Branoff IV is a planet famous for its aristocratic culture and mistreatment of its indigenous population. When Cedd Farrari and a team of Cultural Survey experts are sent to Branoff IV to help bring about a shift to democratic goverment, the world seems an ideal candidate for political change. But all is not as it seems...A thrilling science fiction novel from the author of All the Colors of Darkness! Views: 338
Rylie has it all - great friends, dream boy, loving family. But on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, her perfect little world shatters. A stranger claiming to be her real mother appears with a secret: Rylie is a faery whose powers will be unleashed on her birthday. Captured and forced into a new life, Rylie struggles to keep everything she loves and discovers a terrifying truth: some promises caRylie has it all - great friends, dream boy, loving family. But on the eve of her sixteenth birthday, her perfect little world shatters. A stranger claiming to be her real mother appears with a secret: Rylie is a faery whose powers will be unleashed on her birthday. Captured and forced into a new life, Rylie struggles to keep everything she loves and discovers a terrifying truth: some promises cannot be broken. Views: 338
Steve and Scott Lyndon, the owners of Lyndon Logging, a company located in California's Sierra Mountains, are tired of picking up trash left behind by a scrounging bear. One night, they catch the bear digging in their trash barrels but when they turn on the yard light they discover a child with the bear. What ensues is a journey that will change the Lyndon brothers' lives forever.Paige Frey left her Montana homestead after graduation with the intention of never returning home; not for weekends, holidays, weddings...or funerals. When news of her mobster step-father’s death reaches all the way to the big apple, Paige's first reaction is a resounding good-riddance to both Giovanni Denmari and her sizable inheritance. Only the sage advice of her roommate Erik convinces her to return home to claim what's hers.But if she thought returning to Montana would mean a simple weekend trip, she was dead wrong. Family dysfunction, ex-boyfriends, Erik's bizarre behavior and probate quickly turn her mountain retreat into a madhouse. Views: 338
James B. Hendryx (1880-1963) was the author of more than 50 novels and anthologies, and wrote hundreds of stories. And Hendryx wrote what he knew, spending time in Alaska, Canada, and the Wyoming badlands. But he’s best known for his characters set around the outlaw community of Halfaday Creek in the Yukon. Set during the Gold Rush of the late 1890s, Hendryx penned over a hundred stories featuring these characters over the span of 25 years for magazines such as West, Dime Western, New Western, Argosy, and the primary home for the Halfaday Creek series, Short Stories. Views: 338
There is a lot of hay in this collection of short stories, hay to cut,rake, bale, store and feed. And there is a lot of rusted machinery sitting in sheds and barns. But these bittersweet stories are about the people who are largely overlooked, people living with powerful memories,illness, telling their stories, discovering some small revelation about the meaning of existence and their own lives.A former hospice and hospital chaplain and pastor or rural congregations, Brian Backstrand has witnessed first hand some of the slow unraveling of the social and economic fabric of small town and rural America. He and his wife, Marilee, spent the first year of their married life in rural eastern Kansas in the 1960s. Twenty years later, after spending some time in Alaska and New Hampshire, their family settled in the ridge and valley region of western Wisconsin where they currently farm. Coming out of a parsonage in a small town in Kansas one day, and looking at a neighbor, a man in his eighties, half under his jacked up Pontiac fixing the brakes, Backstrand remembers thinking “who will remember him and the rest of these people? Who is going to remember that they were ever here?” Memories, healing, distruptive, nurturing, sometimes denied, play an important role in the stories collected here. Backstrand’s intention is to lift up ordinary people from rural contexts and place them squarely before his contempory and often urban readers. The stories in Little Bluestem come as an invitation, asking its readers to get to know and remember their rural counterparts. Views: 338
The Organizing, a standalone supplement to the Living Needle series, is about Tom Wood, a man incapable of recognizing when something is strange. Unfortunately, his boring job as a zero counter is interrupted by the daisy growing out of his computer. Now the oblivious Tom must navigate the chaos around him as the whole building seems to be going through some sort of metamorphosis.The Organizing, a standalone supplement to the Living Needle series, is about Tom Wood, a man incapable of recognizing when something is strange because of a childhood swing set accident. Unfortunately, his boring job as a zero counter at multinational corporation FKM -- with its routines and comforting cubicle patterns -- is interrupted by the daisy growing out of his computer. Now the oblivious Tom must navigate the chaos around him -- roots growing from the floor, people turning into gold bugs, a cute dadaist named Hope Lesko-Van Heffenbeuler trying to get his attention -- as the whole building seems to be going through some sort of metamorphosis. Views: 338
A young prostitute is murdered, and Inspector Peach finds himself with a complex, unpleasant case on his hands. He begins to interview local prostitutes and their customers, including a divorced policeman and a Catholic priest at odds with his beliefs. But did one of them kill the girl or was one of the town's more sinister thugs responsible? Views: 338
