Showing results by narrator "James Cronin" in All Categories

Prize-winning author Benjamin Hale's fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.

Ruby was murdered on Earth 18 years ago and reincarnated on Zadok as a Pastel Zeek named Harlow. To be born at the bottom of her race’s caste colour system to a middle-class family of Magentas has made Harlow a source of conflict amongst the ruling Purples, and a source of derision from all three colours.

Forcing Susan Meyer to lie face-down on the floor, the intruders tied her hands behind her back with nylon rope. "Don't call the police," they warned as they led her 23-year-old daughter, Beth, away, "or you'll never see your daughter alive again." The men then pulled a pillowcase over Beth's head, forced her into the back of her mother's Oldsmobile, and drove off.

The 1967 kidnapping of 10-year-old Kenneth Young loomed as one of the few unsolved major kidnaping cases in the FBI's history. His ransom of $250,000 was the second-largest payoff in the annals of the bureau's cases at the time. Yet more than 30 months had passed without a clue being found to the criminal's identity.

Believed to be little more than small-town smugglers at first, their trail would lead the FBI to the world's most dangerous terrorists.

Adrienne Manthus has lost everything: her father, her ship, and her love. Trapped behind enemy lines, she and a small contingent of space marines must explore a desolate world in search of an ancient artifact that will give them a fighting chance against Kokabiel, the God-emperor who has conquered the galaxy. But without the Starship Gilead, how can Adrienne hope to make a stand against her tyrannical enemy?

It was dangerous enough being an honest prosecutor in Mexico. But "Pepe" Patino had spent more than a year working closely with the US DEA, investigating a vicious drug syndicate run by two notorious brothers that was pumping cocaine into America, murdering their rivals, and routinely torturing and killing informers.

In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales - adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families - set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made.

Police cited the deaths of his wife and daughter as a murder-suicide - but he knew that couldn't be.

Magentite. The rarest of gems, one capable of turning any mage into an unstoppable force of destruction. A gem found only in the empty lands surrounding the Tyber River. And now war has come. Endless war between Esteria and the native Tyberons, a savage and mysterious people who prowl the grass-covered land with spearpoints ready. Unable to end the conflict the Esterians rely on mercenaries to bolster their military, desperate men like Dain Gladstone, a disgraced Paladin.

His abductors forced him to a lying position in the box, placed a lid on top, jammed in four lengths of 3/4-inch plastic pipe for breathing tubes, and started shoveling in dirt to fill the hole. To cover their handiwork, they scattered some worn-out tires over the burial site. Then they drove away.

Nick Moulin is a rational, thinking man, who one day acquires a fascinating old book that brings him a dream of a beautiful woman and an adventure of long ago.

Twenty five years ago, Jenna, Donnie, and Nico were the best of friends, having forged a bond through the abuse and neglect they endured as residents of Savior House, a group home for parentless teens. When the home was shut down - after the disappearance of several kids - the three were split up. Though the trauma of their childhood has never left them, each went on to live accomplished - if troubled - lives. They haven't seen one another since they were teens but now are reunited for a single haunting reason: someone is trying to kill them.

In 2013 Eli Mandel decided to recreate the 642-mile trek that John Keats completed in the summer of 1818, hoping to learn more about the famous poet who died at the age of 25. As Mandel matches his "ghostly companion's" journey step-for-step, the moments of discovery turn inward and Mandel is forced to face his own ghosts.

The defense of Castle Elfwood, hidden in an enchanted forest in Albion, from barbarians and the unearthly Orcs depends on four young people - a lord, a magician, a druidess, and an orphan - in the first book of the series.

Henry Jett's life is slowly going nowhere. His girlfriend recently left, and his job in a local garage is uninspiring, considering that he doesn't particularly like cars. Henry finds solace in his eccentric passion, rebuilding the skeletons of birds and animals. Meanwhile Henry's brother, Dan, is disappearing into an obsession of his own. Without Dan to rely on, Henry begins to engage in new ways with the people around him in his Prairie city.

In the baking heat of a Mexican resort town, life is spare but satisfying for David Rhodes, American exile and tennis bum, who is content with his low-key existence. But when a young female American drifter is found raped and murdered at the bottom of the seaside cliffs, Rhodes, an illegal alien, is an easy target and an immediate suspect - particularly to the town's sadistic police chief. David's comfortable life explodes in a sudden hell of accusation, imprisonment, and flight that can only end in one final, nightmarish confrontation.

Jaeme, new lord of Castle Elfwood, Decutonius, an unpredictable mage, the druidess Laela, and the venerable knight Cedric must confront the evil that threatens to crush Elfwood in only three days.

Everything you know about Occupy Wall Street is wrong. In this lively mix of memoir and analysis, writer-activist Travis Mushett takes you inside Occupy and demystifies a movement that was difficult for even its supporters to get a handle on. Pushing past the bromides, Mushett locates the source of this confusion.

Ganry, former mercenary, has pledged his sword to keep Princess Myriam safe. To claim her throne as the rightful heir, Myriam must overcome the usurper once and for all. With Ganry at her side, and friends at her back, their quest for justice begins.