There was a time when the woods near Duva ate girls. . . or so the story goes. But it’s just possible that the danger may be a little bit closer to home. This story is a companion folk tale to Leigh Bardugo’s debut novel, Shadow and Bone. Views: 785
The infamous pirate, riverboat seductress, master of disguise, and street-urchin-turned-sailor Jacky Faber has been captured by the French and beheaded in full view of her friends and crew.Inconceivable? Yes! The truth is she’s secretly forced to pose as an American dancer behind enemy lines in Paris, where she entices a French general into revealing military secrets—all to save her dear friends. Then, in intrepid Jacky Faber style, she dons male clothing and worms her way into a post as galloper with the French army, ultimately leading a team of men to fight alongside the great Napoleon.In this sixth installment of the Bloody Jack Adventures series, love and war collide as the irrepressible Jacky Faber sets off on a daring adventure she vowed she’d never take. Views: 785
The Notting Hill Mystery is thought to be the first detective story of novel length. Views: 784
When a new video game takes the world by storm, a new player is profoundly moved by the beauty and wonder that the game holds. But under the breathtaking exterior is a dark secret that threatens the sanity and lives of the players.In developed countries, social cohesion has been sacrificed on the altar of individual gratification. Individuals wanted more and better. Inventors and entrepreneurs rallied to serve our desires. We progressed – pulled along by our hunger for improvement. This strategy worked well for centuries. Survival rates benefitted more from technological advances than from recognising individual social contributions. But the paths of ‘what we want in the short term’ and ‘what is good for us in the long term’ diverged. As we moved forwards, we increasingly abandoned non-commercial activities – regardless of their contribution to social wellbeing.We’ve now reached point where the benefits of technological advances are becoming outweighed by the disadvantages. New consumer inventions make us less active. Improved food production is turning us fat. Social media is stopping us socialising. Even medical advances will become less important to the majority – focusing, quite rightly, on a shrinking minority of ill people or providing more years of relative infirmity for the very old.The wellbeing of the majority during the majority of their lives can now be improved more by positive social interaction than by technological advances. To do this, we need to amend our reward system. We need to provide additional motivation for carrying out beneficial social activity. Although many already help others altruistically, there’s no moral reason why they shouldn’t receive further tangible rewards. And tangible rewards might encourage even more people to help one another. This would deliver additional social benefits – thereby improving general wellbeing. Views: 784
Alaska—the final frontier?
When Clara Avery, an entertainer working on the Fate, an Alaskan cruise ship, goes to nearby Bear Island, she comes across a scene of bloody mayhem. She also comes across Thor Erikson, who will soon be a member of the FBI's elite paranormal unit, the Krewe of Hunters.
Thor's been sent from the Alaska field office to investigate several grotesque killings, with the dead posed to resemble the victims of notorious murderers. The prime suspect is a serial killer Thor once put behind bars. The man escaped from a prison in the Midwest, and all the evidence says he was headed to Alaska…
Thor and Clara share an unusual skill: the ability to communicate with the dead. Their growing love—and their contact with the ghosts of the victims—brings them together to solve the case…and prevent a deadly fate of their own! Views: 783
THE PROTECTOR
From the moment Heath Masters lays eyes on Meredith Kenyon, he knows there's something mysterious in this pretty woman's past. True, she seems like a good mother to her little daughter, but as local sheriff Heath has seen his share of liars ... and Meredith is certainly hiding something. But though his romantic gestures are met with suspicion, Heath can't help but be drawn to his vulnerable new neighbor. He doesn't entirely trust her, but he sure does want to kiss her
THE WOMAN ON THE RUN
About to lose her child in a devastating child custody case, Meredith transformed herself from urban widow to small town mom, escaping the clutches of her abusive late husband's manipulative father. Fleeing across America, she ran straight into the arms of the lonely lawman. Heath's persistence melts her misgivings, making her wonder if she could overcome her traumatic former life. But could his love protect her from her past - now and forever Views: 783
Dean is faced with the prospect of living alone, after a nasty divorce, only to find an unexpected roommate.NYC Midnight hosts an annual short story writing competition. I competed with over 1,400 writers in the first round of the 2015 writing challenge. Writers are placed random in heats and are given a genre, subject, and character assignment. They then have 8 days to write an original story no longer than 2,500 words. Heat 9, my heat, was assigned Ghost Story for the genre, Agoraphobia for the subject and Divorce Lawyer for the character. I came up with two stories that I liked, Liberty Meadow and Do Us Part. I submitted the former. For your reading pleasure here is the latter.Synopsis: Dean is faced with the prospect of living alone, after a nasty divorce, only to find an unexpected roommate. Views: 783
Fantasy legend Michael Moorcock won hundreds of thousands of readers with his vast and imaginative multiverse, in which Law and Chaos wage war through endless alternative universes, struggling over the fundamental rules of existence.
