“Brilliant…A flash of incandescence counters final threats of death, and the all-encompassing darkness is leavened by a glimmer of hope. Stunning.” —Booklist (starred review)
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- Available Dark
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 6/25/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Award-winning author Elizabeth Hand brings us a searing and iconoclastic crime novel, in which photographer Cass Neary, introduced in the underground classic Generation Loss, finds herself drawn into the shadowy world of crime in Scandinavia’s coldest corners.
As this riveting tour-de-force opens, the police already want to talk to Cass about a mysterious death she was involved with previously, but before they can bring her in, Cass accepts a job offer from overseas and hops on a plane.
In Helsinki, she authenticates a series of disturbing but stunning images taken by a famous fashion photographer who has cut himself off from the violent Nordic music scene where he first made his reputation. Paid off by her shady employer, she buys a one-way ticket to Reykjavík, in search of a lover from her own dark past.
But when the fashion photographer’s mutilated corpse is discovered back in Finland, Cass finds herself sucked into a vortex of ancient myth and betrayal, vengeance and serial murder, set against a bone-splintering soundtrack of black metal and the terrifying beauty of the sunless Icelandic wilderness. Cass Neary finds her own worst fears confirmed: it’s always darkest before it turns completely black.
- Available Dark
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 6/25/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Generation Loss
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 6/18/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Cass Neary made her name in the seventies as a photographer embedded in the burgeoning punk movement in New York City. Her pictures of the musicians and the hangers-on, the infamous, the damned, and the dead, earned her a brief moment of fame.
Thirty years later she is adrift, on her way down, and almost out when an old acquaintance sends her on a mercy gig to interview a famously reclusive photographer who lives on an island in Maine. When she arrives Down East, Cass stumbles across a decades-old mystery that is still claiming victims, and she finds one final shot at redemption.
- Generation Loss
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 6/18/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Waking the Moon
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 4/02/19
Formats: Digital Audy
A Gothic fantasy set on a college campus from the author of Wylding Hall
Sweeney Cassidy is the typical college freshman at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine in Washington, DC. She drinks. She parties. And she certainly doesn’t suspect that underneath its picturesque Gothic façade, the university is a haven for the Benandanti, a cult devoted to suppressing the powerful and destructive Moon Goddess. But everything is about to change as Sweeney learns that her two new best friends are the goddess’ Chosen Ones.
Rich and engrossing, Waking the Moon is a seductive postfeminist thriller that delves into an ancient feud, where the real and magical collide, and one woman is forced to make a decision that will change the world.
- Waking the Moon
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 4/02/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- We Sold Our Souls
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 9/18/18
Formats: Digital Audy
In this hard-rocking, spine-tingling supernatural thriller, the washed-up guitarist of a ’90s heavy metal band embarks on an epic road trip across America and deep into the web of a sinister conspiracy.
Grady Hendrix, horror writer and author of Paperbacks from Hell and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is back with his most electrifying novel yet. In the 1990s, heavy metal band Dürt Würk was poised for breakout success—but then lead singer Terry Hunt embarked on a solo career and rocketed to stardom as Koffin, leaving his fellow bandmates to rot in obscurity.
Two decades later, former guitarist Kris Pulaski works as the night manager of a Best Western—she’s tired, broke, and unhappy. Everything changes when a shocking act of violence turns her life upside down, and she begins to suspect that Terry sabotaged more than just the band.
Kris hits the road, hoping to reunite with the rest of her bandmates and confront the man who ruined her life. It’s a journey that will take her from the Pennsylvania rust belt to a celebrity rehab center to a music festival from hell. A furious power ballad about never giving up, even in the face of overwhelming odds, We Sold Our Souls is an epic journey into the heart of a conspiracy-crazed, pill-popping, paranoid country that seems to have lost its very soul … where only a lone girl with a guitar can save us all.
- We Sold Our Souls
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 9/18/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Wildlands
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By Abby Geni
Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 9/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
From the award-winning author of The Lightkeepers comes a page-turning new novel that explores the bond between siblings and the animal instincts that threaten to destroy them.
