Tom Stechschulte has narrated 127 audiobooks on Listento.it by 93 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 1,807 ratings. The most-rated is The Road.
Just Beyond the Clouds
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Karen Kingsbury - the "queen of inspirational fiction" ( Time) - is acclaimed for poignant, uplifting novels like Waiting for Morning. This compelling novel paints a moving portrait of a heartbroken widower and a jilted bride, thrust together by their Down syndrome siblings. When rodeo champion Cody Gunner returns to Colorado Springs, he has no intention of keeping his deathbed promise to his beloved wife - to love again. But when his concern for his brother, Carl, takes him to the Independent Learning Center, he sees how much Carl and his fellow Down syndrome students are progressing. He also notices their teacher, Elle Downs, who glows with such infectious joy and inner beauty that he almost forgets their philosophical differences.
©2007 Karen Kingsbury (P)2008 Recorded Books
The Searchers
Summary
Alan Le May’s Western novels are widely considered classics in the genre, and the movie adaptation of The Searchers was named AFI’s Greatest Western Movie of All Time. When Martin Pauley and Amos Edwards return to their Texas homestead to find a burning ruin, they set out to find Amos’ missing daughter - and exact revenge on the Comanche responsible for the attack.
©2009 Andrew J. Fenady (P)2013 Recorded Books
If the Creek Don't Rise
Summary
A strikingly sincere portrait of a town and its buried secrets from an outstanding new voice in southern fiction. In a North Carolina mountain town filled with moonshine and rotten husbands, Sadie Blue is only the latest girl to face a dead-end future at the mercy of a dangerous drunk. She's been married to Roy Tupkin for 15 days, and she knows now that she should have listened to the folks who said he was trouble. But when a stranger sweeps in and knocks the world off-kilter for everyone in town, Sadie begins to think there might be more to life than being Roy's wife. As stark and magnificent as Appalachia itself, If the Creek Don't Rise is a bold and beautifully layered debut about a dusty, desperate town finding the inner strength it needs to outrun its demons. The folks of Baines Creek will take you deep into the mountains with heart, honesty, and homegrown grit.
©2017 Leah Weiss (P)2017 Recorded Books
A Drop of the Hard Stuff
Summary
Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block has been named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. A Drop of the Hard Stuff continues Block’s popular series starring New York private detective and recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder. Scudder is already struggling with his sobriety when his friend and fellow AA member Jack Ellery is found murdered. Now the only thing keeping Scudder from the bottle is his obsession with finding the culprit.
©2011 Lawrence Block (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
San Francisco Noir
Summary
Launched by the summer '04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book. Brand new stories by: Barry Gifford, Robert Mailer Anderson, Michelle Tea, Peter Plate, Kate Braverman, Domenic Stansberry, David Corbett, Eddie Muller, Alejandro Murguía, Sin Sorracco, Alvin Lu, John Longhi, Will Christopher Baer, Jim Nisbet, and David Henry Sterry. San Francisco Noir lashes out with hard-biting tales exploring the shadowy nether regions of scenic "Baghdad by the Bay". In this superb collection, virtuosos of the genre meet up with the best of SF’s literary fiction community to chart a unique psycho-geography for a dark landscape. From inner city boroughs to the outlands, each contributor offers an original story based in a distinct neighborhood. At times brutal, darkly humorous, and revelatory - the stories speak of a hidden San Francisco, a town where the fog is but a prelude to darker realities lingering beneath.
©2005 Akashic Books (P)2014 Audible Inc.
The Yearling
Summary
Young Jody lives with his ma and pa on a farm in backwoods Florida. Life is hard there: cutting wood, planting fields, hauling water from a distant sinkhole. It is dangerous: wolves and bears roam the night. It’s also lonely for a young boy. One spring day, Jody’s pa kills a deer for meat. When Jody sees her spotted fawn in the brush, he convinces his father they should bring the fawn home. Thus begins a year when deer and boy are never far from each other. But the day will come when Jody must make a terrible choice between his beloved pet and his family’s survival. The Yearling, published 50 years ago, is an enduring classic which won the Pulitzer Prize. As it follows Jody from childhood to the first steps of adulthood, it has touched the hearts of readers of all ages. Now, with Tom Stechschulte’s warm narration, this moving story will delight an even wider audience.
©1966 Norton Baskin (P)1999 Recorded Books. LLC
The Dying Animal
Summary
Philip Roth, one of the best-known and award winning literary masters of our time, engages his readership with insightful and challenging novels of the human condition. With The Dying Animal, he revisits the character David Kepesh. At age 60, Kapesh is drawn out of his carefully ordered existence and into an obsessive affair with one of his students.
©2001 Philip Roth (P)2008 Recorded Books
Waking Lazarus
Summary
T. L. Hines' mesmerizing debut thriller, one of Library Journal's Top 25 Christian novels of 2006, tells the gripping tale of a troubled man who finds a reason for living while confronting the ghastly face of evil. Jude Allman has actually died and come back to life - three times. Haunted by paranoia and fearful that life has no purpose or meaning, Jude lurks behind locked doors. But when his heightened senses detect immanent death, Jude tries to rescue the captive prey of a fiendish pedophile.
