Steve Cumyn has narrated 4 audiobooks on Listento.it by 3 authors, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is The Certainties.
The Certainties
Summary
A vivid, moving novel reminiscent of Anthony Doerr and Michael Ondaatje, about the entwined fates of two very different refugees. In 1940, as the shadow of war lengthens over Europe, three mysterious travelers enter a village in Spain. They have the appearance of Parisian intellectuals, but the trio of two men and a woman are starving and exhausted from crossing illegally through the Pyrenees. Their story, told over a period of 48 tense hours, is narrated by one of the men, who slowly accepts his unthinkable fate. In a voice despairing and elegant, he calmly considers what he should do, and weighs what any one life means. As he does so, his attention is caught by a 5-year-old named Pia who wanders near his cafe table. To Pia he begins to address all that he thinks and feels in his final hours - envisioning a rich future life for her that both reflects and contrasts with his own. Meanwhile, in the 1980s, a woman named Pia seeks solitude on a remote island in the Atlantic, where she works at an inn and reflects on her chaotic childhood. As Pia's story begins, a raging storm engulfs the island and a boat flounders offshore. Pia and her fellow islanders rush to help - and past and present calamities collide. By turns elegiac and heart-pounding, a love letter in the guise of a song of despair, The Certainties is a moving and transformative blend of historical and speculative fiction - a novel that shows us what it means to bear witness, and to attend to those who seek refuge, past and present.
©2020 Aislinn Hunter (P)2020 Knopf Canada
Lake on the Mountain
Summary
2013 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Mystery - Winner When missing persons investigator Dan Sharp attends a wedding, he finds himself investigating more than one murder. Dan Sharp, a gay father and missing persons investigator, accepts an invitation to a wedding on a yacht in Ontario’s Prince Edward County. It seems just the thing to bring Dan closer to his noncommittal partner, Bill, a respected medical professional with a penchant for sleazy after-hours clubs, cheap drugs, and rough sex. But the event doesn’t go exactly as planned. When a member of the wedding party is swept overboard, a case of mistaken identity leads to confusion as the wrong person is reported missing. The hunt for a possible killer leads Dan deeper into the troubled waters and private lives of a family of rich WASPs and their secret world of privilege. No sooner is that case resolved than a second one ends up on Dan’s desk. Dan is hired by an anonymous source to investigate the disappearance, 20 years earlier, of the groom’s father. The only clues are a missing bicycle and six horses mysteriously poisoned.
©2012 Jeffrey Round (P)2018 Dundurn
Stung
Summary
Award-winning novelist William Deverell is back with a new Arthur Beauchamp legal thriller. Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur’s West Coast island home, where he finds himself arrested for fighting his own environmental cause: the threatened destruction of a popular park. The Toronto trial concludes with a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails jury verdict. Realistic and riveting, Stung is a propulsive legal thriller by a beloved author at the height of his powers.
©2021 William Deverell (P)2021 ECW Press
Pumpkin Eater
Summary
Private investigator Dan Sharp searches the seamy underbelly of the city for a brutal killer. Following an anonymous tip, missing persons investigator Dan Sharp makes a grisly find in a burned-out slaughterhouse in Toronto’s west end. Someone is targeting known sex offenders whose names and identities were released on the Internet. When an iconic rock star contacts Dan to keep from becoming the next victim, things take a curious turn. Dan’s search for a killer takes him underground in Toronto’s broken social scene - a secret world of misfits and guerrilla activists living off the grid - where he hopes to find the key to the murders.
©2014 Jeffrey Round (P)2018 Dundurn