When a Harvard history professor receives a thesis paper titled Jesse James and the Secret Legend of Captain Coytus, from Ulysses Hercules Baxter-an underwhelming student-he assumes the paper must be a prank. He has never read such maniacal balderdash in his life. But after he calls a meeting with the student, Professor Gladstone is dismayed when Baxter declares the work is his own. As he takes a very unwilling Professor Gladstone back in time via his thesis, Baxter's grade hangs in the balance as he attempts to prove his theory. It is 1864 as philanderer and crusader Captain Coytus embarks on a mission to avenge his father's death and infiltrates the Confederate Bushwacker posse looking for the man responsible, Jesse Woodson James. Accompanied by the woman of his dreams, Coytus soon finds himself temporarily appointed to be the sheriff of Booneville and commissions his less-than-loyal deputy to help him carry out his plan. But when tragedy strikes, the Captain is forced to change his immature ways and redefine his lofty mission-more or less.

    To accomplish this, the most primal element of storytelling--a single human voice describing events exactly as it experienced them--is adhered to without embellishment or exception. Within these pages lie taut, unadorned first person narratives from agonized souls, minus all the stylish techniques which dilute, stretch, and burden tales of terror with unnecessary detail. Here you will find no entry into the thoughts of any characters other than the narrator's, no standard passages of dialogue, no humor, no extraneous gore, no romance. The twenty untitled stories inside this book spill forward without page or even paragraph breaks, taking the form of uninterrupted confessions, creating an effect of pure campfire terror. Knifepoint strips away all the tired conventions which water down traditional horror fiction, leaving nothing but the story's riveting spine to compel and chill you to the core.If this collection is expanded in the future, those possessing a copy of any particular edition need only send a page from it to the author to receive a free copy of the new one.

     Constanza Delamar lives in a part of Ireland where ancient traditions are viewed with nostalgia, by people who are eager to move beyond them. A personal tragedy changes her life and she finds herself in a remote village where these traditions are still a way of life. When a parish priest suddenly arrives to challenge the village's traditional priest and condemn his Priest Woman; the village is turned against itself. Constanza suddenly finds herself confronting and then defending the most controversial of traditions. The mounting tensions in the village culminate in a devastating event with long-term consequences for all those involved.

    Upon recovering he meets Captain Horatio Nelson, newly appointed to command of the Northern Leeward Islands squadron and the Royal Navy Dockyard at English Harbour in Antigua. Nelson's primary task is stamping out rampant American smuggling activity. But to succeed, Nelson needs information.Lieutenant Ross serves as a spy for Nelson against the smugglers, but they aren't his only foe. French and American spies supporting the smugglers are playing for far higher stakes, sowing the seeds of violent unrest. Lieutenant Ross is soon in the midst of desperate action and working with a beautiful slave woman to gain information as he struggles to stop to their plot.Dockyard Dog is the first novel in the Evan Ross series. Fans of Julian Stockwin, Dewey Lambdin, and Alexander Kent will enjoy reading this series.

    He and his family live there peacefully for ten years, and then tragedy strikes. His wife and daughter are killed in a confrontation with bank robbers, and he blames himself. He quits the police force and begins a wandering, aimless life around town, walking wherever he goes—silent, brooding, filthy. He exists like this for five years. The majority of people in town see him as a man who is mentally disabled. Few people dare bother him. Then one day, John Slaughter, the man who was responsible for the death of Joaquin’s family, comes back to this town. After robbing the bank with his fellow criminals, he kidnaps a young girl as he gets away. Joaquin recognizes the man, and gives chase. Thus, the tale begins.

    After years of consulting doctors, she decided the visions were a glitch in her own mind until her mentor, the famous physicist Dr. James Corwin, is murdered in Italy, and Andie finds a stack of ink drawings in his office that bear a remarkable resemblance to her hallucinations.Shocked, Andie digs deeper and learns that Dr. Corwin developed a device that might shed light on the very nature of reality. She is even more stunned to discover that her mother, an academic who disappeared when Andie was a young girl, might also be involved.Determined to find answers, Andie follows a trail of clues placed by Dr. Corwin, for reasons unknown, in museums and cultural sites around the world, highlighting human achievement as well as a tapestry of secret knowledge woven into the threads of history.Yet Andie is not the only one searching. Powerful forces know of her mentor's invention, including a mysterious elite society that spans borders and will stop at nothing to find the device. Now a target herself, Andie and a disgraced journalist embark on a perilous journey that might hold the key to a new frontier of knowledge-and which also promises to unlock the doors of her past.From the author of the bestselling Dominic Grey novels, Genesis is a mind-bending thriller about how far two people will go for answers, and to save the ones they love.

    Now the sacrifices begin…In 1921, in the ruined city of Carthage near Tunis, a red-haired French archaeologist hears the cries of long-dead children as he stumbles upon a legendary sacrificial site. Shortly afterwards, he is viciously attacked by a hawk.Back in present-day London, flame-haired journalist Rebecca Burns investigates strange and macabre events which seem to be directed against redheads worldwide. Together with young astrophysicist Dr Jim Cavendish and Professor Larry Burton, an authority on ancient civilisations, she is drawn into an age-old feud…a feud that threatens the very existence of redheads everywhere.

