014 World Cup. Stephen Curry was told he was too small, too weak, and too slow to even receive a scholarship to play college basketball. He outworked everyone and went on to become MVP of the National Basketball Association. Jim Abbott was born without his right hand, yet he refused to be defined by what he lacked. He went on to pitch a no-hitter in the Major Leagues. Athlete after athlete in this book found discipline, hope, and inspiration on the playing field, rising above their circumstances. Filled with first-hand accounts from stars who exemplify the idea of enduring at all costs, this collection of sports biographies will serve as a must-listen source of inspiration for kids and sports fans of all ages.
©2016 Gregory Zuckerman, Elijah Zuckerman, and Gabriel Zuckerman (P)2017 Tantor
Picture Perfect Frame
Summary
In the new Tourist Trap mystery from the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, a new art studio has opened in the Coastal California town of South Cove - but it's about to turn into a crime scene.... As the owner of Coffee, Books, and More, Jill Gardner likes to support other Main Street businesses, so she attends a paint-and-sip event where, sadly, her brushstrokes look more like blobs. It's still fun, though - aside from some disruption by a couple doing more sipping than painting. Jill's police-detective boyfriend is on alert, but a designated driver volunteers to take the drunken pair back to their bed and breakfast, and everything seems resolved. Until the wife's body turns up the next morning back in the studio. The victim, Nan, is from out of town, so it's hard to imagine who'd have a motive aside from her spouse. Now, in between puzzling over her fortuneteller neighbor's strange behavior, preparing for her best friend's wedding, and pouring cups of java at the bookstore, Jill must uncover the secrets of Nan's life and find out who wanted her out of the picture....
©2021 Lynn Cahoon (P)2021 Tantor