Featured Podcasts

Bookcast with Robert and Katrina – April 2008
Join Robert and Katrina from Cameron Village Library for their fourth bookcast as they review book titles.
Length of bookcast: 4:37 (4 minutes:37 seconds)

Spotlight podcasts

Spotlight: Picture Books for children  

Little Hoot by Amy Krause Rosenthal (E Rosenthal)
Little Hoot doesn't like being an owl -- find out why!
Length of Podcast: 0:33 (33 seconds)

Spotlight: Teen Books

New Adult Fiction & Nonfiction Audio Books

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
Read by Shohren Aghdashloo
Length of this audio preview: 1:04 (1 minute:4 seconds)
After her father dies without leaving her with a dowry, a 17th-century Persian teen becomes a servant to her wealthy rug designer uncle in the court of Shah Abbas the Great, where her weaving talents prove both a blessing and curse.

Simple Genius by David Baldacci
Performed by Scott Brick
Length of this audio preview: 1:51 (1 minute:51 seconds)
When Maxwell instigates a fight with the most intimidating bruiser she could find at a local bar and lets herself be beaten unconscious, despite her superior fighting skills, her partner suggests she voluntarily commit herself to a psychiatric facility.

The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian
Performed by Susan Denaker
Length of this audio preview: 1:10 (1 minute:10 seconds)
Working at a homeless shelter, student Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel embarks on an obsessive search for the truth behind the photos.

The Last Summer of You & Me by Ann Brashares 
Read by Cassandra Campbell
Length of this audio preview: 1:32 (1 minute:32 seconds)
Sisters Alice and Riley reunite with their childhood friend Paul at the beach community where they spent summers growing up, but a blossoming romance between Alice and Paul, a serious illness and a dark family secret force the trio to leave their innocence behind.

Play Dirty by Sandra Brown   
Performed by Victor Slezak
Length of this audio preview: 1:59 (1 minute:59 seconds)
The seven deadly sins help propel this provocative, sex-fueled thriller from bestseller Brown (Ricochet). Foster Speakman, an eccentric Texas paraplegic millionaire, offers $500,000 to Griff Burkett, a disgraced former NFL quarterback fresh out of prison after serving a five-year sentence for racketeering, to impregnate Foster's wife, Laura. Foster insists the child be conceived naturally (the way God intended). Broke with no prospects, Griff takes the job.

Boomsday: A Novel by Christopher Buckley
Performed by Janeane Garafalo
Length of this audio preview: 1:23 (1 minute:23 seconds)
Inciting a culture war when she suggests that baby boomers should be given government incentives to commit suicide, 29-year-old blogger and political malcontent Cassandra Devine catches the attention of an ambitious senator seeking the presidency.

Critical by Robin Cook
Performed by George Guidall
Length of this audio preview: 2:09 (2 minutes:9 seconds)
Achieving a successful and profitable life in spite of a troubled past, doctor Angela Dawson pursues business opportunities in three major cities only to find her efforts compromised by a surge of drug-resistant staph infections.

The Sleeping Doll by Jeffrey Deaver
Performed by Anne Twomey
Length of audio preview: 1:42 (1 minute:42 seconds)
California Bureau of Investigation interrogator and body language expert Kathryn Dance works to recapture a dangerous escaped killer with the help of three victims from his former cult and the lone survivor from a family he slaughtered.

The Gift by Richard Paul Evans
Performed by John Dossett
Length of audio preview:  1:36 (1 minute:36 seconds)
Nathan Hurst hated Christmas. For the rest of the world it was a day of joy and celebration; for Nathan it was simply a reminder of the event that destroyed his childhood until a snowstorm, a canceled flight, and an unexpected meeting with a young mother and her very special son would show him that Christmas is indeed the season of miracles.

Bad Blood by Linda Fairstein
Performed by Barbara Rosenblat
Length of this audio preview: 2:11 (2 minutes:11 seconds)
In the middle of a trial involving a businessman charged with murdering his wife, Manhattan prosecutor Alexandra Cooper is summoned to investigate an explosion of unknown origin 600 feet below street level when it is traced back to her case.

Protect and Defend by Vince Flynn
Performed by George Guidall
Length of this audio preview: 1:05 (1 minute: 5 seconds)
In the aftermath of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, CIA director Irene Kennedy and operative Mitch Rapp are dispatched to the Middle East to diffuse Iran's sworn retaliation against the United States.