Moorcock's heroes of the multiverse have been lauded as some of the most influential characters in fantasy. Among the Eternal Champions, Dorian Hawkmoon is one of the most loved. In the far future, Hawkmoon is pulled unwillingly into a war that will eventually pit him against the ruthless Baron Meliadus and the armies of the Dark Empire. Antique cities, scientific sorcery, and crystalline machines serve as a backdrop to this high adventure.
Dorian Hawkmoon, the last Duke of Koln, swore to destroy the Dark Empire of Granbretan. But after his defeat and capture at the hands of the vast forces of the Empire. Hawkmoon becomes a puppet co-opted by his arch nemesis to infiltrate the last stronghold of rebellion against Granbretan, the small but powerful city of Kamarang. He's been implanted with a black jewel, through whose power the Dark Empire can control his every decision. But in the city of Kamarang, Hawkmoon discovers the power inside him to overcome any control, and his vengeance against the Dark Empire is filled with an unrelenting fury. Views: 783
From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.
Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches--a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.
On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and **The Witching Hour** begins.
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery--aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches--finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and--in passionate alliance--set out to solve the mystery of *her* past and *his* unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds--an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien--the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers--provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing. And always--through peril and escape, tension and release--there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.
*From the Hardcover edition.* Views: 783
A lush, seductive novel of the legendary beauty whose face launched a thousand ships
Daughter of a god, wife of a king, prize of antiquity's bloodiest war, Helen of Troy has inspired artists for millennia. Now, Margaret George, the highly acclaimed bestselling historical novelist, has turned her intelligent, perceptive eye to the myth that is Helen of Troy.
Margaret George breathes new life into the great Homeric tale by having Helen narrate her own story. Through her eyes and in her voice, we experience the young Helen's discovery of her divine origin and her terrifying beauty. While hardly more than a girl, Helen married the remote Spartan king Menelaus and bore him a daughter. By the age of twenty, the world's most beautiful woman was resigned to a passionless marriage until she encountered the handsome Trojan prince Paris. And once the lovers flee to Troy, war, murder, and tragedy become inevitable. In Helen of Troy, Margaret George has captured a timeless legend in a mesmerizing tale of a woman whose life was destined to create strife and destroy civilizations. Views: 783
A retired assassin, a vengeful courtesan, and a night of explosive discoveries.A retired assassin, a vengeful courtesan, and a night of explosive discoveries — revenge brings them together under the magic of a desert moon, when the courtesan known only as Sin seeks to hire a retired assassin to kill her lover. Can sharp shooter Gabriel Stone justify helping the woman for more than the Sake of Sin? Views: 782
Two humorous short stories. In A Fairy Tail, Sir Craig desperately tries to rescue his beloved from a fiendish sorcerer, but Boots, a shapechanging unicorn, has other ideas. Out of the Bag features a moment in Jason the cop's day - with surprising results.This light-hearted short story duo is sure to make you smile, chortle, and outright laugh. A Fairy Tail follows the desperate adventures of Sir Craig as he works to rescue his beloved from a fiendish sorcerer. However, Boots, a ragged young man who has a habit of shapechanging into various creatures including a unicorn, is a rival for fair Gregoria's hand. Will Craig rescue Gregoria? Will Boots get to eat apples out of Gregoria's hand? Or will darker forces intervene to keep these lovers apart? Out of the Bag is a short short story, but long on imagination. Jason the cop expects a normal day on the force, but a chance encounter on a breaking and entering call changes everything. Views: 782
Kit Livingstone met his great-grandfather Cosimo in a rainy alley in London where he discovered the truth about alternate realities.