©2006 T. L. Hines (P)2007 Recorded Books
Accordion Crimes
Summary
Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers and listeners across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Accordion Crimes is another masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent. The book opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his 11-year-old son, carrying little more than the accordion, voyage to the teeming, violent port of New Orleans. Within a year, the accordion maker is murdered by an anti-Italian lynching mob, but his instrument carries Proulx's story as it falls into the hands of various immigrants who carry it from Iowa to Texas, from Maine to Louisiana, looking for a decent life. The music is their last link with the past - voice for their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance - but it, too, is forced to change. Proulx's prodigious knowledge, heartbreaking characters, and daring storytelling unite the sections of Accordion Crimes - a stunning novel, exhilarating in its scope and originality.
©1996 Annie Proulx (P)2011 Simon & Schuster
Day of Tears
Summary
As did his father before him, Pierce Butler treats his plantation slaves like family. But massive gambling debts force him to sell 429 “family” members. When the auction begins, torrential rain falls - not stopping until the final slave is sold the next day. The ominous rainfall prompts these words: “This ain’t rain. This is God’s tears.” Based on the largest slave auction in U.S. history, this poignant montage is the fictionalized account of that 1859 Georgia tragedy. All the shrieks and groans, the betrayal and fury, the sorrow and regret are here in the stark, vivid monologues that pour from the souls of master and slave, auctioneer and observer during this “Weeping Time.”
©2005 Julius Lester (P)2006 Recorded Books
Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die
Summary
In Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, Willie Nelson muses about his greatest influences and the things that are most important to him, and celebrates the family, friends, and colleagues who have blessed his remarkable journey. Willie riffs on everything, from music to poker, Texas to Nashville, and more. He shares the outlaw wisdom he has acquired over the course of eight decades, along with favorite jokes and insights from family, bandmates, and close friends. A road journal written in Willie Nelson's inimitable, homespun voice and a fitting tribute to America's greatest traveling bard, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, introduced by another favorite son of Texas, Kinky Friedman, is a deeply personal look into the heart and soul of a unique man and one of the greatest artists of our time, a songwriter and performer whose legacy will endure for generations to come.
©2012 Willie Nelson (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers
Into the Web
Summary
Thomas H. Cook is an Edgar Award winner and the author of several New York Times best-selling thrillers. Into the Web stars Roy Slater, a young man who 25 years ago ran away from his hometown to escape the consequences of an unspeakable crime. Now, Roy returns to see his father die and is caught up in another scandal. Murder rocks the small town, and for Roy it draws him into the same web of deceit and treachery he tried so hard to leave behind. Tom Stechschulte's intense narration will have listeners on the edges of their seats.
©2004 Thomas Cook (P)2004 Recorded Books, LLC.
The Bone Yard
Summary
In this latest thriller from New York Times best-selling author Jefferson Bass, Dr. Bill Brockton discovers the dark side of the Sunshine state when he's called in to investigate human remains found on the grounds of a boys' reform school in Florida. The onset of summer brings predictably steamy weather to the Body Farm, Dr. Bill Brockton's human-decomposition research facility at the University of Tennessee. But Brockton's about to get more heat than he's bargained for when Angie St. Claire, a forensic analyst with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, asks him to help prove that her sister's death was not suicide, but murder. Brockton's quick consulting trip takes a long, harrowing detour when bones begin turning up amid the pines and live oaks of the Florida panhandle. Two adolescent skulls - ravaged by time and animals, but bearing the telltale signs of lethal fractures - send Brockton, Angie, and Special Agent Stu Vickery on a search for the long-lost victims. The quest leads them to the ruins of the North Florida Boys' Reformatory, a notorious juvenile detention facility that met a fiery end more than forty years ago. Guided by the discovery of a diary kept by one of the school's young "students," Brockton's team finds a cluster of shallow graves, all of them containing the bones of boys who suffered violent deaths. The graves confirm one of the diary's grim claims: that one wrong move could land a boy in the Bone Yard. But as the investigation expands, it encounters opposition from the local sheriff, who's less than delighted to find forensic experts from the state capital and the Body Farm digging up dirt in his county. As Brockton and his team close in on the truth, they find skeletons in some surprisingly prominent closets.... and they learn that the ghosts of the past pose perilous consequences in the present.