World Without End by Ken Follett
Performed by John Lee
Length of this audio preview: 1:22 (1 minute:22 seconds)
In 1989 Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in 12th-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own.

The Appeal by John Grisham - new!
Narrated by Michael Beck
Length of this audio preview: 1:25 (1 minute:25 seconds)
A Mississippi jury returns a $41-million verdict against a chemical company accused of dumping carcinogenic waste into a small town's water supply. The company's ruthless billionaire CEO is thwarted and the good guys (a courageous young woman who lost her husband and child and her two lawyers who've gone half a million dollars in debt preparing her case) receives its just reward. This sounds like the end of a Grisham legal thriller, but instead it's the beginning of a book-length lesson in how greed and big business have corrupted our electoral and judicial systems.

The Alibi Man by Tami Hoag
Performed by Beth McDonald
Length of this audio preview: 1:53 (1 minute:53 seconds)
Ex-narcotics detective Elena Estes wants nothing more than to live in peace training her horses, but after she finds the abused body of a young female co-worker, she launches an investigation that leads to the Russian mob and a powerful cadre of Palm Beach bad boys.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone? by Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney
Performed by Lee Iacocca
Length of this audio preview: 2:03 (2 minutes:3 seconds)
Iacocca is outraged. Now 82, he has seen the U.S. overcome some of its worst crises, including the Great Depression and World War II, through great leadership. As the CEO of Chrysler Corporation, he brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy and worked with the government to overcome the fallout from the 1970s oil crisis. Now, he says, our government has fallen under the grip of arrogant ideologues and spineless detractors. Our business leaders are more obsessed with stock options and trumping each other's multimillion-dollar salaries than with finding creative solutions to pressing problems, such as the health-care crisis, our loss of competitive edge in the global marketplace, the massive trade deficit, and the slow death of the middle class. From Booklist.

Einstein by Walter Isaacson
Performed by Edward Herrmann
Length of this audio preview: (1 minute:11 seconds)
Acclaimed biographer Isaacson examines the remarkable life of "science's preeminent poster boy" in this lucid account (after 2003's Benjamin Franklin and 1992's Kissinger). Contrary to popular myth, the German-Jewish schoolboy Albert Einstein not only excelled in math, he mastered calculus before he was 15. Young Albert's dislike for rote learning, however, led him to compare his teachers to "drill sergeants." That antipathy was symptomatic of Einstein's love of individual and intellectual freedom, beliefs the author revisits as he relates his subject's life and work in the context of world and political events that shaped both, from WWI and II and their aftermath through the Cold War.

Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon
Performed by Scott Sower
Length of audio preview: 1:58 (1 minute:58 seconds)
Anticipating a relaxing retirement, Father Tim returns to his hometown for the first time in decades when he receives an anonymous summons, an event that leads to his discovery of long-buried secrets and new people.

The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman
Length of this audio preview: 1:25 (1 minute:25 seconds)
Performed by Michell Greenberg
Police detective Peter Decker is called to an orthodox Jewish community to investigate the rape of one of the women who lives there. The call is made by the victim's friend, Rina Lazarus, whom Peter is attracted to immediately. Thus begins a wonderful mystery series which features a strictly religious orthodox Jewish woman, and a man who is indifferent to religion, but not to Rina.

The Burnt House: a Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus novel by Faye Kellerman
Performed by George Guidall
Length of this audio preview: 1:47 (1 minute:47 seconds)
In the aftermath of a suspicious commuter plane crash in Los Angeles, police lieutenant Peter Decker investigates the claims of one family that foul play had been involved, a suspicion that gains credibility when a key victim is discovered to be someone else.

Obsession by Jonathan Kellerman
Performed by John Rubenstein
Length of this audio preview: 2:10 (2 minutes:10 seconds)
Once again, Delaware, an accomplished psychologist, teams with his friend Milo Sturgis, an LAPD detective, to probe a mystery, though this time there's considerable doubt as to the nature of the puzzle. Teenager Tanya Bigelow, whom Delaware treated as a child for obsessive-compulsive disorder, consults him because her aunt Patty, who raised her, conveyed a cryptic message just before she died, apparently confessing to a crime.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
Read by the author
Length of this audio preview: 2:05 (2 minutes:5 seconds)
Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, this book  tells the story of how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where we live.

