First grader Zach Taylor’s school is the latest to be flocked by reporters and thrown into the headlines for the most devastating reason: it has been added to the long list of school shootings in the United States. Told from the perspective of a six-year-old boy facing trauma and loss, Only Child could easily and heartbreakingly pass as non-fiction.
Crammed in a coat closet that smells like pee and his teacher’s coffee breath, six-year-old Zach and his classmates listen to gunshots firing through the halls of their school. A gunman entered the building, taking 19 young lives and forever changing the once peaceful community and Taylor family. Growing up far faster than any child should, Zach is a stunning example of the wisdom, optimism, and forgiveness of children that is so often forgotten as we age.
In the aftermath of tragedy, the Taylor family struggles to cope. Zach’s mother focuses on pursuing justice against the shooter’s parents, holding them accountable for the pain their son caused, despite backlash from the community, while his father is more distant than ever. As Zach’s world begins to crumble around him, he loses himself in a magical world of books and art that help lead him, and the adults in his life, on a path of healing and forgiveness.
The author’s ability to storytell from the perspective of a six-year-old boy is striking. Rhiannon Navin dug so deep in subtle, aching ways that I found myself pausing it for the sake of gathering myself. What made the story even more compelling was the narration by young actor Kivlighan De Montebello, who perfectly portrays Zach and made me even more emotionally invested in the story. While I always prefer listening to audiobooks over print, I strongly encourage anyone interested in Only Child to listen to it in audio in order to get the most powerful experience.
If you’re a fan of dark, twisted psychological thrillers, Jody Gehrman‘s Watch Me: A Gripping Psychological Thriller, will leave you guessing until the very end. Listen to our interview with the author to find out the inspiration behind the story, her advice for aspiring narrators and authors, and more!
Audiobooks.com:Watch Me is a psychological thriller about how far obsession can go. Where did the inspiration for the novel come from?
Jody: I’m a professor at a small college and I’ve been teaching at the college level for two decades, so I’ve seen a lot of changes on campus and was thinking about how much fear had entered into the campus equation in the last two decades. We were doing trainings about active shootings and what to do if God forbid that ever happened, and I was thinking about that and wanted to find a way to personalize that fear, to express it through two characters. At the same time, I had been thinking a lot about women – and certainly this happens to men, too, but especially women – when you turn a certain corner in your life and you no longer feel very visible or relevant. You start to feel less seen, and I realized how vulnerable that can make a person feel, especially if there’s someone who does give them that attention.
Audiobooks.com: You describe yourself as a lifelong audiobook lover. What ignited your passion for audiobooks and audio in general?
Jody: My obsession with it predates this wonderful renaissance we’re going through with audiobooks. I found a collection of tape cassettes at the library ages ago that were old, 1940s radio drama. I just fell in love with this form of storytelling and drama. there’s something so nurturing about coming home, doing the dishes, and having someone tell you a story. it’s the most fantastic, nurturing thing to just shut off and become the listener.
Audiobooks.com: Absolutely! So how did the opportunity to narrate your own novel arise?
Jody: I let Macmillan Audio know that I listened to one or two books a week and am really obsessed with [audiobooks], and had all kinds of ideas about narrators. They were open to that and I sent them a list of narrators. As I was listening to possible narrators for the role of Kate, I couldn’t fight this nagging feeling that I wanted to read it myself. So I told them I really do understand that sometimes, the author is not the best person to read their work. But I wanted them to audition me on equal footing with other narrators just to pick the person they felt would work best and so they asked me to do it. I absolutely loved reading my own work and kind of visiting it from that angle. It was a completely different perspective on the book for me.
Audiobooks.com: What do readers gain from listening to the audiobook that they miss out on if they just read the print version?
Jody: One of the things that struck me in listening to especially Holter [Graham]’s section was that he really brought out a lot of humor in the character, Sam, and he’s not inherently a funny character – he’s a really demented person, rather a scary brain to inhabit. i love the way he was able to make me laugh out loud. i don’t know that i would have that experience just reading the book.
Audiobooks.com: What advice would you give someone interested in narrating, writing a book, or both?
Jody: I’m not going to pretend to be an expert, but because I do listen to so many audiobooks, I notice a lot of things narrators do well and things they do not so well. I think a big part of it is trying to sink into the spirit of the work and not overdramatize.
Part of what a good narrator does is they disappear; they’re no longer thinking about their voice. they’re lost in the story.
The temptation for actors much of the time is to really have a huge variation in the voices – for example, for a man to go really high on the woman’s voices or vice versa for women. I think that’s mostly distracting. In my opinion, less is more.
If the hope is to be a novelist because you love to write, because you love to write more than anything, that’s the biggest secret to making it – indulging that love and writing as often as you can. I know most of us have busy lives and it’s hard to carve out space. Figure out a daily practice to keep working and use that love of writing to balance out the more crazy making aspects of the industry. For example, pitching, promoting and selling your work are necessary, but they’re not the heart of being a writer. The actual heart is writing.
Audiobooks.com: Do you think you’ll narrate any future novels you put out into the world?
Jody: I would love to. I don’t want to force it. If I write a character that isn’t in the right age range or demographic, I certainly would prefer that someone who fits better would be the person. But I’m also getting more interested in the issues of being in your late 30s and 40s and experiencing the changes you go through in those time periods, so maybe I will fit the right demographic. I certainly would love to do it again.
Kate Youngblood is disappearing. Muddling through her late 30s as a creative writing professor, the follow-up novel to her successful debut tanked. Her husband left her for a woman a decade younger. She fears no one will ever truly look at or know her again. Except for Sam Grist, her most promising student. A talented writer who gravitates towards dark themes and twisted plots, he’s not just there to be a great writer. He’s been watching her. Wanting her. Working his way to her for years. As he makes his way into her life, they enter a deadly web of dangerous lies and forbidden desire. Read more and sample the audio.
