The enigmatic “Grayman” has been killing known terrorists throughout Europe in spectacularly brutal fashion. Captured by Coalition forces, he is recruited by a joint military and intelligence project to create the ultimate counter-terror force, only to find himself being carefully groomed into something unthinkable: a popular hero.Grayman chronicles a daring and disturbing experiment to decisively end the tenacious threat of global terrorism. A group of powerful corporate and political players lever a desperate world to create a multinational force of surgical strike teams, authorized to cross borders and pursue targets with impunity; armed with advanced weapons, technology and armor; and directed by a cutting-edge artificial intelligence. But more than simply employing high-tech military might, this new army is designed to fight a true “information war” by operating completely in the public eye, their missions crafted for maximum marketability, their operatives shaped into Hollywood-style action heroes.The series focuses on the man being groomed to be the wired public’s greatest hero: Given the “stage name” Mike Ram, he’s charismatic, talented and damaged unknown, pushed by circumstance to become a merciless predator. Initially little more than a trauma-driven serial killer, he’s given a new identity and is re-programmed to kill on cue to satisfy the media’s thirst for violent and visible retribution against an equally vicious enemy. Ram quickly rises from being a murderer on the run to being an untouchably popular celebrity and global leader, as his every action plays out on the public stage.In Book One: Acts of War, the enigmatic “Grayman” has been killing known terrorists throughout Europe in spectacularly brutal fashion. Captured by Coalition forces, he is recruited by a joint military and intelligence project to create the ultimate counter-terror force, only to find himself being carefully groomed into something unthinkable: a popular hero.

Winter is the worst time of year to have to beg on the streets. People become less charitable, and shelter beds are harder to get. One cold night, homeless teens pick the wrong house to squat in. Not only is it old, but it's also haunted by an angry ghost.Genre: Tweens 10 +Homeless teenagers, Tatia, Bruce and Jack don't have much - not even caring parents. But they've got each other. Winter is the worst time of year to have to beg on the streets. People become less charitable, and shelter beds are harder to get. One cold night, they pick the wrong house to squat in. Not only is it old, but it's also haunted by an angry ghost. As if that weren't trouble enough, Jack needs to get $1,000 to buy back his father's vintage Roy Buchanan Fender Telecaster. Follow the kids as use they devise a plan to get his guitar back. And in the end, save the ghost from the destruction of the house.Genre: Tween Novella, ages 10+

A war is brewing between the hunters and the vampires and Chloe is determined to strike against the vampires before they have a chance to attack the hunter community.A war is brewing between the hunters and the vampires and Chloe is determined to strike against the vampires before they have a chance to attack the hunter community. While Chloe tries to convince the hunter community, and most especially tries to convince Drew, that they should move against the vampires first instead of waiting for an attack, the group of new friends—Oscar, Alice, Drew, Chloe and Christina—are distracted by news reports of a vigilante who is saving innocent humans against what can only be vampire attacks. Fearing this vigilante will cause unwanted attention that will expose the vampire-hunter community with each person he rescues, the group attempts to discover who this mysterious potential vampire hunter is.When they catch up with him, the group learns a shocking revelation that might just change everything for everyone in Arcadia Falls, but will have the most profound impact on Chloe herself.The Arcadia Falls Chronicles is the continuation of The Vampire Hunter’s Daughter. Following the format of The Vampire Hunter’s Daughter, The Arcadia Falls Chronicles is serialized into several novella-length stories.

“Bread of Tears” is at once engaging and unsettling. It’s not a “one read and done” collection. On my first pass through Nathaniel S. Rounds’ work, I found myself wondering just what had happened to Rounds to make him create such disjointed, almost crestfallen characters and imagery.--Patrick StevensMy first clue into Rounds’ motivations came with some research into the title. The phrase “bread of tears” is taken from Psalm 80. The verses around it say the following:How long, Lord God Almighty, will your anger smolder against the prayers of your people? You have fed them with the bread of tears; you have made them drink tears by the bowlful. You have made us an object of derision to our neighbors, and our enemies mock us. It was then that I began to understand the subjects of Rounds’ poetry. They are not the subjects of love, objects of affection, or esteemed champions of victory that are the subjects of so many poems before. They are not even the hard-working, salt of the earth people whose praises are sung throughout the verses of Whitman and others like him. In a way, they are not subjects of anything. They are people so defeated by life that they are never mentioned at all.--Patrick Stevens

