Showing results by narrator "Eric G." in All Categories

Vicky Clay awakens with chills. She's still glowing from her victory in last night's steeplechase - the genteel form of horseracing for which the Virginia gentry lives and dies - but that's not why her skin tingles. She has been poisoned, and within seconds she's as useless to the world as a thoroughbred with a broken leg. The stakes are high in the world of Virginia horseracing, where fortunes are won and lost by a hair.

Vacaville layabouts Constantine and Ralphie get a rude awakening when the rodeo hits town. Constantine has been getting by managing his late father's photo shop until he meets sisters Allison and Lisa, itinerant rodeo ticket-takers who end up moving into his life and his bed. But things can't stay the same after Ralphie's addiction issue forces them to make a choice about what they're willing to give each other as they grapple with issues of identity, leadership, and sexuality.

The Vietnam draft is removing the staff of a rural Wisconsin bar one by one. Dishboys, bouncers, and a bartender named Roger are the latest to get induction notices, each showing a proud face while secretly terrified to face the medical examiners who will determine their fate. When help comes from an unexpected place, new problems arise. Shortlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015, Larson's intimate psychological portrait of fear takes the familiar and turns it into something utterly original.

Do spirits return? Houdini sneaks into the Winchester Mystery House to find out. Set in 1915 during the San Francisco World's Fair, King of Chains looks back at the mad passions of the first half of the 20th century.

Forty years after her son's tragic death, Betty tells the story to a fellow traveler in Ireland. Interspersed with her version of events, we hear her son, Stephen, telling us his own story of longing and loss and about the lunge at life that became his undoing.

Desperate to complete the last chapter of his law thesis on workplace dynamics for women to secure his tenure, Professor Stanley Hopkins stumbles on an old close college friend, Donald Johansson, who has plenty of female employees. The problem is that Donald is a porn video king. Taking his wife to California’s seedy city of Burbank to help with taping interviews, Stanley realizes he is in way over his head the moment a leading porn star is brutally killed in Donald’s office during a party.

A double dose of Western action from one of the genre's acknowledged masters. The first story, "The Rodeo Killer", is a smoldering tale of the violent intersecting conflict between New Mexico cattle ranchers, cattle buyers, and men breeding horses for the rodeo circuit. The title story, "Mission Creek", tells the fiery tale of Ruel Starrett, a man who worked against the odds his whole life to establish his own ranch. He finally gets his chance when he's offered a half interest in the Spade Ranch from a woman named Susanna Dahlhart. But she isn't all she appears. 

Tracy Briggs has finally gotten her act together. She’s focusing on her own life and helping her hearing-impaired son learn to talk. With her sister married and exploring a new career, Tracy has begun to run the family’s magazine business and feels her life is pretty much perfect. That is, until her son’s deadbeat dad shows up in Magnolia Grove asking for a second chance. Now that her son is getting the help he needs and a promising new romance with his teacher is in bloom, Tracy wants to keep her life just as it is. But her ex isn’t taking no for an answer. 

Sheriff Stevens should be the happiest man in Powder Valley. After a shootout with a gang of outlaws nearly cost him his life, he promised Sally he would hang his guns up for good. But trouble is coming to the Valley. In nearby Dusty Canyon, a troop of hooded killers menaces the honest miners who toil in the local goldmines. The local sheriff has already been wounded once trying to stop them, but he continues the fight - and begs for Pat's help.

The Chinese dragon is flexing its muscles. As its military begins to prey on neighbors in the South China Sea, attacking fishing vessels and scheming to seize natural resources, the US goes on high alert. But a far more ominous danger lurks closer to home: a Chinese sleeper cell has planted a nuclear weapon in the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, the biggest naval base on the planet. The target: a secret rendezvous of the Atlantic Fleet aircraft carriers and their battle groups.

Brilliant 21st-century tycoon Justin Cord was brought from cryogenic storage into a 24th-century society where people own stock in one another, safeguarding each other's welfare only out of economic self-interest. This is anathema to the defiantly individualistic Cord, who leads the outer edges of the solar system to form a new government and revolt against the core world of Earth and Mars.

After his mother dies, rock star Ace White - lead singer of the red-hot band Wicked White - is done with the celebrity game. The phony people, the meaningless one-night stands: he doesn't want any of it anymore. Quitting in the middle of a sold-out tour, Ace sets out to find some place - any place - where he can be alone.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai were birthed on a far-flung planet in the Milky Way - a human breeding colony with the purpose of churning out disposable foot soldiers. But the masters of the colony, the Airlia, created humans with one fatal flaw: an insatiable thirst for freedom. Though Donnchadh and Gwalcmai become God-killers in the bloody revolt against their seemingly omnipotent creators and captors, their planet is already doomed.

James Bond has nothing on Dusko Popov. A double agent for the Abwehr, MI5 and MI6, and the FBI during World War II, Popov seduced numerous women, spoke five languages, and was a crack shot, all while maintaining his cover as a Yugoslavian diplomat....

Newbie vampire Oliver and Ursula, the woman he saved from a blood brothel, are finally tying the knot. But with Ursula's old-fashioned Chinese parents arriving in town for the traditional wedding, chaos soon breaks out - with Oliver always one step away from accidentally revealing to his soon-to-be in-laws that he and his extended Scanguards family are vampires. And amid all the chaos and confusion, a stalker lurks and threatens to tear Ursula and Oliver apart before they can blood-bond.

Based on Melville's real-life experiences after having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, his first novel was extremely popular, provoking public skepticism until the events within were corroborated by a fellow castaway. Typee is properly considered a work of fiction, as the three weeks stay on which the author based his story is here extended to four months, and the book is supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and adaptation of material from other Pacific exploration books of the time. The title refers to the province of Tai Pi Vai. 

Former homicide detective Camden Wilde has been in love with his ex-partner Eva Cardoso for longer than he cares to admit. Not that it matters. She's shoved him into the friend zone, and after living through the hell of his parents' violent deaths, Cam's unable to give her the idyllic life she secretly desires.

Former Marine Jude Wilde's motto has always been "burn bridges and never look back," so nobody is more surprised when Wilde Security is hired to protect assistant district attorney Libby Pruitt, the woman he loved and left. Although she makes it clear she wants nothing to do with Jude, they're forced to fake a relationship for her safety.

The Kingston Trio’s folk song “Tom Dooley” tells the story of the murder of Laura Foster, a simple country girl involved with returning Confederate soldier Tom Dula. But Tom was also engaged in a passionate affair with his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful - and married - Ann Melton. One May morning in 1866, Laura Foster stole her father’s horse and left home, telling a neighbor that she was eloping to Tennessee. Three months later, her body was found in a shallow grave only a few hundred yards from where she was last seen.

When Jerry Parr was eight years old, he knew he wanted to be a Secret Service agent when he grew up. Little did this eight-year-old dreamer know that he would become the agent responsible for saving the life of President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981.