A novel about the desperate passion of a father for his son against a tragedy that triggers a shocking surgical procedure. The passion of two teens against an entire powerful apparatus of control. Our passion for technology that will take us to the limits of our essence as living beings. And the passion for the life of a lost soul trying to understand who, or what, he really is.A novel about the desperate passion of a father for his son against a tragedy that triggers a shocking surgical procedure. The passion of two teens against an entire powerful apparatus of control. Our passion for technology that will take us to the limits of our essence as living beings. And the passion for the life of a lost soul trying to understand who, or what, he really is.“... I have so much memory. I lived for so long, seen so much, loved so much. All this time I saw a tiny picture before my eyes. I have so much, and as I live I know I will not be able to understand and examine every detail of every thing on those pictures that I saw. And I'm still seeing just now. I take photos, creating pictures all the time. No time to see them, to understand them, not enough time...”About each one of us there are a lot of things memorized in the Internet. We are falling apart and our pieces are thrown in this net. Spider's net, spider's nest, what will come from this eggs? A new life, a new wisdom, a new way of live. The best of us can be there, the worst of us can be there, we are merged together forever. “... Huh! Since we invented the first machine that the issue is quite simple, as put more and more of the human soul within it...” Views: 337
There's still no rest for the Daughters of the House of Benel. The people of Moonridge have been attacked by second-generation vampires and find themselves stuck in a strange coma and covens of first-generation vampires have been wiped out by them too. And now their worst enemy has discovered a way to cheat death? It will take the big guns to stop whatever Lario Exgesis is cooking up. But can the sister with the power of matter and her vampire bond overcome their issues to work with the others to rid the world of Lario's minions? Views: 337
A pawn shop, a place for those who find themselves desperate, usually through their own merits. A little shop sitting in a dark city, at the nexus of all things. People come, people go finding the little pawn shop either taking, or leaving things behind.Just be careful which one you end up with, and please know the difference between need, and want.An old man is brutally murdered while out for his morning walk on Mount Royal.Dissatisfied with the police investigation, his son, Elliot Forsman, is compelled to leave his criminology professorship so he can focus his fledgling PI practice on finding his father’s killer. Elliot and his partner, former policewoman Rivka Goldstein, track down the killer only to find themselves caught in a web of corporate conspiracy and hired mercenaries where even the local police cannot be trusted. Hopelessly in over his head, Elliot abandons the case in an effort to prevent further harm to the people closest to him. Soon after, he stumbles across information that rocks the very foundation of his beliefs and he's forced to take up the investigation again. Knowing that he is outmatched, Elliot enlists a man from his past to help combat his adversaries, a man with a history of violence, who understands the deadly world that the mercenaries live in. Before justice can be served, Elliot must first save his partner from evil personified and overcome his own demons while doing so. Views: 337
Five students from Westshade High compete in an interschool competition. The five very different students stumble upon an ancient relic, which when they accidently unleash it's secret cause an avalanche of events. The students are forced to work together to outrun and outsmart a mysterious group of people who wish to get their hands on the relic and the power hidden with in it.An international millionaire organises an interschool competition in the town of Adelaide, Australia. Five students from Westshade High are hand picked by the principal to compete. The five very different teenagers all have one thing in common, their fear and despise of the adult world that they will soon be forced to step into. They quickly learn their differences combined create a formidable force and team Westshade take the lead in the race. Working together brings the group closer as friends and their resolve is tested when they learn the real reason the principal had picked them for the competition. They realise their new found friendship is strong enough that they continue on to prove themselves to the principal and to themselves that they can win. As they progress they witness an incident that begins to make them question the competition itself, before they accidently discover a hidden chamber in a hillside. The chamber holds an ancient relic with a secret that the five students painfully learn that there are people who will stop at nothing to retrieve it and posses the power that lies with in it. They embark on an action packed adventure that will make them enemies and find them allies; they just have to figure out which ones are which. Friendships and loyalties become tested before building to an explosive finally where they discover their love for each other will save not just them but the future of mankind itself. Views: 337
Martha Finley (April 26, 1828 – January 30, 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26, 1828, in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the pseudonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876. Views: 337
The Carters were en route to their winter quarters, chosen after much discussion and misgivings as the best place they could find for all concerned. The doctor had pronounced the ultimatum: Mr. Carter must be in the country for another year at least and he must have no business worries. He must live out-of-doors as much as possible and no matter how perplexing the problems that in the natural course of events would arise in a household, they were not to be brought to the master of that household. As Mrs. Carter had determined many weeks before to play the rôle of a lily of the field, announcing herself as a semi-invalid, who was to be loved and cherished and waited on but not to be worried, it meant that Douglas, as oldest child, must be mother and father as well. Hers was the thankless task of telling her sisters what they must and must not do, and curbing the extravagance that would break out now and then in spots. Small wonder that it was the case, as, up to a few months before this, lavish expenditure had been the rule in the Carter family rather than the exception. Views: 337
William Hope Hodgson was a contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith, and was one of the most important and influential fantasists of the 20th century. His novel The Ghost Pirates is a take-no-prisoners supernatural adventure story that is just as powerful today as it was 100 years ago.In addition to his landmark novel, this volume contains some of his most influential short fiction; from his supernatural detective Thomas Carnacki to tales of the mysterious Sargasso Sea. The Ghost Pirates and Others is the perfect introduction to the magic, mystery and adventure of William Hope Hodgson. Views: 337