Five ordinary kids in an ordinary town with an extraordinary secret: we're superheroes, the Upbeats, and this is our story...This is the pilot episode to a brand new series for young (and young at heart) superhero wannabes.Written by a 15-year-old.Luke Rosenhart is your average straight-A student, always trying to do things the right way, always reliable, always responsible.He’s just an average kid, and doesn’t want that to change.But one field trip, on a rainy Autumn day, to a still-under-construction zoo turns his life and the lives of Ned Detwiler, his best pal, Brooke O’Mackey, the girl from across the road, Robyn Diaz, the quiet bookworm from the country outskirts of town and Smithy, the new kid in town who doesn’t talk very much, upside down.An alien, who crash-landed into the unfinished hippo habitat, tells the five fourteen-year-olds that their planet is under threat by the Intergalactic criminal Gemini who intends to completely wipe out the entire human race, with help from some other aliens who want nothing more than to have the beautiful planet Earth all to themselves.So what can a straight-A student, a class clown, a girl from across the road, a bookworm and a loner, do about that?Well, with the powers the alien gives them, they can do lots!Save a little girl from a burning building, mess up the dentist’s office, and aid in a school food fight!Now they have to figure out how to stop Gemini before it’s too late! On top of that, they have to find out what powers they have, how to use them, how not to use them, how to keep everything a secret so as not to panic everyone and, most important of all, learn to work as a team.If you are in the mood for jokes, super powers, hilarious situations, ordinary kids turned superheroes, a save-the-day story and aliens (both good and bad), then the Upbeats is sure to brighten your day!

After the death of a colleague, aging poet Jacob Schorr begins to worry about his recent struggles to write. He had long since lost the inspiration that made his first book, Imeros, a success. This early success was driven by the desire to recapture his love for Melissa--his college fiancee. Now, as a college professor, he begins to look around campus for something new to desire.He finds Joelle.It was the ultimate cold case. The murders occurred on Mars twenty years ago, so how can Detective Inspector Richardson, a local policeman from Melbourne, Australia, track down the murderer – and why is he being asked to?Twenty years ago, the Prometheus landed in the Hellas Basin on Mars and all the crew died from unknown causes. When an historic site survey crew arrive, they find that the circumstances of the deaths weird and inexplicable. Yet secret coded instructions from the UN space agency HQ on Earth indicates that these circumstances were somehow known in advance. This is murder and Detective Inspector Richardson, a local detective from Melbourne, is called in to solve the case. There are only four people with means and opportunity, all of them are highly focused, very intelligent and none of them, apparently, has a convincing motive. Richardson must sort out their stories to find the guilty, all the time wondering why he was given this job at all.Joseph H.J. Liaigh started out studying the polar ice caps on Mars. Since then he has worked as a government scientist, an Air Force intelligence officer and an academic. He has studied everything from the methane streams on Titan to the flat topped volcanoes of Venus. Through all this, he has been an avid devotee of detective fiction. In The Prometheus Incident, he brings these two worlds together in a unique way to create an unusual and intriguing mystery.

What begins as a simple accident quickly evolves into a complex web of deception, subterfuge, and murderThe President is coming to the town.Secret Agent Julia Bukowski warns the local police officers to be on red alert and probe all the events carefully as they can be tips of icebergs. When a car veers off a mountain road, falls into a canyon, killing a veterinary surgeon, Detective Ryan Cook is summoned. Soon Ryan discovers that not everything is as it appears. What begins as a simple accident quickly evolves into a complex web of shady cover ups and family feuds. From the quiet streets of Los Angles to the rugged Arizona mountain range, the trail of deception, subterfuge, and murder leads to a shocking conclusion.

Graduated - check. College acceptance - check. Access to trust fund - check. Independence - Skylar Adams knows no such thing. She may step out in her new season Prada's and drive a convertible around her upscale city, but only with her older brother's permission. Desperate to have a decent night out, she breaks out of her two-storey 6 bedroom, 4 bathroom prison only to prove her brother right...The Seven Realms Of Zoaia is a universe created by Michael Zinetti. This ebook is a breakdown of that universe, explaining who Zoaia is, the seven realms, the many gods, the many stars (or heroes or main characters), etc. Some prominent stories that take place within the Seven Realms Of Zoaia are the story of Godbolt and the story of Switek of Springfield. As more is created and added to the universe, they will added here in future revisions. Welcome to the Seven Realms of Zoaia by Michael Zinetti.