When a Category 5 tornado ravaged Mercy, Oklahoma, no family in the small town lost more than the McClouds. Their home and farm were instantly demolished, and orphaned siblings Darlene, Jane, and Cora made media headlines. This relentless national attention and the tornado’s aftermath caused great tension with their brother, Tucker, who soon abandoned his sisters and disappeared.
On the three-year anniversary of the tornado, a cosmetics factory outside of Mercy is bombed, and the lab animals trapped within are released. Tucker reappears, injured from the blast, and seeks the help of nine-year-old Cora. Caught up in the thrall of her charismatic brother, whom she has desperately missed, Cora agrees to accompany Tucker on a cross-country mission to make war on human civilization.
Cora becomes her brother’s unwitting accomplice, taking on a new identity while engaging in acts of escalating violence. Darlene works with Mercy police to find her siblings, leading to an unexpected showdown at a zoo in Southern California. The Wildlands is another remarkable literary thriller from critically acclaimed writer Abby Geni, one that examines what happens when one family becomes trapped in the tenuous space between the human and animal worlds.
- The Wildlands
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By Abby Geni
Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 9/04/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Just in Time
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Read by Emily Sutton-Smith, Kate Marcin, and Carol Monda
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Release Date: 3/27/18
Formats: cpid_11
In her most powerful novel yet, New York Times bestselling author Marie Bostwick weaves the uplifting story of three grief support group dropouts—women united in loss and rescued through friendship.
Fifteen years ago, Grace Saunders vowed to take her beloved husband for better or worse. Now she’s coming to terms with difficult choices as she crafts a memory quilt from scraps of their life together—a life torn to shreds by an accident that has left him in a coma. Enduring months of limbo, Grace is at least not alone.
Nan has been widowed for twenty years, but now, with her children grown, her home feels painfully empty. Even the company of her golden retriever, Blixen, and a series of other rescue dogs, can’t fill the void. Then there’s Monica, a feisty woman with a biting wit who’s reeling following her husband’s death—and the revelation of his infidelity.
As for Grace, a chance evening with a man she barely knows brings a glimmer of joy she hasn’t felt since the tragedy—along with feelings of turmoil and guilt. But her struggle to cope will force all three women to face their fears, share their deepest secrets—and lean on one another as they move from grief and isolation to hope and a second chance at happiness.
- Just in Time
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Read by Emily Sutton-Smith, Kate Marcin, and Carol Monda
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Release Date: 3/27/18
Formats: cpid_11
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- Marita
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 9/05/17
Formats: Digital Audy
Here is the dramatic, glamorous story of lover-turned-spy Marita Lorenz and her affair with Fidel Castro, the basis for a major motion picture starring Jennifer Lawrence.
Few people can say they have seen some of the most significant moments of the twentieth century unravel before their eyes. Marita Lorenz is one of them.
Born in Germany at the outbreak of World War II, Marita was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp as a child. In 1959, she traveled to Cuba where she met and fell in love with Fidel Castro. Yet upon fleeing to America, she was recruited by the CIA to assassinate Castro. Torn by love and loyalty, she couldn’t bring herself to slip him the lethal pills.
Her life would take many more twists and turns, including having a child with ex-dictator of Venezuela Marcos Pérez Jiménez, testifying about the John F. Kennedy assassination, becoming a party girl with close ties to the New York Mafia, and then becoming a police informant.
Caught up in Cold War intrigue, espionage, and conspiracy, this is Marita’s incredible autobiography of a young woman who became a spy for the CIA.
- Marita
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 9/05/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Nuclear Family
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Performed by a full cast
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Release Date: 7/18/17
Formats: Digital Audy
From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie over the course of three decades: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression.
Together, their missives—some sardonic, others absurd, others heartbreaking—weave a tapestry of a very modern family trying (and often failing) to show one another they care.