False Memory by Dean Koontz
Narrated by Stephen Lang
Length of this audio preview: 1:21 (1 minute: 21 seconds)
While struggling to help an agoraphobic friend cope, Martie Rhodes suddenly falls prey to her own traumatic autophobia – a fear of herself – and when her husband tries to uncover the roots of her problem, he comes face to face with an enigmatic therapist and his own bizarre nightmare.

The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller
Narrated by Blair Brown
Length of this audio preview: 1:09 (1 minute: 9 seconds)
Two unconventional women – Meri Fowler, pregnant, newly married and discovering the gap between reality and expectation, and Delia Naughton, wife of a notoriously unfaithful liberal senator – confront the costs and challenges of love.

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
Written and performed by Barack Obama
Length of this audio preview: 2:03 (2 minutes:3 seconds)
Senator Barack Obama from Illinois presents this new plan for American progress. He details how leaders can end petty conflicts and start addressing the real problems facing America today. Abridged audio book.

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Narrated by Hope Davis
Length of this audio preview: 1:59 (1 minute:59 seconds)
Fleeing the violence that destroyed her family and separated her from her sister Claire and Coop, an enigmatic young man who lives with them, Anna finds refuge in an isolated house in south-central France, while she struggles to reconcile the past and present.

Stranger in Paradise by Robert B. Parker - new!
Narrated by James Naughton
Length of this audio preview: 1:12 (1 minute:12 seconds)
Jesse Stone trades quips with his deputies, Suitcase Simpson and Molly Crane; struggles with his relationship with his ex-wife, Jenn; and grapples with a criminal's return in bestseller Parker's sizzling seventh novel to feature the Paradise, Mass., police chief (after 2007's High Profile). Ex-con Wilson Crow Cromartie, who claims to be Apache and who eluded the police after a shootout 10 years earlier in Trouble in Paradise (1998), wants Stone not to interfere in his search for someone in Massachusetts. A Florida mob bigwig, Louis Francisco, has hired Crow to kill his ex-wife and kidnap his 14-year-old daughter, Amber, but Crow has a policy of not harming women. In the end, Stone does more than leave Crow alone; he decides to make sure Amber, who's involved with a Latino gang, gets a chance, however slim, to overcome the odds stacked against her.  

The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Narrated by Simon Vance
Length of this audio preview: 0:47 (47 seconds)
Faulques, a war photographer, witnessed most of the wars of the end of the 20th century, but he was never able to capture the photo that would explain the chaos of the universe. Now, as he continues to try to understand it, he starts painting a grand circular fresco on the inside wall of a tower on the Mediterranean, disturbed by the memories of a woman he can never forget, and an unexpected visit: a man who wants to kill him.

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Performed by Carol Monda
Length of this audio preview: 2:23 (2 minutes:23 seconds)
In the aftermath of a small-town school shooting, lawyer Jordan McAfee finds himself defending a youth who desperately needs someone on his side, while detective Patrick Ducharme works with a primary witness of the daughter of the judge assigned to the case.

Body Surfing by Anita Shreve
Performed by Lolita Davidovich
Length of this audio preview: 1:36 (1 minute:36 seconds)
Struggling to start over again after being divorced and widowed while still in her twenties, Sydney tutors the daughter of a wealthy couple during a New Hampshire summer but finds herself caught up in a bitter family squabble.

Dear John by Nicolas Sparks 
Read by Holter Graham
Length of Audio Preview: 1:45 (1 minute:45 seconds)
John, a high school dropout, enlists in the Army not knowing what else to do with his life. While in the Army he meets Savannah, they fall in love, and she awaits his return from the Army. After 9/11 John feels it's his duty to re-enlist. During their long separation Savannah falls in love and marries someone else.

Bungalow 2 by Danielle Steele
Narrated by Michael Boatman
Length of Audio Preview: 1:24 (1 minute:24 seconds)
When Marin County mother and freelance writer Tanya Harris gets the chance to write a major Hollywood screenplay, she finds herself thrust into an unfamiliar world that forces her to reconcile her two lives as a suburban mom and award-winning screenwriter.

April in Paris by Michael Wallner
Performed by Paul Michael
Length of this audio preview: 1:55 (1 minute:55 seconds)
Working as an interpreter at Gestapo headquarters in occupied Paris, Roth, a young German soldier, falls in love with Chantal, the daughter of an antiquarian bookshop owner, and finds himself on the opposite side of his Nazi colleagues.

