Showing results by narrator "Michael Paul" in All Categories

The ringed planet and its moons remain the Wild West as the crew delves into the meaning of what makes us human, what is freedom anyway, and exploring these truths - space is hard, relationships are complicated, shit happens, and just as art is subjective, evil is often defined by the eye of the beholder.

These short stories are brimming with the big-heartedness, warmth and homespun humor that the author is known for. Geoffrey Thomas introduces curious characters in this mesmerizing story based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale.

Jefferson Burke and the Secret of the Lost Scroll is a mystery as old as the Christian church wrapped in a modern-day thriller. Though an unwilling hero, professor Jefferson Burke's intellectual curiosity pits him against the powerful Bruno Krueger in a race to find a 2,000-year-old scroll that calls into question the divinity of Christ and could shake the foundation of Christian faith, upsetting the balance of power in the modern world.

The second instalment of the phenomenal Russian quartet The Night Watch vampire novels set in a richly realized post-Soviet Moscow.The second book in the internationally bestselling fantasy series, The Day Watch begins where The Night Watch left off, set in a modern-day Moscow where the 1,000-year-old treaty between Light and Dark maintains its uneasy balance through careful vigilance from the Others.

Vila is scared. Of course he is. Vila is always scared. He should feel safe. He is onboard the Liberator, the most powerful ship ever constructed. He is home - but he is certainly not alone. Ghostly figures stalk the corridors of the Liberator. Spectres who know Vila's name. Revenants. Demons. And Vila has nowhere to run.

Kevin Canty tells a story based on a real incident that begins with a disastrous fire in an isolated silver-mining town in Idaho in the 1970s. Everyone in town had a friend, lover, brother, or a husband killed in the mine. The Underworld traces the lives of the handful of survivors and their loved ones - a young widow with twin children, a college student trying to make a life for himself in another town, a lifelong hard-rock miner - as they struggle to come to terms with the loss.

This story is excerpted from The Emperor's New Clothes: And Other Stories by Geoffrey Thomas. These short stories are brimming with the big-heartedness, warmth, and homespun humor that the author is known for.

Heloise and her allies are marching on the Imperial Capital. The villagers, the Kipti, and the Red Lords are united only in their loyalty to Heloise, though dissenting voices are many and they are loud. The unstable alliance faces internal conflicts and external strife, yet they’re united in their common goal. But when the first of the devils start pouring through a rent in the veil between worlds, Heloise must strike a bargain with an unlikely ally, or doom her people to death and her world to ruin.

The stranger arrived on a cool October evening. Jessie and Carl invited the stranded young man into their cabin, fed him supper, and let him spend the night. The next morning he repays their kindness by taking them prisoner in their own home.

In this short story from Nathan Englander's collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a Protestant, after a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi, realizes he has a Jewish soul.

The search for Dayna takes the Liberator to Solace, a former galactic tourist trap fallen on hard times. When he loses a second member of his crew, Avon is forced to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances. As Orac and Del Grant track a radical new movement that is campaigning for the purity of Solace, a deadly trap begins to tighten. The future is Fortuitas. The future is now.

Now living a quiet life, nothing could lure Paul Janson back into the field. Nothing - except Peter Novack, a man who once saved Janson's life, who has been kidnapped by terrorists and is set to be executed. Janson hastily assembles a team of former colleagues and proteges to rescue Novak but the operation goes horribly wrong.

Orac has tracked Space Major Kade - the man who killed Jenna’s father - to the planet Vere. Jenna wants her revenge, but that must wait. Blake needs her to pilot the Liberator to Stellidar Four, where he has a small window of opportunity to solve the mystery of a new Federation device. It’s a daring plan. And it could be the beginning of the end for the Liberator crew.

A child of Hell’s Kitchen and the bastard son of a beloved former police commissioner, Fritz Malone is all too familiar with New York City’s rougher side. So when a gunman opens fire at the crowded Thanksgiving Day parade, Fritz steps into action, giving chase. He then learns that someone dubbed “Nightmare” has been taunting the city’s leaders for weeks—and there’s more carnage to come, unless the city meets the madman’s impossible demands. The nervous police need an outside man, and Fritz fits the bill.

Pliny is the newly appointed governor of a turbulent and corrupt frontier province seething with hatred of Rome. When a high Roman official is found murdered on a desolate hillside, Pliny must investigate the devotees of a barbarian god whose ranks may include a murderer, an unscrupulous faith healer who knows everyone’s secrets, and a boy who struggles toward manhood though stricken with the "sacred disease." As Pliny pursues one lead after another, he is betrayed where he least expects it.

Forced out of his high-powered Manhattan law firm and stuck in a dead-end solo practice, Michael Seeley cannot say no when his estranged brother flies in from California to beg him to take over his company's lawsuit for patent infringement of its AIDS vaccine after the apparent suicide death of the lead trial lawyer.

During a live television broadcast on the night of a lunar eclipse, renowned astrophysicist Andrew Leland is suddenly lifted into the sky by a giant spacecraft and taken away for all to see. Six years later, he turns up wandering in the Sonoran Desert, thin, bearded, a ghost of his former self. Upon his return he denies ever having been abducted, refuses to cooperate with the government or media, and disappears from the public eye, supposedly becoming a hermit somewhere in the woodlands of the Midwest.

In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for 40 years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences", London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Here is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.

A stylish piece of noir fiction; now a major film starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. Drive is about a man who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night. Sallis combines murder, treachery, and payback in a sinister plot with resonances of 1940s pulp fiction and film noir. Told through a cinematic narrative that weaves back and forth through time and place, the story explores Driver's near-existential moral foundations, intercut with moments of bloody violence.

In 1920s Munich, the body of Anna Gross, a young society wife, has been found in the English Gardens, still clothed in finery. Soon a second body is discovered, also a woman of high society. When a third body is found, homicide detective Axel Berg realizes he's dealing with unprecedented evil. Is the murderer politically motivated? Is he a lone madman? Or worse, is the killer possessed by both political and personal demons?