Science Fiction Suspense

"Investigation, Mediation, Vindication." That's how the Yellow Pages ad starts, and if it sounds like the sort of thing a drunk teenager might come up with . . . well, you'd only be wrong about the teenager part. John Smith owns San Diego's smallest private investigation firm, but he doesn't know the first thing about mediation. Or vindication.

It’s an ordinary Monday. Until everything changes forever. At 2:44 PM, a mysterious crack appears in the sky. Anyone unfortunate enough to look up is immediately struck blind. What’s worse, their mind is wiped clean, replaced with a vicious urge to kill anyone within reach. Mark is at work when it happens. Fighting not to fall asleep, the boring department meeting suddenly turns into a bloodbath when people are drawn to the windows to look up at the sky.

I've always had a weak spot for strange ladies. One very beautiful girl had even warned me that she was, get this, a vampire. But did I listen? No.

An all wolf-shifter police force has been the only thing between humans and an unknown evil for centuries, but the pack is in danger of dying if they don't find their promised mates soon. This bundle contains all four books in the One True Mate series.

Esper may dress the part. She has her own ship. She even carries a blaster - not that she ever uses it. But she violates the cardinal rule of the galaxy’s most cold-blooded profession: get paid. At least she's not alone. Her partner, Kubu, is an alien who gets mistaken for a dog. One is a wizard on the run from her past. The other is a lovable eating machine. Between them, they haven’t got a ruthless bone in their bodies. But when a client hires them, they’ll do whatever it takes to bring a target home safely. This time, it’s a teenage kidnapping victim.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

When Savanna Robinson showed up at Wicklow College to assume her new teaching position, she was somewhat curious about the abrupt departure of her predecessor. Then she discovered he had been murdered. No one knew who killed him, or why, but everyone had their theories and suspects. Even the police—arcane and mundane—didn't seem very eager to investigate too deeply. But Savanna discovered a possible connection with the murder of a broker of rare arcane books. Were there really spells that could change your luck?

When a man came into my shop in the Great Marketplace at the Crossroads of the Worlds and tried to kill me, it completely ruined my day. Not only did I have to clean up the blood, but disposing of his body made me late to meet my friends for drinks. A nagging little detail kept bugging me, though. As he died, he said he was hired by my mother's family—people I hadn't seen for more than a decade. Then I discovered that assassins had made attempts on my brother and sister as well. As much as I didn't want to, I decided I should find out who wanted us dead, and put a stop to it.

Linx Maxwell is on the verge of greatness. She's finally graduated from street fairs and hopping chain link to making art that pays the bills. Her family life is...not dull. And it looks like her van might just be able to exist on hope and duct tape. If only she could get rid of the ghost who's plagued her since the eighth grade.

In the mid twenty-first century San Francisco, a group of corpses is found chained together on the bottom of the bay. Retired police officer Louis Tanner must find the killer among a city full of serial murderers, cyborgs, and street-wise kids. This first book in the Carlucci series introduces famed police lieutenant Frank Carlucci.

Anthropologist Calliope Santiago awakens to find herself in a strange and sinister wasteland, a shadow of the New Mexico she knew. Empty vehicles litter the road. Everyone has disappeared - or almost everyone. Calliope, heavy-bellied with the twins she carries inside her, must make her way across this dangerous landscape with a group of fellow survivors in search of answers. Long-dead volcanoes erupt, the ground rattles and splits, and monsters come to ominous life. Calliope will be forced to reconcile the geological record with the heritage she once denied.

Abandoned as a child, Sera dreams of becoming an inspector and finding her family. To do that, she must be referred into the Advanced Studies Program at the Aetherium's Witchling Academy. Her birth order, quick temper, and tendency to set things on fire, however, have left her an outcast with failing marks...and just what Professor Nikolai Barrington is looking for.

My name's Devon Jinx, and, yes, I'm half warlock, half witch. But I couldn't care less about which kind of magic is better. All I want to do is keep my head down and get on with my new job as an investigator at the Hunted Witch Agency. A recent, shall we say, mistake has put me in place to inherit the leadership of the warlocks. Which means only one thing. I have a choice to make: leave behind my life of witchery to become a warlock, or lose my warlock magic forever. Complicating my choice is the fact that someone is trying to destroy the warlock coven.

Ripped from the headlines, the explosive Trackers saga is a realistic depiction of what an EMP attack and the aftermath might look like from one of the genre's leading voices, USA Today best-selling author and former Homeland Security disaster mitigation officer Nicholas Sansbury Smith. This box set includes the entire four-book Trackers series with over 30 hours of post-apocalyptic survival fiction and action. This box set includes Trackers, Trackers 2: The Hunted, Trackers 3: The Storm, and Trackers 4: The Damned.

After a long and bloody battle, legendary Hell Diver Xavier Rodriguez reigns as the dutiful but reluctant new king of the islands. Advised by a council of former sky citizens as well as Cazadores, he works to assimilate the two societies peacefully. But not all Cazadores have accepted the new order. While X tries to ease tensions at home, a rookie team of divers, led by Michael Everhart, returns to the skies in Discovery, formerly the ITC Deliverance. Their mission: To locate other human survivors throughout the world and rescue them.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, Inferno, and The Secret of Secrets—comes a lightning-fast thriller about an astonishing NASA discovery that uncovers a vicious conspiracy leading all the way to the White House. When a new NASA satellite spots...

Hello. My name is Stevie Cartwright, and I've been witchless for 30 days. If only there was a support group for down-on-their-luck ex-witches who've had their powers slapped right out of them (literally). Just as I was licking my wounds after returning to my hometown of Ebenezer Falls, Washington, and navigating my suddenly nonmagical existence with the help of my familiar, Belfry, things got sticky. Enter an ex-spy and newly departed spirit named Winterbottom, who's infiltrated my life with his sexy British accent and a couple of requests....

The gods are dead. Decades ago, they turned on one another and tore each other apart. Nobody knows why. But are they really gone forever? When 15-year-old Hark finds the still-beating heart of a terrifying deity, he risks everything to keep it out of the hands of smugglers, military scientists, and a secret fanatical cult so that he can use it to save the life of his best friend, Jelt. But with the heart, Jelt gradually and eerily transforms. How long should Hark stay loyal to a friend who’s becoming a monster - and what is Hark willing to sacrifice to save him?

The mission to Rio de Janeiro ended in victory, but it came at a dire cost, killing most of those who set out to rescue the stranded survivors. Even worse, the skinwalkers’ leader, Horn, escaped with his demonic crew and is coming to take the throne. Back at the Vanguard Islands, King Xavier Rodriguez has been severely injured in another battle to protect the kingdom. Now an infection threatens to kill the one man who can keep the peace.

Hallie works as a skip tracer—hunting down people wanted by the law, for one reason or another. It's not glamourous, and it doesn't pay all that well. But it's legal work, and that's hard to come by in low city. When her best-and only—friend calls her in a panic, Hallie goes to help and gets a lot more than she bargained for. One of the elite has been murdered and the city police and special investigators are looking for someone to blame. The moment Hallie is near a dead body of one of the ruling class, her hard work and clean record count for nothing.