©2011 Jefferson Bass, LLC (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers
Dancing Dogs
Summary
With his signature insight and gift for storytelling, Jon Katz here shares 16 stories about one of life’s most unique relationships. In the title story, a housekeeper loses her job, but discovers her four-legged “children” have some toe-tapping talents that just may get the whole family back on its feet. In “Puppy Commando” a shy grade-school outcast forges an instant connection with a beagle puppy she meets at a shelter - and risks everything to keep him. “Gracie’s Last Walk” features a woman who must find a way to say goodbye to her beloved golden retriever - but ends up saying hello to someone unexpected. “The Dog Who Kept Men Away” shows that not all humans pass the “sniff” test when it comes to canines, who possess an excellent judge of character. And in “Guardian Angel” a widower going through a painful transition finds the greatest comfort in the unlikeliest of sources: a funny-looking pug named Gus.
©2012 Jon Katz (P)2012 Recorded Books
Fay
Summary
Larry Brown is hailed as one of today's most talented Southern writers. With the release of each book, including Dirty Work, Father and Son, and Joe, reviewers and fans offer increasingly enthusiastic praise for the astonishing characters he creates. At 17, Fay Jones leaves her family's squalid home with $3 in her bra and ragged sneakers on her feet. As she heads for Biloxi, people befriend her (a policeman, his wife, a bouncer) but her impact on their lives is seductive and unpredictable. Beautiful and naive, Fay becomes the catalyst in a chain reaction of desire and violence. Her journey provides unflinching snapshots of the South, from beaches to bar rooms. Wherever she lands, though, Fay is fueled by a deep-rooted will to survive. Narrator Tom Stechschulte voices every nuance of this unforgettable young woman's personality and her transient, often brutal, world.
©2000 Larry Brown (P)2000 Recorded Books, LLC
Heart Earth
Summary
National Book Award finalist Ivan Doig had only a vague memory of his mother until he discovered a cache of her letters. They revealed a passionate, can-do woman who loved the lilting rhythm of words. A moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig’s Heart Earth highlights his childhood before his mother’s death and eloquently captures the texture of the American West, the fortunes of a family, and one woman’s indomitable spirit.
©1993 Ivan Doig (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
Bloodthirsty
Summary
Acclaimed television writer Marshall Karp has been lauded for his Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs mysteries, including The Rabbit Factory. These two contentious friends investigate Hollywood homicides that no one else will touch. In their second teaming, Lomax and Biggs are on the trail of a killer who knocked off one of the most despised men in the movie industry. There’s only one problem - the lead suspect just got plugged as well.
©2007 Mesa Films, Inc. (P)2007 Recorded Books, LLC
Cimarron Rose
Summary
Texas attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland has many secrets. Among them is Vernon Smother's son, Lucas, a now-teenaged boy about whom few know the truth - Lucas is really Billy Bob's illegitimate son. When Lucas is arrested for murder, Billy Bob must confront the past and serve as the boy's criminal attorney. Billy Bob knows the propensity of the town, Deaf Smith, Texas, to make scapegoats out of the innocent and to exploit and sexually use the powerless. During Lucas's trial, Billy Bob realizes that he will have to bring injury upon Lucas as well as himself in order to save his son. As a result, Billy Bob incurs enemies that are far more dangerous than any he faced as a Texas Ranger. With the same electric language and hard-edged style that brought James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels to the forefront of American crime fiction, Cimarron Rose explodes with a new, evocative setting that will establish Billy Bob Holland as James Lee Burke's next great character.
©2012 James Lee Burke (P)2012 Simon & Schuster Audio
The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac
Summary
A dark, fantastical, multigenerational tale about a family whose patriarch is consumed by the hunt for the mythical, elusive Sasquatch he encountered in his youth. Eli Roebuck was nine years old when his mother walked off into the woods with "Mr. Krantz", a large, strange, hairy man who may or may not have been a Sasquatch. What Eli knows for certain is that his mother went willingly, leaving her only son behind. For the rest of his life, Eli is obsessed with the hunt for the bizarre creature his mother chose over him, and we watch it affect every relationship he has in his long life - with his father, with both of his wives, his children, grandchildren, and colleagues. We follow all of the Roebuck family members, witnessing through each of them the painful, isolating effects of Eli's maniacal hunt, and find that each Roebuck is battling a monster of his or her own, sometimes literally. The magical world Shields has created is one of unicorns and lake monsters, ghosts and reincarnations, tricksters and hexes. At times charming, as when young Eli meets the eccentric, extraordinary Mr. Krantz, and downright horrifying at others, The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac is boldly imaginative throughout and proves to be a devastatingly real portrait of the demons that we as human beings all face.
©2015 Sharma Shields (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
The Big Girls
Summary
A crime of unfathomable horror has a ripple-like effect on four profoundly different souls. Helen, a troubled inmate at Sloatsburg women's prison, is serving a life sentence for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, the recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, has forsworn the Park Avenue practice for which she trained in favor of the chief of psychiatry job at Sloatsburg. Former New York City narcotics detective Ike Bradshaw is a sardonic corrections officer at the prison. And Angie, an ambitious Hollywood starlet, is intent on nothing but achieving fame. As the alternating narratives unfold, mysteries are revealed, and the surprising connection between them is uncovered.
©2007 Susanna Moore (P)2007 AudioGO, Ltd.