    Raised in an orphanage, never knowing his parents, Quinn had a happy if unexceptional life. Until the day of “strange magnetism.” It compelled him to drive out to the middle of nowhere. It helped him find a coin worth a lot of money. And it practically saved his life when two government agents showed up in the diner in pursuit of him. Now Quinn is on the run from those agents and who knows what else, fleeing for his life.During a shoot-out at a forlorn dude ranch, he finally meets his destined companions: Bridget Rainking, a beauty as gifted in foresight as she is with firearms, and her grandpa Sparky, a romance novelist with an unusual past. Bridget knows what it’s like to be Quinn. She’s hunted, too. The only way to stay alive is to keep moving.Barreling through the Sonoran Desert, the formidable trio is impelled by that same inexplicable magnetism toward the inevitable. With every deeply disturbing mile, something sinister is in the rearview―an enemy that is more than a match for Quinn. Even as he discovers within himself resources that are every bit as scary.

    But Zeph is also blessed with a gift, an uncanny ability to foresee the future,to know peoples’ deepest sins and secrets. He calls it the Telling, but he has abandoned this gift to a life of solitude, unbelief, and despair until two detectives escort him to the county morgue where he finds his own body lying on the gurney.   On the northern fringes of Death Valley, the city of Endurance is home to llama ranches, abandoned mines, roadside attractions...and the mythical ninth gate of hell. Now, forced to investigate his own murder, Zeph discovers something even more insidious behind the urban legends and small-town eccentricities. Early miners unearthed a megalith, a sacred site where spiritual and physical forces converge and where an ancient subterranean presence broods. And only Zeph can stop it.   But the scar on Zeph’s face is nothing compared to the wound on his soul. For not only has he abandoned his gift and renounced heaven, but it was his own silence that spawned the evil. Can he overcome his own despair in time to seal the ninth gate of hell?    His words unlocked something deadly,  And now the silence is killing them.

    His assailant disappears, the knife in his pocket, the blood of the old-one seared into its sharpened edge. The knife trades hands, drawing blood again, and the old-one is resurrected through his victims’ consciousness and divided, spreading through the infected. With his horde of infected youth, the old-one must reclaim the knife to regain control of his soul. But someone is out to stop him...

    Yet they walk through our world as our coworkers and our neighbors, hiding in plain sight and coexisting in peace. They survive?and they prosper.A shy young dreamer, Tomas wanders through his life with help from his good friends and influential family on the ruling Council. Now, he's decided his future lies with the Nahan's most elite class: the mysterious Storytellers. But his family is troubled by his new choice?and by his new girlfriend, Stell, a wild, beautiful, and deadly outcast from a fanatical Nahan sect.As Tomas descends into the dark wonders of the Nahan's most powerful culture, Stell answers her own calling as an exceptional assassin. But when a lethal conspiracy threatens their destinies, Tomas and Stell must unite their remarkable talents against the strongest?and most sinister?of their kind.

    She was just seven years old, wandering lost and hungry in the wilderness, when the solitary hunter took her in. In the years since then, he's taught her how to survive in this desolate land where civilization has been destroyed and men are at the mercy of the elements and each other.But the man Elka thought she knew has been harboring a terrible secret. He's a killer. A monster. And now that Elka knows the truth, she may be his next victim.Armed with nothing but her knife and the hard lessons Trapper's drilled into her, Elka flees into the frozen north in search of her real parents. But judging by the trail of blood dogging her footsteps, she hasn't left Trapper behind--and he won't be letting his little girl go without a fight. If she's going to survive, Elka will have to turn and confront not just him, but the truth about the dark road she's been set on.The Wolf Road is an intimate cat-and-mouse tale of revenge and redemption, played out against a vast, unforgiving landscape--told by an indomitable young heroine fighting to escape her past and rejoin humanity.

    It’s forbidden.In Garner County, girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. They believe their very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth, of a girl on the edge of womanhood. That’s why they’re banished for their sixteenth year, to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage. But not all of them will make it home alive.Sixteen-year-old Tierney James dreams of a better life—a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman, but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the brutal elements they must fear. It’s not even the poachers in the woods, men who are waiting for a chance to grab one of the girls in order to make a fortune on the black market. Their greatest threat may very well be each other.With sharp prose and gritty realism, The Grace Year examines the complex and sometimes twisted relationships between girls, the women they eventually become, and the difficult decisions they make in-between.

    Who lives, who dies? You decide.When someone hacks into the systems of eight self-drive cars, their passengers are set on a fatal collision course.The passengers are: a TV star, a pregnant young woman, a disabled war hero, an abused wife fleeing her husband, an illegal immigrant, a husband and wife - and parents of two - who are travelling in separate vehicles and a suicidal man. Now the public have to judge who should survive but are the passengers all that they first seem?

    Cono is a startling young man of mixed and haunting heritage who has been gifted – or cursed – with an accelerated nervous system. An orphan from the streets of Brazil, he acts as a freelance spy, happy to use his strange talents in the service of dubious organizations and governments – until, in Kazakhstan, on a personal mission to rescue a former lover, he is sucked into a deadly maelstrom of betrayal that forces him to question all notions of friendship and allegiance. Relevant to our times, PERFORMANCE ANOMALIES explores the expansion of Beijing’s imperial reach into Central Asia, and the takeover of Kazakhstan. Cono’s main adversary is a brutal Beijing agent whose personality has been twisted by the Cultural Revolution’s devastation of his family. Victor Robert Lee’s topical depiction of a Beijing government pursuing territorial expansion resonates with current tensions over China’s claims on the entire South China Sea.PERFORMANCE ANOMALIES travels from Brazil and Stanford to Almaty and the Tian Shan mountains, covering a tumultuous emotional landscape along the way. The fate of an oil-rich nation the size of Western Europe is at stake. So, too, is a hidden stockpile of weapons-grade uranium. The Beijing agent craves Cono's suffering; a jihadi cell wants him dead. As the human cost of his mission escalates, Cono realizes that he must turn his strange talents toward higher deeds in the future - if by his guile he can survive the explosive present.