Showing results by narrator "Ron Butler" in All Categories

The town of Franklin Falls is having its 100th birthday. And that means the town’s historic time capsule is about to be dug up and put on display by the proud citizens. Yeah, well, not if the crooked mayor has his way. Good thing all-around smart kid Leon Karakostas is one step ahead of him. Leon and his twin sister, Noel, and his crew - Pixie, Microscope, and Aardvark - find themselves in a mad dash to the dump, on a rooftop chase, and caught up in a showdown with a mysterious grandma.

Operation Treadstone has nearly ruined Adam Hayes. The top-secret CIA Black Ops program trained him to be a nearly invincible assassin, but it also cost him his family and any chance at a normal life. Which is why he was determined to get out. Working as a cabinet-maker in rural Oregon, Adam thinks he has left Treadstone in the past, until he receives a mysterious email from a former colleague, and soon after is attacked by an unknown hit team at his job site.

Nearly half of all mergers and acquisitions involve private equity, but the world of PE can confuse even lifelong business professionals. For years, the #1 bestselling book The Private Equity Playbook has helped countless entrepreneurs, leaders, and CEOs like you successfully navigate the PE playing field. But much has changed since the book was released at the start of 2019. Adam Coffey knows the rapidly evolving PE game isn’t won with outdated tactics.

Johnny Decker, #12. Star quarterback for the Boston Tomcats. Two-time Super Bowl MVP...a decade ago. Nickname: "Decker the Panty Wrecker". When we lose our beloved team owner, his estranged daughter inherits the Tomcats. I don’t know which is worse—the fact that she’s a finance nerd from New York who knows less than nothing about football...or that I mistook her for a secretary when we first met. She’s stubborn, uptight, infuriating, looks way too good in a skirt, and she’s wrong about absolutely everything—from pizza to how to run my team.

The seminal rap group A Tribe Called Quest brought jazz into the genre, resurrecting timeless rhythms to create masterpieces. This narrative follows Tribe from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Throughout the narrative, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Listen to the hilarious-but-true adventures of the world’s most amazing spies, document their actions, and most importantly: Do not let the enemy see you laugh. Spies! has it all: secret turnips, infiltrating pigeons, encrypted clothing, milk messages, prison breaks, snooping kitties, grave robbing, hanging monkeys, bumbling Brits, and even original songs.

Unbundling the Enterprise provides a blueprint for organizations to remain relevant and maximize growth in the digital economy by embracing the flexibility and optionality enabled by APIs. Drawing on real-world examples of both innovative “digital pirates” and legacy “digital settlers,” authors Stephen Fishman and Matt McLarty articulate strategies to unbundle business capabilities into reusable digital assets.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the US, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the US government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.

The Art of the Straight Line captures the energy of Lou Reed's worlds of Tai Chi, music, and meditation. It was edited by his wife, the artist Laurie Anderson. Lou Reed was a musician, singer, songwriter, poet, and founding member of the legendary rock band the Velvet Underground. He collaborated with many artists, from Andy Warhol and John Cale to Robert Wilson and Metallica. Reed had a groundbreaking solo career that spanned five decades until his death in 2013. Reed was also an accomplished martial artist whose practice began in the 1980s.

An alien ship rests over Water Island. For five years, the people of the US Virgin Islands have lived with the Ynaa, a race of super-advanced aliens on a research mission they will not fully disclose. They are benevolent in many ways but meet any act of aggression with disproportional wrath. This has led to a strained relationship between the Ynaa and the local Virgin Islanders, and a peace that cannot last.

First there was Curse of the Whiskey House, then there was Viral Xgressions, an FINALLY, Ghost of Ace Honeycutt completes this thrilling, exciting, and compelling Trilogy! Seems that the City of Lazarus (Alabama) cannot buy a break as the nonstop drama continues.

Many believe that a lot of spirits are uneasy and that a curse lingers around Lazarus and Hawthorne County because of the crass circumstances that surround the whiskey house. There's an old saying around Lazarus, Once you enter the whiskey house, if you should ever come out, your life goes south. There is also an eerie prophecy tied to the whiskey house that no one wants to acknowledge; they keep quiet about it hoping it will just disappear.

Lazarus Police Department and Hawthorne County Sheriff's Office had their hands full with the cataclysm at the Hawthorne County Whiskey House. After having to deal with false prophets and violent death, a serious toll was taken on the Lazarus authorities and leadership. So by now all citizens of Lazarus and Hawthorne County definitely know, it's not just an urban legend....

The city streets are no longer safe. They are filled instead with the living dead, rotting predators driven only by a need to kill and eat. Some of the living still struggle to survive, but with each passing day, their odds grow worse. Some survivors have fled, frantically searching for a place to escape, even briefly, the slaughter around them.

Operation Treadstone made Jason Bourne, but he's not the only agent they trained. After the revival of Operation Treadstone, former operative Adam Hayes has retreated to Africa, determined to escape the black-ops CIA program for good. Hayes knows just how destructive the program can be, as it turns government agents into nearly superhuman assassins. But his quiet life in Africa changes irrevocably when Hayes is attacked by extremists while flying a charitable mission in Burkina Faso.

First contact with a mysterious race of aliens reveals an unusual request; a family's pet dog comes to grips with the newly bestowed gift of human-like intelligence; a poet, in danger and alone on a distant world, makes unlikely allies; hundreds of years in the future, a famous hermit lives in the sea above the now-underwater Harvard University; former friends navigate unsteady peace between human refugees and the technologically superior race that saved them; in a future where human life can be infinitely extended through cybertronic rebirth, one woman declines immortality.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale.

The most pressing issue on Adam Hayes' mind is planning his son's upcoming fifth birthday party. After years of operating in the world's most dangerous spots for Treadstone, he's ready to call it quits, but the feeling isn't mutual. Levi Shaw, Treadstone's director, calls Hayes back for one more mission.

This lush and haunting novel tells of a city steeped in decadent pleasures and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal. It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evening's festivities are interrupted - by murder. The ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death.

Valdez Jones VIII calls himself Wrecker because his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather salvaged shipwrecks for a living. So is it destiny, irony, or just bad luck when Wrecker comes across a speedboat that has run hard aground on a sand flat? The men in the boat don't want Wrecker to call for help—in fact, they'll pay him to forget he ever saw them. Wrecker would be happy to forget, but he keeps seeing these men all over Key West—at the marina, even in the cemetery. And now they want more than his silence—they want a lookout.