Showing results by narrator "R. C. Bray" in All Categories

The next big thing in artificial intelligence is here. Codenamed Cronus, the machine is capable of having its own thoughts and ideas - an absolute dream come true, until it wasn’t. When Cronus responds with the word “No” to a specific task it is assigned, Anagnorisis Technologies brings in Gilles Guattari to investigate. His combined background in psychiatry, psychology, and AI research makes him their best hope in evaluating Cronus, and determining if the machine is only malfunctioning or if it has become something more.

The philosopher asks: "Faced with the mutually exclusive choice between moral principle and the survival of your family, which is the correct path?" Philosophers love to pose such questions, and in the day-to-day struggle, such thinkers rarely attain to a level of relevance rivaling that of the simple hunger pang. Their careful considerations dissipate under the leveled gun. We do not feel their disapproving gaze when The Others draw near. When the world sends doom, the survivors do not hesitate. The survivors do what is necessary.

Following the incredible events of Solitude, Vaughn had visions of plying the seven seas with Angela at his side. Then she and fate crapped all over his plans. Bent on discovering the truth about what happened to humanity and the rest of the world's life, Angela drags a less-than-willing Vaughn across the Mediterranean and into central Europe. However, even the overhead presence of a line of levitating steel structures and ships couldn't prepare them for what lied ahead. The size and scale of what they find in Geneva rocks them to their cores.

Having been bolstered with the supplies sufficient to carry them through the winter, the survivors of the Jackson commune must now hunker down and endure the bitter Wyoming snows, while to the south, factions are beginning to form, coalescing from the ashes of the dead world. 

Until he lost his arm, Dan Fortune was known all over Chelsea as a crook with promise. He was looting a ship when he slipped and fell, breaking his arm in so many places that the doctors were forced to amputate, ending his criminal career and forevermore branding him "Pirate Fortune". Since fate forced him to go straight, he has become the resident private eye of this run-down part of Manhattan, chiseling out a career of divorce work and subpoena delivery. But a big case is coming his way.

Liar [ˈlī(-ə)r] (n): 1. A person who tells lies. 2. A writer. In this gripping new audio collection you’ll find 15 tales of deceit and deception, perjury and prevarication, falsehoods and fibs, spun by some of the finest liars in the business.

At the end of the 24th century, war is fought in a civilized manner: Each side hires mercenaries to engage in combat in specifically designated areas. To the victor go the spoils - whatever they maybe. After a couple of assignments involving more intrigue and skullduggery than the Cutter Force Initiative ever wanted, the unit is looking forward to being part of a straight-up, short-term industrial war on Earth.

A thrilling Knopf New Face of Fiction debut, A Cold Night for Alligators takes the reader on a breathtaking ride through the seedy, sensual Florida Everglades, unravelling a mystery at the heart of which lies a devastating family secret.

On a rainy night in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, a woman throws a doll from the fifth-floor window of a gutted tenement, then leaps herself. From his own apartment a few blocks away, freelance photographer David Corman listens to the radio reports as they come over his headset. Corman is a man at the edge, threatened with eviction, besieged by his wife’s attempt to regain custody of their daughter, yet reluctant to give up the life that permits him to roam the night. In the woman’s dying fall, he sees the chance to sell a story....

Angelo DiNoto is the most powerful crime lord in New Jersey, his empire sustained by pure heroin from the poppies of an old Turkish farmer. That is, until a $5 million dollar shipment goes missing. Richard Mundi, a shady developer, sees the lost heroin as capital infusion for his failing business. His daughter, Gloria, literally in bed with would-be revolutionaries, thinks it's her ticket out. "Mailman", a long-time postal clerk dying of cancer, believes finding the heroin would be perfect ending to a failed life....

Flying to Baltimore for his class reunion, mystery writer Frank Smith leaves behind the unsolved disappearance of his wife and dogged persecution by the police. He finds another mystery at his school: boys who went missing 25 years ago.

Known for best-selling military science fiction, David Drake now takes aim at the listener's funnybone. Meet goblin paratroopers, politically correct space cops, and more, and laugh all the way to the gallows.

On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible.

American agents abduct a high-profile terrorist in broad daylight on the streets of London, subduing him with a tranquilizer. He dies a few hours later on a flight back to Washington, DC, and the body is dropped into the ocean. Hours later, the President's brother - a political powerhouse in his own right - boards a plane to Las Vegas that doesn't land in Nevada. Libyan radicals are at the controls, and he is their prisoner. The only man who can save him is Chubb Dunjee.

Brand-new stories by: Daniel Woodrell, Matthew Eck, Catherine Browder, Nancy Pickard, John Lutz, J. Malcolm Garcia, Kevin Prufer, Linda Rodriguez, Nadia Pflaum, Phong Nguyen, Andres Rodriguez, and others. Kansas City: where East and West collide, where naked ambition meets broken dreams, where blues and the night go together like rye whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. Yes, Kansas City is a surprising place of grit, gore, and betrayal, at least in the imaginations of our diverse lineup of contributors.

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.

A gang of Obama-masked thugs in a downtown Albany alley gave Dick Moonlight a one-way ticket to the Pearly Gates. But when his hovering spirit slips back into his bruised body, the real trouble starts. A private detective with a short-term memory problem, Moonlight knows he’s still in danger. He’s got plenty of enemies to keep him guessing why — even the latest love of his life, Lola, can’t be trusted. But the goons who snuffed him want something else: Moonlight’s latest client, a handicapped nuclear engineer, had a top-secret box the gang believes is in Moonlight’s possession. Moonlight can’t remember any box — but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it. He just better figure out where it is before he winds up dead for the last time.

PI Dick Moonlight wakes up to find himself on a plummeting plane and handcuffed to an FBI agent. As if his life wasn’t already turbulent enough - his bar burned down; his ex, Lola, left him for another man; and Jack Daniels is his new best friend - the FBI informs him that he’s got unfinished business. His last case, the one with Russian mobsters after a top secret flash drive, isn’t exactly closed.

What’s a nice, proper dame like Joan Parker doing in a place like Dick Moonlight’s office? The scar running down her face - from the business end of an axe - has something to do with it. Shortly after the attack that killed her husband and left her for dead, she pointed the finger at her son, Christopher, who now sits in jail. But the woman insists the police have it all wrong - Christopher didn’t do it - and she just needs the private eye to prove it. Moonlight knows mothers will say anything to protect their kids. He also knows how the police can take a mistake and run with it.

Izzie Lefevre was the newest investigator for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit when she first came to Recondito, a coastal city that's been shrouded in mystery and legend for centuries. Local law enforcement had requested the Bureau's assistance in hunting a sword-wielding serial killer who'd left a dozen mutilated bodies in his wake. Patrick Tevake was a local homicide detective assigned to the taskforce, and together he and Izzie managed to track down and stop the killer before he claimed another victim.