Showing results by narrator "Matt Godfrey" in All Categories

As a young man, Virgil Moody vowed he would never be like his father, he would never own slaves. When he moves from his father's plantation in Savannah to New Orleans, he takes with him Annie, a tiny woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, who he is sure would not survive life on the plantation. She'll be much safer with him, away from his father's cruelty. And when he discovers Annie's pregnancy, already a few months along, he is all the more certain that he made the right decision. As the years pass, the divide between Moody's assumptions and Annie's reality widens ever further.

Nature has finally created a masterpiece: an influenza strain with an uncommonly high mortality rate. Though hearing the initial reports half a world away, young, carefree Vincent isn't fazed by the news. It isn't until local people are hospitalized with the same symptoms the news has been warning against that he takes note and starts to consider the possible implications. Now faced with the harsh new reality unfolding around him, he must act to survive as his supplies vanish as quickly as his options.

The blizzard hits out of nowhere, screaming across the Great Plains like a runaway train. Frostbite and hypothermia wait for anyone caught without shelter. For the hardy settlers of Far Enough, in the Montana Territory, it’s about to get worse. Something else has arrived with the blizzard - something sleek and savage and hungry. Wild animal or vengeful spirit from Native American legend, it blends into the snow and bites with sharper teeth than the wind. It is called the wanageeska. It is the White Death.

Things are bad for Clay Miller and George Hitchens. For starters, they're on the run from a posse out for blood. Then, as they ride through the Utah desert, the two come across the crumpled body of a young boy on the brink of death.

Wyatt Stryker, ex-special ops, has suddenly found his more recent roles as a father, husband, and doctor thrown into a world of chaos. A deadly drug cartel has targeted him and his family and forced Stryker to revisit a chapter of his life he thought forever closed. Fortunately for his family, this transition was easier than he imagined - leading a simple life was never really in the cards for Stryker.

It is the beginning of Kirk McGarvey's career as a CIA black ops officer. Fresh out of the Air Force OSI, he receives his first assignment: assassinate a Chilean general known as the Butcher of Valparaiso, a monster who has tortured and killed more than one thousand dissidents at a soccer stadium in Valparaiso. McGarvey manages to cross the border over the mountains from Argentina without being discovered, and even makes his way to the general's remote compound. But the odds are stacked against him.

Henry "Biggie" Abbott is the son of one of Finch, Iowa's most famous athletes. His father was a baseball legend and his step-dad is a close second. At an obese 300+ pounds though, Biggie himself prefers classroom success to sports. As a perfectionist, he doesn't understand why someone would be happy getting two hits in five trips to the plate. "Forty percent, that's an F in any class", he would say. As Biggie's junior year begins, the girl of his dreams, Annabelle Rivers, starts to flirt with him and suggests he should play baseball.

Is there anything more random than middle school? Sixth graders Oliver and Frankie don't think so. Their first few weeks have been full of weirdness-lunchtime thievery, free beef jerky, and Matilda, the mysterious new girl who knows everything about them, but has a lot to learn about making friends. But what if none of it is random at all? What if a reclusive genius is keeping an eye on them and making sure the tiny pieces of his puzzle fall into place, one by one, until strange, seemingly unconnected incidents snowball totally out of control?

Lucas Callahan, a man who gave up his law degree, fiancée, and small-town future for a shot at making it in the Big Apple. He snags an entry-level job at Empire Magazine, believing it’s only a matter of time before he becomes a famous writer. Then, late one night in a downtown bar, he meets a gorgeous brunette who takes him home.... Carmen Kelly wanted to be a hard-hitting journalist, only to find herself cast in the role of Empire's sex columnist thanks to the boys' club mentality of Manhattan magazines.

Sixteen-year-old James and his little brother, Danny, live in Crystal Springs, Louisiana, with their grandmother, mother, and first cousin, Lila. The family is working class, proud, strict, and church-going. When a big, clumsy boy named Gabriel moves up the street with his minuscule and mysterious "auntie" James has a new friend who he loves and hates in equal measure.

Vollis Simpson was a man with a curious mind—always eager to know how things worked and how to fix them. Growing up on a farm in North Carolina, he loved to tinker with machines. And when he served in the Army Air Corps during WWII, Vollis kept right on tinkering. His ingenuity allowed him to build things no one would have thought to create from scraps—a washing machine out of airplane parts and a motorcycle out of a bike. After the war, his passion for metal creations picked up speed—turning into a whirlwind of windmills as far as the eye could see.

Did you know that ghosts love coffee? They’re not trying to be scary. They’re just deprived of an appropriate amount of caffeine! They also bump into things by accident, are occasionally nosy, and get a little nervous when they’re seen by the living. Elwood McGee knows these ghost facts because he’s one of those rare people with the gift of ghost-sight. And it turns out ghosts are everywhere! Especially in the small Tennessee town where Elwood and his family had to move following the death of his big brother Noah, which Elwood thinks was his fault.

Come Away From Her is a boldly written mystery-suspense novel set in the rural town of Black Walnut. The story revolves around the arrival of Tess, a deaf woman running from her past, who unwittingly sets into motion a chain of disturbing events as she is forced to share her secrets with the strangers around her. Her presence upsets the status quo for the townspeople, none more so than for Cap, the pastor of the local church whose life has been marred by substance abuse and tragedy. The morning that Cap discovers a dead body outside the church, life as the town knows it is forever changed.

Grandma Ginny and Timmy take a trip to visit the site of the family farm, where the old house and some rickety buildings still stand. Timmy had visited with Grandpa before and learned all about his tractor, but Grandma has her own stories to tell of planting the fields, harvesting the crops, and feeding the animals. Guided by Grandma’s farm diary and her fond memories, Timmy and Grandma tour the land and talk about what life was like back then.

Every town needs a hero, and Detective Cal Farrell fits the bill. He stopped an active shooter six months earlier, and now he’s become the darling of the Alexandria press. The problem is that Cal remembers nothing from that day. He’s working with a psychiatrist to recover his memories, but hasn’t had much luck. Then, on one of his morning runs, he is once again the first on scene for a grisly discovery—a body hanging impossibly high on a tree. Soon there’s another victim, killed by a blade and dumped in a ravine.

The Accidental Ecosystem tells the story of how cities across the United States went from having little wildlife to filling, dramatically and unexpectedly, with wild creatures. Today, many of these cities have more wild animals living in them than at any time in at least the past 150 years. Why have so many cities—the most artificial and human-dominated of all Earth's ecosystems—grown rich with wildlife, even as wildlife has declined in most of the rest of the world? And what does this paradox mean for people, wildlife, and nature on our increasingly urban planet?

Becky Keller and Sam Granger’s romance has cooled. He is busy teaching at the vet school, and she’s busy with her restaurant and antique shop. What Sam hasn’t told her is his PTSD, which manifests mostly with nightmares, makes him believe he’s damaged goods. But that is about to change when he meets Vvolt, a Belgian Malinois retired military working dog. When a tornado hits Brenham, there is damage in the downtown area as well as in nearby Round Top where Becky’s restaurant is situated.

Hotter than ever, everyone wants a piece of Jimmy, from Hollywood producers thirsting to take advantage of his fame to another former child star who wants to be just like him. And then there's the return of his long-absent father. Jimmy wonders if he deserves all this attention and just wants a new case to take his mind off it all.