The titular “nuclear family” includes, among many others, a narcissistic former-child-prodigy father who has taken up haiku writing in his old age and his new wife, a traditional Chinese woman whose attempts to help her stepdaughter find a man include FedExing her silk gowns from Filene’s Basement; their six-year-old son, Stuart, whose favorite condiment is truffle oil and who wears suits to bed; and Julie’s mother, a psychologist who never remarried but may be in love with her arrogant Rabbi and overshares about everything, including the threesome she had with Dutch grad students in 1972.
- Nuclear Family
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Performed by a full cast
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Release Date: 7/18/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Blue Hour
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/14/17
Formats: Digital Audy
The tight-knit residents of Blue Moon Mountain, nestled high in the Colorado Mountains, form an interconnected community of those living off the land, stunned by the beauty and isolation all around them. So when, at the onset of winter, the town veterinarian commits a violent act, the repercussions of that tragedy will be felt all across the mountainside, upending their lives and causing their paths to twist and collide in unexpected ways.
The housecleaner rediscovering her sexual appetite, the farrier who must take in his traumatized niece, the grocer and her daughter, the therapist and the teacher, reaching out to the world in new and surprising ways, and the ragged couple trapped in a cycle of addiction and violence. They will all rise and converge upon the blue hour—the l’heure bleu—the hour of twilight, a time of desire, lust, honesty. The strong, spirited people of Blue Moon Mountain must learn to navigate the line between violence and sex, tenderness and the hard edge of yearning, and the often confusing paths of mourning and lust.
Writing with passion for rural lives and the natural world, Laura Pritchett, who has been called “one of the most accomplished writers of the American West,” graces the land of desire in vivid prose, exploring the lengths these moving, deeply felt characters—some of whom we’ve met in Pritchett’s previous work—will traverse to protect their own.
- The Blue Hour
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/14/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- There Was a Crooked Man
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By K. J. Larsen
A Poisoned Pen Press mystery
Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 11/01/16
Formats: Digital Audy
Life is looking up these days for Chicago PI Cat DeLuca. Her Pants on Fire Detective Agency is booming, and FBI boyfriend, Chance Savino, still curls her toes. She both adores and dodges her outrageous Italian family. Mama’s latest scheme to marry her off involves a romantic cruise, insane amounts of champagne, and a hijacked priest to tie the knot.
But Cat’s near-perfect world is thrown into a tailspin when Captain Bob’s dog is kidnapped and a ghost from the past threatens to expose a terrible secret. Cat launches an investigation that leads her to a decades-old armed robbery, an unsolved murder, and a fresh body.
But when she unearths a wicked truth about Papa and Bob, her trust is shattered, and the detective finds herself faced with the most daunting dilemma of her life.
Cat DeLuca is an unexpected heroine. She’s tenacious, unstoppable, and rocks the heck out of a pair of Jimmy Choo’s. In a wild race against time, she inches closer to the truth and into the sights of a killer. And all the while, a man who got away with murder twice is closing in on Cat.
There Was a Crooked Man is a labyrinth of twists and turns packed with suspense. It’s a tale of betrayal and second chances and the utterly astonishing things we do to save the ones we love.
- There Was a Crooked Man
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By K. J. Larsen
A Poisoned Pen Press mystery
Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 11/01/16
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Gin Lovers
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 7/11/16
Formats: Digital Audy
Set against the turbulent and glamorous backdrop of Prohibition and the rise of the Jazz Age, The Gin Lovers was first published as a six-part e-serial. Now this sensual and romantic story of how one high-society woman’s passion and courage lead her to love is available for the first time ever as a complete audiobook.
It’s 1925, and the Victorian era with its confining morals is all but dead. Unfortunately for New York socialite Charlotte Delacorte, the scandalous flapper revolution is little more than a headline in the tabloids. Living with her rigid and controlling husband, William, her Fifth Avenue townhouse is a gilded cage. But when William’s rebellious younger sister, the beautiful and brash Mae, comes to live with them after the death of their mother, Charlotte finds entrée to a world beyond her wildest dreams—and a handsome and mysterious stranger whom she imagines is as confident in the bedroom as he is behind the bar of his forbidden speakeasy.
Soon Charlotte realizes that nothing is as it seems. Secrets are kept and discovered, loves are lost and found, and Charlotte finds herself on the brink of losing everything—or having it all.
