Narrator

Thérèse Plummer

Thérèse Plummer
  • Set in 1968 after the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this immersive audio dramatization, inspired by the author’s own experiences, features an award-winning cast of 15 actors, in a fast-paced, suspenseful coming-of-age story.

    With his father’s mysterious disappearance and his brother Ronnie enlisting in the Vietnam War, 13-year-old TJ Crowley is left alone with his racist, unstable mother, Kate. The newly enforced Fair Housing Act results in the unthinkable for the Crowleys when a Black family, headed by the eminent Dr. Washington, crosses the racial red line and moves in next door. Kate is quick to warn TJ that their new neighbors are strictly off-limits and makes a panicked call to beg Ray, her old flame, to travel to their home in Wichita Kansas to help deal with “the problem next door.”

    At his now integrated junior high, TJ resents that teachers tell him he must get to know his Black classmates, yet he understands that staying out of trouble can only help assure him an all-important spot on the basketball team. At school, a violent confrontation with Leon, the tough new kid in 7th grade, lands them in the principal’s office. And at home, Ray ropes him into building a fence that will send the Washingtons a message that they’re not welcome. 

    But the fence can’t quiet the sounds of unfamiliar music floating over the fence nor hide the strength and beauty of his new classmate, Ivy Washington, who fiercely stands up for what she believes in.

    Over time, TJ begins to question the lessons he’s learned at home and decides to accept Dr. Washington’s invitation to visit their family. Devastated when his poor grades and bad behavior keep him from the basketball team, TJ turns to the doctor, a former athlete, who coaches him for the track team, teaching him how to throw the shot put.

    When TJ’s secret visits to the Washingtons are discovered, and a series of escalating hate crimes point to Ray, TJ is forced to make a defining choice that will forever change his life.

    Performed by Dani Martineck, Dion Graham, Tavia Gilbert, Johnny Heller, Kevin R. Free, Shayna Small, Ari Fliakos, Michael Crouch, Kirby Heyborne, Graham Halstead, Peter Berkrot, Thérèse Plummer, Brittany Pressley, John Wright, and Sheila Brown Kinnard, playing the role inspired by her mother, Josephine Brown. 

    Grant Overstake, a storyteller and educator, draws from his background as a former Miami Herald sports writer and decathlon All-American to write authentic sports themed novels of raw emotion. Grant and his wife, Claire, sing in the multicultural ARISE Ensemble, who’s music is featured in this program.

    An award-winning producer and director with over 400 titles to her credit, May Wuthrich is a former actor with a background in traditional book publishing and book-to-screen script development.

    Presented by Grain Valley Publishing 

    “The gospel music of the ARISE Ensemble enhances the listening experience. The audio drama has moments of remarkable verisimilitude: from the play-by-play announcing of a basketball game to the whirring of a helicopter in Vietnam. Performed by a gifted cast, this slice of our history stays with the listener.” —AudioFile (Earphones Award winner) 

  • Escaping New York City and the espionage case that made her question everything, recently widowed FBI Agent Lina Connerly returns home to sell the house she has inherited in Greenfield, California. With her teenage son Rory, Lina hopes to reassemble her life, reevaluate her career, and find a clear way forward.

    Adrift and battling insomnia, she discovers that her father’s sleepy hometown has been transformed into a Silicon Valley suburb on steroids, obsessed with an annual exam called the Wonder Test.

    When students at her son’s high school go missing, reappearing under mysterious circumstances on abandoned beaches, Lina must summon her strength and her investigative instincts, pushing her own ethical boundaries to the limits in order to solve the crimes. Meanwhile, an old espionage case called Red Vine keeps calling her back into the fold. While Lina struggles to balance her new role as a single mother and the complex counterintelligence puzzles she is so adept at solving, Greenfield’s shadowy dangers creep closer to her own home.

    The Wonder Test is a searing view of a culture that puts the well-being of children at risk for advancement and prestige, and a captivating story of the lengths a mother will go for her son.

  • A gripping new mystery from the author of The Wild Inside, set in the magnificent and brutal terrain of Glacier National Park

    In the darkening days of autumn, in a remote region near the Canadian border, a journalist has been murdered. Anne Marie Johnson was last seen with Reeve Landon, whose chocolate Labrador was part of an article she had been writing about a scientific canine research program. Now Landon is the prime suspect. Intensely private and paranoid, in a panic that he’ll be wrongfully arrested, he ventures deep into the woods. Even as he evades the detective, Landon secretly feels the whole thing is somehow deserved, a karmic punishment for a horrifying crime he committed as a young boy.

    While Montana FBI investigator Ali Paige is not officially assigned to the case, Landon—an ex-boyfriend and the father of her child—needs help. Ali has only one objective for snooping around the edges of an investigation she’s not authorized to pursue: to save her daughter the shame of having a father in jail and the pain of abandonment she endured as a child. As the clock ticks and the noose tightens around Landon’s neck, Ali isn’t sure how far she will go to find out the truth. And what if the truth is not something she wants to know?

    A Sharp Solitude is a study of two flawed characters, bonded by a child, trying to make their way in an extraordinary place where escape seems possible. But no one can ever really outrun their demons, even in the vast terrain of Glacier, the ultimate backdrop for a journey of the soul.

  • Scott O’Connor’s novels have been hailed as “astonishing” (Library Journal), and “so insistently stirring, you want to lean in close to catch every word” (New York Times Book Review). Now, from the author of Untouchable and Half World comes A Perfect Universe, a piercingly emotional cycle of stories in the tradition of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Annie Proulx’s Close Range.

    Welcome to the often-overlooked corners of sun-bleached Los Angeles, where a teenaged bicycle thief searches for a kidnapped boy, a young musician emerges as the lone survivor of a building collapse, and an aging actor faces the erasure of his past. There, far from the Hollywood spotlight, we also meet two sisters locked in a destructive cycle of memory and illness, coffee-shop regulars whose lives are torn apart by a stunning moment of violence, and the desperate, fraudulent writer whose fictions connect these unforgettable characters in subtle and surprising ways.

    Sharply observed, exhilaratingly paced, and beautifully written, A Perfect Universe is a masterful exploration of growing up and growing old, loss and longing, identity and deception, and the search for redemption, humanity, and grace.