It's All Too Much by Peter Walsh
Performed by the Author
Length of this audio preview: 1:59 (1 minute:59 seconds)
Veteran "organizational consultant," TV show host and author Walsh (How to Organize (Just About) Everything) has more ideas in his latest book on clutter management than the spare closet has junk, and, even better, it's organized, in-depth and entirely user-friendly.

Ruler of the Realm by Herbie Brennan
Performed by James Daniel Wilson
Length of this audio preview: 1:07 (1 minute:7 seconds)
While simultaneously trying to prevent and prepare for war between the Faeries of the Night and Faeries of the Light, Queen Holly Blue is kidnapped from her Uncle Hairstreak's home by human Henry Atherton and learns she must face another, far greater enemy.

Missing You by Meg Cabot
Performed by Johanna Parker
Length of this audio preview: 1:43 (1 minute:43 seconds)
Ever since a walk home on a particularly stormy day, Jessica Mastriani has had an ability like no other. She became known worldwide as Lightning Girl – a psychic who could find the location of anyone, dead or alive. Jess finally had no choice but to embrace her newfound talent, and ended up lending her skills to the U.S. Government. Missing You is the fifth and final book in the 1-800-Where-R-You series.

Loving Will Shakespeare by Carolyn Meyer 
Performed by Katherine Kellgren
Length of Audio Preview:
In Stratford-upon-Avon in the 16th century, Anne Hathaway suffers her stepmother's cruelty and yearns for love and escape, finally finding it in the arms of a boy she has grown up with, William Shakespeare.

Larklight by Phillip Reeve
Performed by Greg Steinbrunner
Length of this audio preview: 0:57 (57 seconds)
In an alternate Victorian England, young Arthur and his sister Myrtle, residents of Larklight, a floating house in one of Her Majesty's outer space territories, uncover a spidery plot to destroy the solar system.

Specials by Scott Westerfeld
Performed by Carline Montbertrand
Length of this audio preview: 1:01 (1 minute:1 second)
When she is turned into a super-modelesque super-fighting machine, Tally, a former ugly, is ordered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid in a carefully engineered world of perfection where she refuses to play by the rules.

Frightful's Mountain by Jean Craighead George – new!
Performed by Jeff Woodman
Length of Audio Preview: 1:15 (1 minute:15 seconds)
As she grows through the first years of her life in the Catskill Mountains of New York, a peregrine falcon called Frightful interacts with various humans, including the boy who raised her, a falconer who rescues her, and several unscrupulous poachers, as well as with many animals that are part of the area's ecological balance.

Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix – new!
Performed by Steven Boyer
Length of this audio preview:
A government decree allows each family only two children. For Luke, a third child, this has meant a lifetime of hiding. But could a stray glimpse of a child hiding in the house across the way lead to freedom?

Flush by Carl Hiaasen – new!
Read by Michael Welsh
Length of this audio preview: 1:00 (1 minute)
With their father jailed for sinking a river boat, Noah Underwood and his younger sister, Abbey, must gather evidence that the owner of this floating casino is emptying his bilge tanks into the protected waters around their Florida Keys home.

Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass
Performed by Andy Paris
Length of this audio preview: 1:27 (1 minute:27 seconds)
Just before his 13th birthday, Jeremy Fink receives a keyless locked box – set aside by his father before his death five years earlier – that purportedly contains the meaning of life.

The Last Dragon by Silvana De Mari
Performed by Patricia Conolly
Length of this audio preview: 1:15 (1 minute:15 seconds)
Struggling to survive in a postapocalyptic world after his village is destroyed, Yorsh, the earth's last elf, must embark on a perilous quest to decipher a powerful prophecy and find the last dragon, who holds the key to saving the world from the Dark Age that has begun.

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy
Performed by Christina Moore
Length of this audio preview: 1:03 (1 minute:3 seconds)
From 1939, when Syvia is four-and-a-half years old, to 1945, when she has just turned 10, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland's Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation.

The Rainbow People by Laurence Yep – new!
Performed by George Guidall
Length of this audio preview:  1:19 (1 minute:19 seconds)
Twenty Chinese folk tales passed on by word of mouth for generations, as told by some old-timers newly settled in the United States.