A young boy and his family travel to a concert in Peekskill, New York in 1949 and witness the beginning of dark times in America.Captain Kirk is forced to work with a personal enemy from his past while confronting a much more dangerous enemy in the present, all while making first contact with a previously unknown and potentially hostile alien race.The first of a series of stories written in the Star Trek universe, as seen in the New Voyages: Phase II fan-film series. “Friends and Foes” takes place several weeks after the live-action episode “Blood and Fire” and shortly before the live-action episode “Enemy: Starfleet”Part two will be released on December 31, 2016.

When love is crime, who will save the guilty? ... After falling in love and fathering a child, a young criminal refuses to voluntarily throw himself into a lake of fire to gain his community's forgiveness. So he's sentenced to death and sold to the owner of a spaceship that buys criminals like him. But the ship and its crew are not quite what they appear to be.When love is crime, who will save the guilty?EPISODE 1: After falling in love and fathering a child, a young criminal refuses to voluntarily throw himself into a lake of fire to gain his community's forgiveness. So he's sentenced to death and sold to the owner of a spaceship that buys criminals like him. But the ship and its crew are not quite what they appear to be.MEET THE LONGVIEW - An Ancient Spaceship Resurrected To Transport ConspiracyInhabited by a crew of misfits fleeing nightmare pasts, with a cargo of Condemned slated to die at the hands of the highest bidders, and with a passenger roster made up exclusively of people NOT who they claim to be, The Longview serves the hidden agenda of an eccentric recluse bent on playing puppetmaster to all of Settled Space.

Ram Singh's life has turned upside down. His beloved wife passed away leaving behind their 3 small children, his farmland is mortgaged and his crop is spoilt. Lonely and lost, on the verge of giving up, he finds support from an unconventional source.In the realms of Brodérunn, an ancient evil is about to find a way out of its prison, and it is slowly collecting its powers in order to bring the world around it to the brink of destruction. Without even knowing it herself, an elf-warrior, Amashanae, is about to become the key in what will the fate of the world become, as she’s pulled into the vortex of the evil sorceress Raelia’s plans to rein the beast for her own uses to take over the entire Brodérunn. In this first book of the trilogy Amashanae embarks on a journey to find her destiny with an accidental band of companions, a farm-girl and a warrior, and it is a journey that will take her and everyone around her to much further than any of them could have guessed – both in body and spirit.So yes, it is another freakin' elf story. With dragons.

An adventurous poetic story of dreams and discoveries, writing poetry through art and hearted experiences, she goes and comes through herself and all.No one notices when a shapeshifter isn’t herself. A novella of mistaken identity.Three hundred years ago, Earth was destroyed, but the Terrans aren’t giving up. Maya Qaitra is a special type of Terran, created to sniff out biologically compatible species. But Maya’s talent comes with a hefty cosmetic price: half the time, she looks like a mountain lion.On a space station over the planet Elsajh, she’s mistaken for a local shapeshifter and goes with the flow. After all, how better to observe a new species and culture? While impersonating her alien look-alike, Maya stops an invasion and becomes a populist hero. Sure, that seems great, but her mistaken identity stirs trouble for her and her doppelganger. If she’s not careful, she could get her whole species banned from Elsajh forever.

The timeless, fearless, #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from the author of The Lovely Bones—a powerful account of her sexual assault at the age of eighteen and the harrowing trial that followed, now with a new afterword by the author.In a memoir hailed for its searing candor, as well as its wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What ultimately propels this chronicle of sexual assault and its aftermath is Sebold’s indomitable spirit, as she fights to secure her rapist’s arrest and conviction and comes to terms with a relationship to the world that has forever changed. With over a million copies in print, Lucky has touched the lives of a generation of readers. Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims and imparts a wisdom profoundly hard-won: “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.” Now reissued with a new afterword by the author, her story remains as urgent as it was when it was first published eighteen years ago.

