Steven J. Mclaughlin

Nancy Kranich (played by Emmy-nominated actress Natasha Lyonne of Russian Doll and Orange Is the New Black) is a night nurse on an orbiting space station. But Nancy hates her job, is sick of space, and longs to find adventure and a safe place to smoke cigarettes that won’t blow everyone up. But when Nancy gets caught up in an outer-space conspiracy involving President Kennedy, former vice-president Richard Nixon, and an intergalactic object that could change the course of history, she gets way more adventure than she bargained for.

After a surprise assault on Task Force Ember’s secret compound in Virginia by Russian covert operators, John Dempsey and his teammates are mourning their dead and trying to put the pieces back together. But in the ever-evolving world of shadow warfare, there is no respite for heroes or victims. Russian spymaster Arkady Zhukov, the mind behind the attack on Ember, is at it again - directing false flag operations to destabilize Ukraine and enable Russia to seize control of the Black Sea.

The Persian King Artaxerxes rules an empire stretching from the Aegean to Northern India. As many as 50 million people are his subjects. His rule is absolute. Yet battles can be won - or lost - with a single blow. Princes fall. And when the dust of civil war settles, the Spartans are left stranded in the heart of an enemy's empire, without support, without food, and without water. Far from home, surrounded by foes, it falls to the young soldier Xenophon to lead the survivors against Artaxerxes' legendary Persian warriors.

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson led the design of such crucial aircraft as the P-38 and Constellation, but he will be more remembered for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. His extraordinary leadership of the Lockheed "Skunk Works" cemented his reputation as a legendary figure in American aerospace management.

Assassin’s Creed: Gold follows Aliyah Khan, a card shark and hustler who’s been dealt a rough hand in life. Surviving through her smarts and street scams, Aliyah struggles to get by until she loses big time to a mysterious older man, Gavin Banks. Her only option to repay Banks is to become an Assassin. During her training, Banks tells Aliyah of the centuries-old battle between the Assassins and Templars, imploring her to help him decode a secret message inscribed on an illegal form of currency during the Great Recoinage of 1696.

Knocking off a bank or an armored truck is merely crude. Knocking off an entire republic has, I feel, a certain style." So says mining magnate Sir James Manson, a shadowy titan of London's financial district, who is scheming a coup d'état in the small West African dictatorship of Zangaro, where a secret source of platinum lies waiting to be exploited.

It's obvious that Cletus Graeme - limping, mild-mannered scholarly - doesn't belong on a battle field, but instead at a desk working on his fourth book on battle strategy and tactics. But Bakhalla has more battlefields than libraries, and Graeme sees his small force of Dorsai - soldiers of fortune - as the perfect opportunity to test his theories. But if his theories or his belief in the Dorsai lead him astray, he's a dead man.

It is the fall of 1951 and the Korean War is raging. Nicholai Hel has spent the last three years in solitary confinement at the hands of the Americans. Hel is a master of hoda korosu or "naked kill," fluent in seven languages, and has honed extraordinary "proximity sense" - an extra awareness of the presence of danger. He has the skills to be the world's most fearsome assassin and now the CIA needs him. The Americans offer Hel freedom, money, and a neutral passport in exchange for one small service: go to Beijing and kill the Soviet Union's Commissioner to China.

The Republic of Venice was the first great economic, cultural, and naval power of the modern Western world. After winning the struggle for ascendency in the late 13th century, the Republic enjoyed centuries of unprecedented glory and built a trading empire which at its apogee reached as far afield as China, Syria, and West Africa. This golden period only drew to an end with the Republic's eventual surrender to Napoleon. The Venetians illuminates the character of the Republic during these illustrious years by shining a light on some of the most celebrated personalities of European history.

It was every starship captain’s nightmare, and for Travis Miller, it was his own personal hell. He’d done everything by the book, but when the Tahni had attacked him and his crew, there was no choice but to return fire and destroy the first alien vessel humans had ever encountered. Excoriated in the press, his career in shambles, Travis is exiled to a long patrol of the outer colony worlds. Forgotten, except as a bad example...until the Tahni prove him right by declaring war on the human commonwealth.