This interview has been condensed and edited. For the full interview, listen here.
From notorious gangsters who monopolized countries to small town criminals who committed atrocities, these eight true crime audiobooks will remind you to lock your doors at night.
A young woman leaves a party with a wealthy U.S. senator. The next morning her body is discovered in his car at the bottom of a pond. This is the damning true story of the death of campaign strategist Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick and of Senator Ted Kennedy, who left her trapped underwater while he returned to his hotel, slept, and made phone calls to associates. Read more and sample the audio.
An epic story of gangsters, drugs, violence, sex, and murder rooted in the streets, The Corporation reveals how an entire generation of political exiles, refugees, racketeers, corrupt cops, hitmen, and their wives and girlfriends became caught up in an American saga of desperation and empire building. Read more and sample the audio.
In 1991, flight attendant Nancy Ludwig checked in to an airport hotel near Detroit. The next morning she was found gagged and tortured, her throat slit with such rage that she was nearly decapitated. Her husband Arthur never gave up hope that the future would bring enough evidence to close the case. But it was the past that held the clue. Read more and sample the audio.
Every generation has a larger-than-life criminal: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Al Capone. But each of these notorious lawbreakers had a “white hat” in pursuit. For drug lord El Chapo, that lawman is Andrew Hogan. Hunting El Chapochronicles the exclusive inside story of Hogan and his dangerous hunt that captured the world’s most wanted drug kingpin who evaded the law for more than a decade. Read more and sample the audio.
From sex slaves to drug mules, The Daily Beast’s Rome Bureau Chief uncovers a terrifying and intricate web of criminal activity right on Europe’s doorstep. Caught between Camorra gunrunners selling to ISIS and Nigerian drug gangs along Italy’s picturesque coast, each year thousands of refugees and migrants are lured into their underworld, forced to become sex slaves, drug mules, or weapon smugglers. Read more and sample the audio.
A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer-the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade-from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case. Read more and sample the audio.
Two true-crime thrillers combined. Stephen Small has it all, but the only thing he needs right now is enough air to breathe. Kidnapped, buried in a box, and held for ransom, Stephen has forty-eight hours of oxygen.
High in the Sierra Nevada mountains, developers Jim and Bonnie Hood tour Camp Nelson Lodge. They intend to buy and modernize the property, but the locals don’t like rich outsiders changing their way of life. Read more and sample the audio.
In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Between 1902 and 1908, she lured a succession of unsuspecting victims to her Indiana “murder farm.” Read more and sample the audio.
A flight attendant wakes up in the wrong hotel, in the wrong bed, with a dead man – and no idea what happened. Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She’s a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. Afraid to call the police, Cassie begins to lie. Read more and sample the audio.
The home of a family of five is now a crime scene: four are savagely murdered, and a 16-year-old girl is missing. Was she lucky to escape? Or is her absence evidence of something sinister? Detective D.D. Warren is on the case, but so is the survivor-turned-avenger Flora Dane. Seeking different types of justice, they must make sense of the clues left behind by a young woman who, whether a victim or suspect, is silently pleading. Read more and sample the audio.
Alaska, 1974. Unpredictable. Unforgiving. Untamed. For a family in crisis, the ultimate test of survival. Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier. Read more and sample the audio.
The Shape of Water is set in Cold War-era Baltimore at the Occam Aerospace Research Center, which has recently received its most sensitive asset ever: an amphibious man captured in the Amazon. What unfolds is a stirring romance between the asset and one of the janitors on staff, a mute woman who uses sign language to communicate with the creature. Read more and sample the audio.
Who is Nola Brown? Nola is a mystery. Nola is trouble. And Nola is supposed to be dead. Her body was found on a plane that mysteriously fell from the sky as it left a secret military base in the Alaskan wilderness. Her commanding officer verifies she’s dead. The U.S. government confirms it. But Jim “Zig” Zigarowski has just found out the truth: Nola is still alive. And on the run. Read more and sample the audio.
The incredible, harrowing account of how American democracy was hacked by Moscow as part of a covert operation to influence the U.S. election and help Donald Trump gain the presidency. Read more and sample the audio.
With wry wit and hard-earned wisdom, popular online personality and founder of TheChicSite.com founder Rachel Hollis helps readers break free from the lies keeping them from the joy-filled and exuberant life they are meant to have. Read more and sample the audio.
In the final, thrilling installment of the Red Sparrow Trilogy, Russian counterintelligence chief Dominika Egorova and her lover, CIA agent Nate Nash, must find a Russian agent about to be appointed to a very high office in the US government. Read more and sample the audio.
A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer-the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade-from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case. Read more and sample the audio.
An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University. Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills” bag. Read more and sample the audio.
Joe has witnessed things that cannot be erased. A former FBI agent and Marine, his abusive childhood has left him damaged beyond repair. He has completely withdrawn from the world and earns his living rescuing girls who have been kidnapped into the sex trade. When he’s hired to save the daughter of a corrupt senator held captive at a brothel, he stumbles into a dangerous web of conspiracy, and he pays the price. Read more and sample the audio.
Zama describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good. Read more and listen to a sample.
Stubby’s story begins in 1917 when America is about to enter the war. A stray dog befriends Private J. Robert “Bob,” and the two become inseparable, eventually crossing an ocean and going to war together. What follows is an epic tale of how man’s best friend becomes an invaluable soldier on the front lines and in the trenches, a decorated war hero, and an inspiration to a country. Read more and sample the audio.
January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book. Read more and sample the audio.
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