Lisey Landon lost her husband Scott two years ago, after a twenty-five-year marriage of profound, sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was a celebrated, award-winning, novelist. And a complex man. Lisey knew there was a dark place where her husband ventured to face his demons. Boo'ya Moon is what Scott called it; a realm that both terrified and healed him, that could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed to write and live. Now, it's Lisey's turn to face her husband's demons. And what begins as a widow's effort to sort through her husband's effects, becomes a perilous journey into the heart of darkness

Jason Bourne returns to Georgetown University and the mild world of his alter ego, David Webb, hoping for normalcy. But after so many adrenaline-soaked years of risking his life, Bourne finds himself chafing under the quiet life of a linguistics professor. Aware of his frustrations, his academic mentor, Professor Specter, asks for help investigating the murder of a former student by a previously unknown Muslim extremist sect. The young man died carrying information about the group's terrorist activities, including an immediate plan to attack the United States. The organization, the Black Legion, and its lethal plot have also popped up on the radar of Central Intelligence, where new director Veronica Hart is struggling to assert her authority. Sensing an opportunity to take control of CI by showing Hart's incompetence, National Security Agency operatives plan to accomplish what CI never could-hunt down and kill Bourne. In Europe, Bourne's investigation into the Black Legion turns into one of the deadliest and most tangled operations of his double life-the pursuit of the leader of a murderous terrorist group with roots in the darkest days of World War II-all while an assassin as brilliant and damaged as himself is getting closer by the minute . . .

This short novella IS included in the back of Elicit (book 4) but many people have been requesting it be set apart, if you own Elicit, you don't need to purchase this novella Trace is about to ask her mob boss husband to do the unthinkable...allow his enemy Phoenix De Lange to train her in combat, the very same enemy who nearly killed her the year before. But Phoenix isn't the man he once was, and now he's out to prove to everyone, himself included that he can be trusted.

Ned Kelly would never have imagined shrinking his size in order to escape the dreary hospital bed where he’s recovering from appendicitis. But, that’s exactly what Apis, his new friend (who happens to be a bee), helps him do with the aid of a special gold liquid. At apian size, Ned flies off with Apis and Nancy Clancy (who speaks only in rhyme) to try life in the hive. Although he questions some of their practices, like disposing of old drones who can’t work anymore, Ned soon makes friends with the bees, including Romeo, a drone lovesick for the Queen, Basil, a drone-rights activist, and even the haughty Queen herself.

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey, for which they are all ill-equipped, that ends at Miss Reba's bordello in Memphis. From there a series of wild misadventures ensues--invoving horse smuggling, trainmen, sheriffs' deputies, and jail.

Published on the fortieth anniversary of its initial publication, this edition of the classic book contains a new Preface by David McCullough, “one of our most gifted living writers” (The Washington Post). Built to join the rapidly expanding cities of New York and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge was thought by many at the start to be an impossibility destined to fail if not from insurmountable technical problems then from political corruption. (It was the heyday of Boss Tweed in New York.) But the Brooklyn Bridge was at once the greatest engineering triumph of the age, a surpassing work of art, a proud American icon, and a story like no other in our history. Courage, chicanery, unprecedented ingenuity and plain blundering, heroes, rascals, all the best and worst in human nature played a part. At the center of the drama were the stricken chief engineer, Washington Roebling and his remarkable wife, Emily Warren Roebling, neither of whom ever gave up in the face of one heartbreaking setback after another. The Great Bridge* is a sweeping narrative of a stupendous American achievement that rose up out of its era like a cathedral, a symbol of affirmation then and still in our time.

From New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Ruth Cardello comes the steamy debut to the Lone Star Burn series. Would-be writer Sarah Dery has just turned twenty-five and feels like her life is on hold. She's done squat with her English degree and is just killing time working for her parents. So, when the opportunity to spend the summer working on a ranch in Texas comes her way, she jumps at the chance, figuring it might be just the jolt she needs to get her creative juices flowing. Tony Carlton is a handsome and reclusive horse trainer with a tortured past and an eye for trouble, this time in the form of a naked blonde stranger he finds in his shower. The wrong turn that led Sarah into the arms of this sexy, brooding cowboy turns out to be just what she needed to find her steamy inner voice, but will their connection be enough to break down Tony's defenses?

Shirley Jackson, author of the classic short story The Lottery, was known for her terse, haunting prose. But the writer possessed another side, one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont. Fans of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Cheaper by the Dozen, and anything Erma Bombeck ever wrote will find much to recognize in Shirley Jackson's home and neighborhood: children who won't behave, cars that won't start, furnaces that break down, a pugnacious corner bully, household help that never stays, and a patient, capable husband who remains lovingly oblivious to the many thousands of things mothers and wives accomplish every single day."Our house," writes Jackson, "is old, noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books." Jackson's literary talents are in evidence everywhere, as is her trenchant, unsentimental wit. Yet there is no mistaking the happiness and love in these pages, which are crowded with the raucous voices of an extraordinary family living a wonderfully ordinary life.