Showing results by narrator "Ray Chase" in All Categories

Cold War Marseille is a city of shadowy alliances and loose morals, where a good man can lose sight of which side he is really on and evil men profit from the misery and confusion of others. It is therefore the perfect town for Ernst Ludwig, an East German terrorist who is sadistic beyond measure. But when Ludwig kidnaps and murders the wife of Alex Moran, the US intelligence agent hot on his trail, he sets off a blood feud whose violent shock waves will span decades and reach all the way across the globe.

The first case is simple. A wealthy man’s wife has grown distant, and he asks Frank Clemons, a private eye hardened by his past work on Atlanta’s homicide beat, to find out why. There are a number of simple reasons why a young woman might withdraw from her older husband, but the spurned spouse rejects them all. Her jewelry is disappearing, but he insists that she doesn’t have trouble with blackmail, drugs, or gambling. The answer must be more complex, and he begs Frank to find out what it is.

Nine years ago, Steve Clarke was just a teenage boy in love with the girl of his dreams. Then a freak chemical spill transformed him into Reaver, the man whose super-powerful fists can literally take a year off a bad guy’s life. Days ago, he found himself at the mercy of his archnemesis, Octagon, and a whole crew of fiendish super-villains, who gave him two weeks to settle his affairs - and prepare to die. Now, after years of extraordinary adventures and crushing tragedies, the world’s greatest hero is returning to where it all began in search of the boy he once was...and the girl he never forgot.

As an agent of the Department of Advance Analysis, she's one of a handful of people who knows about the spread of a new virus—one she believes will wipe out mankind. With her bosses in denial, she flies to New York to get her ex-fiancé, Chip, to safety. But he's already been scooped up and quarantined—and so has his adopted daughter. Pursued by her own agency, Ellie will stop at nothing to break Chip out before the virus claims them all.

Nearly two years after the harrowing events of The Straits of Galahesh, Atiana and Nikandr continue their long search for Nasim. The clues they find lead them to the desert wastes of the Gaji, where the fabled valley of Shadam Khoreh lies. But all is not well. War has moved from the islands to the mainland, and the Grand Duchy knows its time may be limited if Yrstanla rallies its forces. Worse, the wasting disease and the rifts grow ever wider, threatening places that once thought themselves safe.

From 1951 to 1967 Egypt pursued a secret program to build military rockets that could have conceivably posed a threat to neighboring Israel. Because such an ambitious project required Western expertise, the Egyptian leader President Nasser hired West German scientists, many of them veterans of the Nazi rocket program at Peenemünde and elsewhere. These covert plans soon came to the attention of Israel’s legendary secret service, Mossad, and caused deep alarm in Tel Aviv.

The Nebula award-winning short story by master SF writer Greg Bear. Humans are engaged in a long war against an advanced alien race, the Senexi, but the possibility for peace may exist thanks to a young girl who learns the enemy's larger role and humanity's opportunity to evolve.

In 1992, Count Phillippe Pozzo di Borgo, on the heels of his wife's diagnosis with a terminal illness, suffered a paragliding accident that left him a quadriplegic. Forty-two years old, trapped inside his luxurious Paris town house, he was an outcast for the first time in his life. Abdel, an unemployed Algerian immigrant who had been an outcast for his entire existence, would become Phillipe's unlikely caretaker. Quick-thinking, unsentimental, and more than a little wild, Abdel surprises both himself and his employer.

Can humanity survive what it never saw coming? On October 15 at 2:15 a.m. Earth vanished. A scattered few woke alone in a world with no rules, other than survival at any cost. These survivors aren't truly alone... Someone or something is watching them. And waiting... Strangers unite. Sides are chosen.

The future should have been perfect. Microscopic robots known as nans could repair any damage to your body, keep you young by resetting your cellular clocks, and allow you to download upgrades like intelligence, muscle strength, and eyesight. You were supposed to be able to have anything you wanted with a simple thought, to be able to fly without the aid of a machine, to be able to live forever. But when a small group of five terraformers working on Venus return to Earth, they discover that every other human in the solar system has been gruesomely murdered.

The Art of the Infinite takes infinity, in its countless guises, as a touchstone for understanding mathematical thinking. Robert and Ellen Kaplan guide us through the “Republic of Numbers,” where we meet both its upstanding citizens and its more shadowy dwellers; and transport us across the plane of geometry into the unlikely realm where parallel lines meet.

Christopher Marlowe Cobb ("Kit"), the swashbuckling early 20th-century American newspaper war correspondent, travels to Mexico in April and May of 1914, during that country’s civil war and the American invasion of Vera Cruz. But covering the war in enemy territory and in sweltering heat isn't enough of a challenge for Cobb. Soon, he's falling in love with a young Mexican laundress, Luisa, who may not be as innocent as she seems, and he's witnessing the inexplicable attempted sniper assassination of a priest (miraculously, the bullet rebounds off the cross around his neck, leaving him unharmed).

Funny Boy, a superhero who disarms villains with his powerful sense of humor, must save the Earth from a trio of bubble-headed barbers from another planet.

Streaming video games is now a billion-dollar industry. In 2022, Twitch alone had over 140 million active monthly users, with top players earning millions each year. But success breeds envy, and when big money's being made, everyone wants a piece.

The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.

From the heights of sacred sexuality to the depths of human foible, they ultimately have to choose: surrender to this love or shrink back to mediocrity, work through their emotional baggage or flee the connection, open to the next portal of possibility or postpone it until the next lifetime. Shaped and reshaped in love's cosmic kiln, Sarah and Lowen become a symbol of our own longing for wholeness in the presence of another.

Summer 1978. A young boy disappears without a trace from a summer cabin. His mother claims he was carried away by a giant. He is never found. Twenty-five years later, another child goes missing. This time there's a lead: a single photograph taken by Susso Myrén. Myrén has devoted her life to the search for trolls, legendary giants known as stallo, who can control human thoughts and assume animal form. Convinced that trolls are real, she follows the trail of missing children to Northern Sweden.

Frederick the Demon (formerly A Warm Place to Call Home): Frederick is a demon. Born in Maryland in the early 1980s, he hasn't a clue where he came from or why but feels an irresistible desire to occupy a human body. Once inside, he finds the previous occupant's consciousness and memories forever erased, an inevitable side effect that gives Frederick pause when switching bodies but not so much as to truly halt his ongoing enjoyment of human lives.

Yoshio Kawashita is a great warrior until aliens whisk him away during World War II. They put him on a desolate planet far from his home, where he is destined to remain forever, leaving him alone in his new hell. Then Anna Nestor appears. This empress does not see planets as homes for their inhabitants; she sees exploitable real estate. At first, Anna Nestor views Kawashita as a sideshow attraction until they fall in love. But the two cannot be free until they find out who kidnapped Kawashita and why.

A group finds itself taking refuge at The Sanctuary, a religious compound with an enigmatic leader called The Prophet. A serial killer finds himself leading an unlikely group of survivors. A young man searches to prove himself to his group, and avoid being bullied ever again. A young child is called to perform another miracle at great personal cost. Every decision. Every action. Every dream. Every alliance. Every secret. Every betrayal.