- The Gin Lovers
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 7/11/16
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Hard Light
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 4/19/16
Formats: Digital Audy
As her passionately devoted fans know, Elizabeth Hand is a uniquely gifted storyteller. Readers were introduced to her iconoclastic crime novels, featuring offbeat photographer Cass Neary, in the underground classic Generation Loss, which was followed by the brilliant Available Dark.
In Hard Light, the third book in the series, Cass makes a remarkable discovery that could change our understanding of human history—if she lives long enough to share it.
As the story opens, Cass arrives in London where she’s arranged to meet her long-lost lover, Quinn O’Boyle. When Quinn fails to show at their rendezvous point, Cass meets the eccentric couple Mallo and Morven Dunfries. When Mallo catches Cass rifling his medicine cabinet in search of drugs, he threatens to turn her in to the authorities, then puts her to work as a runner for his illegal goods.
Cass makes a delivery to Poppy Teasel, a famous singer from long ago. Cass leaves Poppy’s flat but returns a short time later to find the place ransacked and Poppy dead. Fearful she’ll become the next victim, Cass goes on the run.
- Hard Light
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Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 4/19/16
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Bye, Bye, Love
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By K. J. Larsen
A Poisoned Pen Press mystery
Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 12/29/15
Formats: Digital Audy
Chicago’s Pants on Fire Detective Agency targets liars and cheats. But private investigator Cat DeLuca is once again up to her smokin’ skinny jeans in murder.
Cat is out running in a neighborhood park when she crashes over the faceless body of Bernie Love. Bernie was the finance guy for the scary Provenza family and a friend to Cat’s shady uncle Joey, a Ferrari-wheeling cop. As she hauls out her phone, Cat is assaulted by someone with a Rolex, a stun gun, and a wheelbarrow. When the cops show up, the killer is gone—and so is the body.
Captain Bob, a stickler for habeas corpus, blows off Cat’s story. Stung by a chorus of snickers from the Ninth Precinct, home base for DeLuca men, Cat vows to make her case and goes after the Rolex man. The murderer, desperate to silence the only person who can place him at the park, comes after Cat. She’s quickly on a collision course with the deadliest adversary she’s ever encountered—but she has the help of her beagle partner, her gun-happy assistant, a former spy (or two), and her outrageous, interfering Italian family. Meanwhile, her hot FBI boyfriend seems sidelined in Vegas.
In Bye, Bye, Love, K. J. Larsen delivers another nail-biting tale rife with unexpected plot twists, zany characters, fabulous food, and laugh-out-loud humor.
- Bye, Bye, Love
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By K. J. Larsen
A Poisoned Pen Press mystery
Read by Carol Monda
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Release Date: 12/29/15
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Suicide of Claire Bishop
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Read by Carol Monda and Will Damron
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Release Date: 9/15/15
Formats: Digital Audy
Greenwich Village, 1959. Claire Bishop sits for a portrait—a gift from her husband—only to discover that what the artist has actually depicted is Claire’s suicide. Haunted by the painting, Claire is forced to redefine herself within a failing marriage and a family history of madness. Shifting ahead to 2004, we meet West, a young schizophrenic obsessed with a painting he encounters in a gallery: a mysterious image of a woman’s suicide. Convinced it was painted by his ex-girlfriend, West constructs an elaborate delusion involving time-travel, Hasidism, art theft, and the terrifying power of representation. When the two characters finally meet, delusions are shattered and lives are forever changed.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop is a dazzling debut, evocative of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Virginia Woolf’s classic Mrs. Dalloway, as well as Donna Tartt’s bestseller The Goldfinch. With high stakes that reach across American history, Carmiel Banasky effortlessly juggles balls of madness, art theft, and time itself, holding the listener in a thrall of language and personal consequences. Daring, sexy, and emotional, The Suicide of Claire Bishop heralds Banasky as an important new talent.
- The Suicide of Claire Bishop
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Read by Carol Monda and Will Damron
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Release Date: 9/15/15
Formats: Digital Audy