Showing results by narrator "Ray Porter" in All Categories

Edgar Laplante was a small-time grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. But after years of playing thankless gigs and traveling with medicine shows, he decided to undertake the most demanding and bravura performance of his life. In the fall of 1917, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader - and total fraud.

They crawl through jungle. Claw through caves. Slog through swamps. Nothing can stop them. And every moment their minds are dominated by a single thought: kill, or die. They take the impossible jobs no ordinary outfit will touch. Because these aren’t ordinary men. They’re the toughest team in the Pacific War, the one the enemy fears most...The Rat Bastards.

The enemy’s plotting against them - while they’re tearing at each other’s throats! Malaria could lay them on their backs. Jungle fever threatens to strip their sanity. An army of death marches through bloody war zones looking to tear their guts out. But over the roar of grenades and the swish of Samurai swords you can always hear the spine-curdling battle cry of the guys who kill their way to victory.

After thwarting the Federation's attempt to take over her ship, Captain Sarah Blythe vowed to make President Pleyal himself pay for her cargo losses. Their lone Fed prisoner told them enough of the President's plan: Confiscate all vessels to help equip the fleet he's gathering to end the Venus rebellion once and for all. But the citizens of the Free State of Venus have different ideas. Joining forces with the legendary Piet Ricimer and Stephen Gregg, Captain Blythe plans on making back more than her losses.

They’re bad news wherever they go. Slogging their way through steaming jungles choked with blood. Digging out from the stone-cold tunnels of an underground tomb. To them, death is just a sick joke - a joke played on anyone dumb enough to stand in their way. The Rat Bastards. Nothing is more important to them than winning.

The quiet of the jungle is shattered by a single command. The air fills with voices of death. A Texas cattle call. An Apache war whoop. A piercing scream of bloody blue murder. And a killing chorus of zinging hot lead. A mighty green wave surges up the hill. The Rat Bastards are on the rampage, and what the enemy began, they are about to finish.... The Rat Bastards.

From the introduction by Les Standiford: "The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and 'edge' might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city... We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island's heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the 20th century.

LAPD robbery-homicide detective Hayden Glass finds himself in another hot situation when the young prostitute he’s been seeing in San Francisco is kidnapped. His efforts to find and save her put him in direct conflict with a corrupt element of the San Francisco Police Department, the FBI, and the local Russian Mob. Each faction uses Hayden like a pawn, and each has its own reason to take the young woman away.

To the victor go no spoils in the bloody battle for New Guinea. This is the Rat Bastards’ kind of war. They don’t fight for glory, but for survival. Reluctant heroes and outlaw soldiers, they hate the steaming, Jap-filled jungles, but they wouldn’t trade places with anybody. So for a high kill ratio, the Army calls on the experts. The Rat Bastards. Making history is what comes naturally to them.

Leo Painter is the CEO of Earth Global, a large energy, mining, and real-estate development firm. He and his party of company executives are traveling in Botswana to consult with the government about accessing their extractable resources. Sekoa is a male lion who shares with his bipedal enemies the misfortune of being the bearer of HIV/AIDS. Painter, pursued by his own "hyenas", only wishes to find a last resting place where he can further his dream. Their paths cross with tragic consequences.

LAPD detective and former vice cop Hayden Glass is a sex addict. The addiction has ruined his marriage and continues to complicate every aspect of his life. But regular attendance in Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings has helped keep his behavior from affecting his career. That is, until he suspects that three macabre and seemingly unrelated murders are linked to his meetings and targeted directly at him.

The enemy wants them dead. Their own side wants them to shape up. They’re the Rat Bastards. They steal. Lie. Kill. And they never respect the rules. The stuntman. The Indian. The gangster. The bum. The most awesomely effective fighting team in the history of man-to-man mayhem. And now they’re all that stands between the Japs and their plan to retake the bloody Pacific island of Bougainville.

Nox Dormienda is the award-winning debut novel of critically-acclaimed author Kelli Stanley (City of Dragons), and the first of a series in a new genre: Roman Noir. Featuring Arcturus, a hardboiled protagonist in the best Philip Marlowe tradition, Nox is a different kind of historical mystery, a suspense thriller that combines a classic noir style with the rich texture of the ancient past.

In a distant galaxy where immense danger threatens, desperate pirates travel to the outer limits of space, doing trade with the star colonies and encountering rivals, aliens, and strange human hybrids.

Fourteen-year-old Ellis is getting ready to leave the Southwest for a boarding school in the East. This means leaving behind the only real father he has ever known, Goat Man. Goat Man has been raising a herd of goats all the while teaching Ellis the meaning of stability, caretaking, and commitment. And when a skeptical Ellis returns for spring break, he and Goat Man will be forced to re-evaluate their relationship.

When a county employee is found shot to death in sun-drenched daylight while sitting in his county road grader, Undersheriff Bill Gastner is faced with puzzling questions. The simplest explanation - that an errant bullet from a careless target shooter’s rifle blew out Larry Zipoli’s brains - is soon discarded as inconsistencies surface. The fatal bullet shows no rifling marks, and investigation shows that the shooter walked directly toward the road grader, in full view of the victim - who did nothing to defend himself.

Mystery sensation Pelecanos pens the lead story and edits this groundbreaking collection of stories detailing the seedy underside of the nation's capital. This is not an anthology of ill-conceived and inauthentic political thrillers. Instead, in D.C. Noir, pimps, whores, gangsters, and con-men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

A short story from New York Times best-selling author Jonathan Maberry!

In "The Things That Live in Cages", an MMA fighter at the end of his career is offered the chance to stay young, fit, and stronger than ever - but the price is his humanity.

Kamikaze Kill Sweep! The Rat Bastards face the deadliest battle of all as the war draws to an explosive end. The Japanese launch a final, desperate attack - a blood-hungry suicide mission. And the Rat Bastards finally meet their match. Kicking, clawing, shooting, stabbing - whatever it takes to kill the battle-crazed enemy - The Rat Bastards will do it. The tougher the opposition, the harder the Rat Bastards fight back. And they're the deadliest group of killers in the world - with one exception….

Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of the small town of Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible loss and their place in it. In this brilliantly written novel, one girl's story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her.