Showing results by narrator "Derek Shoales" in All Categories

Waldo Packwood has had a rough time of things lately. He's lost his job, his friends, and finally his family. At 50 years old, he's living alone in a small apartment wondering what's happened to his life. He's unexpectedly asked to travel to Hector 1, a lone asteroid in the Jupiter Trojans, to investigate the missing crew. His trip is a struggle from the beginning, as he discovers more about those around him and what they're willing to do to keep Hector 1 to themselves.

Korri Fontenot left family behind on Earth a century ago to fight in a war that broke her body and her mind. Now, her great-granddaughter, Jackie, has followed in her footsteps. First as a Marine and then as a mercenary outlaw, Jackie has made the mistake of breaking into a secret corporate lab and stealing an ancient alien artifact. Dark forces want the artifact back.

A bounty hunting survivor. A Galactic dark elf. A woman who has given up her humanity to become something more. These stories and more are available in the first short story anthology for the System Apocalypse, covering year one on Earth. When the world ends, humanity steps up, finding new ways to survive in a world with classes, magic, and monsters. The anthology features exciting, new stories by five new writers and a new, never publicly released short story by Tao Wong.

Phillip Pliant is the wealthy opportunist plastics dealer, and CEO of Pliant Industries. He’s also a master thief—creating a pervasive threat to the manufacturing infrastructure in the Caribbean islands markets. With the cartel as his stealth client, the naïve city leaders have been seduced, enabling the production of more than 3-dimensional building materials.

While intensely attentive to its own tradition, Japanese literature has also embraced the outside world, particularly the influence of China. Beyond this, Japan boasts a powerful literary culture, made up of cultivated reading publics, both aristocratic and bourgeois, literary salons, specialized presses, authoritative judges of talent who cultivated and celebrated particular writers and styles, and a canon consisting of classics. This Very Short Introduction traces the rich history of Japanese literature from its beginnings over a millennium ago to the present day.

Niki Banks and her team from the DOD need Taylor's help, but he isn't at home. He is in New Orleans with her cousin, which has Niki more than a little curious. She needs to stop a potentially catastrophic release of cryptids into the Louisiana biome. But will Taylor be in jail by the time she arrives? If he isn't in jail, will he have committed yet another major heist to get even with those who have attacked him?

In a future where humanity has scattered itself across the stars and Earth itself is now a dimly remembered place of legend, two worlds of near-supernatural strangeness challenge two naive but courageous heroes.

Two years after the end of the Psi War, Caleb Mitchell is Emperor in all but name, leading his armies on a crusade to cleanse the colony worlds and Earth itself of the last of the psionic madmen known as the Changed. But the citizens of the Commonwealth weren't the only ones devastated by the war; the criminal cartels in the Pirate Worlds are in chaos, their trade cut off, their resources running out. A young warlord named Amos Dobrev rises up to unite the cartels into a union they call the Syndicate. 

The Cryptids have started to kill a large amount of humans in the Upper Midwest. Banks' bosses told her not to call in the Cryptid Assassin.... He's too expensive. Now, the showdown between Taylor and the creatures will stop when one or the other is dead...and it isn't looking good for Taylor.

Nerekhall: a city of paranoia and fear, where the harsh and unbending rule of law is enforced by unfeeling automata called the Ironbound. Drawn to the city by recurring nightmares, Andira Runehand and her companion, Trenloe the Strong, soon find themselves caught up in a sinister plot and unable to escape. Both have different ideas about what it means to be a hero, and both must learn to trust the other. For in secret, an uneasy alliance concocts a dark plan in the city's infamous tower to open a portal and summon a demonic power, the likes of which has never set foot in Terrinoth.

When businesses try to "do AI", they place an abstract solution before problems and customers without fully considering whether it is wise, whether the hype is true, or how AI will impact their organization in the long term. Often absent is sound reasoning for why they should go down this path in the first place. Doing AI explores AI for what it actually is - and what it is not - and the problems it can truly solve. 

Indrajit and Fix are the founding partners of the Protagonists, a jobber company in Kish. Since the seven great families of Kish farm out all tasks they and the city need doing, a jobber might one day unblock a well; the next, man a tollgate for the fair; and on the third, hunt down a murderer on the loose, all in a corrupt old city that isn't so much governed as kept barely in bounds.

Just imagine being able to find priceless antiques in just seven days (or less) without making a ton of expensive mistakes or wasting time looking in the wrong places. And if you could do this from the comfort of your own home, wouldn't that be great? Yes you could have the knowledge of how to find priceless antiques. It truly is possible, but you just need to know how. That's what this brand new amazing audiobook on antiquing can help you do.

I have created this artistic expression of a storybook version of the Coffin family legacy. This is the true story of the seafaring Coffin Family Legacy, connecting their historical homes, historical museums, and events, beginning in Normandy, France. The Norman Coffins lived in possession of Chateau Cortiton in 1066, which still stands today. After migrating to England with William the Conquerer in the 1200s, Sir Richard Coffin built Portledge Manor in Devonshire, England, also still standing today.

In late 2019, Dennis Oya's persistent cough was just the beginning of a harrowing tale of neglect and systemic failure in a Washington prison. Diagnosed eighteen months later with tuberculosis (TB), Oya's case sparked one of the largest prison TB outbreaks in decades, affecting over 3,000 contacts. This outbreak, and others like it, exposes the glaring weaknesses in prison healthcare systems. In Outbreak Behind Bars, Homer Venters reveals the grim realities of how communicable diseases thrive in the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions of correctional facilities.

Taylor McFadden is willing to go against any monster thrown at him. But something Niki threw at him has got him off his game. Niki must build a consultant team to figure out if she has a problem with another company. But will Dr. Salinger Jacobs of Heavy Metal take her call? Does she have the clout to get him to believe her if he picks up the phone?

The greatest heroes of the Commonwealth are gathered in the breach for one last fight. The Transformation Virus rages through human space like a wildfire, changing ordinary men and women into psionic demi-gods, bent on destruction and conquest. The government has fallen, the military is helpless, and the fate of humanity rests in the hands of a collection of unlikely saviors.

"I've heard Cretan archers are good bowmen but weak skirmishers," a Tribune offered. "It has something to do with the teeny, tiny shields they wear like jewelry on their left forearms." "They wear jewelry into combat," Tribune Scipio moaned. "What have I done?" Set in the desperate years of the Second Punic War, the series follows the exploits of Cretan archer Jace Kasia and Roman Legion Tribune Cornelius Scipio. One is a castaway searching for a home while the other seeks to step out of the shadow of a famous father.

As the world's biggest powers compete for superiority, it's not larger weapons or greater numbers of soldiers that top their wish lists. Instead, it's the latest and greatest technological advances: nanotechnology, dynamic programming algorithms, and drones, working together to build the next generation of military communications. When a professor at a Texas university begins researching ways to improve animal husbandry and boost global food supplies, her results catch the eye of inquisitive engineer Keith Austin Avery, whose interests have nothing to do with solving world hunger. But as Avery works on potential new uses for this technology, his research draws the attention of a powerful terrorist group, with traumatic results for him and his subcontractor Eilla-Zan Marshall.

Random events at a Brazilian hydroelectric plant, Irish financial institution, and Texas winery seem connected by an insidious virus hack which attacks system vulnerabilities then vanishes without a trace. Are these all a glimpse of the new viral danger of the Ghost Code designed for devastation on a personal and industrial level? A new mysterious pair of cyber pirates, known only as Mephisto and Callisto, seems to be behind the plot to deliver these destructive payloads for computer domination.