Now he's on the run--and on a quest--trying to understand the impossible mission he inherited from Cosimo: to restore a map that charts the hidden dimensions of the multiverse. Survival depends on staying one step ahead of the savage Burley Men.
The key is the Skin Map--but where it leads and what it means, Kit has no idea. The pieces have been scattered throughout this universe and beyond.
Mina, from her outpost in seventeenth-century Prague, is quickly gaining both the experience and the means to succeed in the quest. Yet so are those with evil intent who, from the shadows, are manipulating great minds of history for their own malign purposes.
Those who know how to use the ley lines have left their own world behind to travel across time and space--down avenues of Egyptian sphinxes, to an Etruscan tufa tomb, into a Bohemian coffee shop, and across a Stone Age landscape where universes collide--in this, the second quest to unlock the mystery of "The Bone House."
The Bright Empires series--from acclaimed author Stephen R. Lawhead--is a unique blend of epic treasure hunt, ancient history, alternate realities, cutting-edge physics, philosophy, and mystery. The result is a page-turning, adventure like no other. Views: 782
Alex Mackenzie was born in 1754 in the Scottish lowlands on the border between Scotland and England. Alex, his father, and his two older brothers were members of the last band of Reivers (outlaws) that operated along the border. A few years before the start of the American Revolutionary War, Alex ran afoul of the British authorities. His only alternative was to leave Scotland for America.Alex Mackenzie was a Scottish lad born in 1754 in the Scottish lowlands on the border between Scotland and England. Alex, his father, and his two older brothers were members of the last band of Reivers (outlaws) that operated along the border. A few years before the start of the American Revolutionary War, Alex ran afoul of the British authorities; they were on his trail and wanted him dead. His only alternative was to leave Scotland for Ireland and then from there to sail to America. The colonies in America were supposed to be a place where people could get a new start in life and explore new opportunities. America was supposed to be a place where people could put down stakes and put old feuds behind them, or was it?“Och, that tears it; it’s all gang agley” said Alex’s father. “Ye are going to hae to set aff from Scotland for a wee bit, Alex, laddie.”“Where should I go?”“Ireland,” said John. “Ye can find wark at the Plantation of Ulster and get back on yer feet there. Ye might hae t’ stay in Ireland quite a spell until this all blows oer.”“How am I going to get there?”“Weel,” Hugh chimed in, “the distance from Scotland to Ireland is less than fourteen miles at the closest point, we can probably swim o’er there, just like swimming across a loch,” said Hugh with a grin and a gleam in his eye.“We,” said Alex. “Who invited you along?”“Ye don’t think Robber and I would let ye go o’er the Sheuch alane, do ye, laddie?” replied Hugh. Views: 781
The unsolved murder of a respected doctor has sent ripples of fear throughout a city teeming with life and noise and commerce. Who snuffed out the good man's life with the slash of a blade on a midnight streeti The local printmaster has labeled the fiend "the Masker," adding fuel to a volatile mystery. . . and when the Masker claims a new victim, hardworking young law clerk Matthew Corbett is lured into a maze of forensic clues and heart-pounding investigation that will both test his natural penchant for detection and inflame his hunger for justice. Views: 781
