Dark Zader was one of the most powerful men in the galaxy, but when he threw his emperor down a shaft, he found himself without a job. Living with his kids and down on his luck, he finds that he only has one solution, beg for his old job back from the very emperor he thought he'd killed. Read as this family of rebel scum scrambles to prepare a dinner fit for an emperor in the most ridiculous culinary experience ever. Double the excitement. Triple the laughs. Paintbrush illustrations. This is... Family Wars Episode I: The Forced Dinner

    She watches reality shows with her friends, eats well, and occasionally wonders to herself: what would life be like if men were still alive?It has been almost 50 years since an experimental virus accidentally killed all the men on earth. However, a controversial project is currently underway to bring men back. There's just one catch. The project has been sabotaged.So begins Athena's Choice. When the police of 2099 are tasked with finding the saboteur, they receive a mysterious command to investigate the otherwise innocuous Athena Vosh. After it becomes clear that the young girl might know more than she lets on, Athena is brought in to participate in the official investigation. Simultaneously, the girl begins to experience a series of cryptic dreams featuring a ruined library and an old book containing the saboteur’s true identity. As the police close in on their prize, Athena finds herself on a journey of her own. Her clue-filled dreams and incorruptible spirit bring her face-to-face with a pair of forgotten truths about happiness and gender. The world waits to see if men will return as Athena fights a separate battle, culminating in the choice that will define her and others' lives forever.

    That's all it takes for the darkness to penetrate. To infect. To destroy.A plague has incapacitated humanity, spreading across the globe faster than it could ever possibly be contained. Almost overnight the world is awakened to a new reality and the realization that no one is safe, not a single living soul.As the virus takes control, humanity is brought crashing to its knees. The few left untouched fight frantically for their survival, even as they know their future no longer exists, doing the uninmaginable at the brink of death.A dark tale that shows exactly how desperate, how dark, humanity can get once the undead winter arrives.This short story will haunt readers long after the last page has been read. A story you will want to read over and over.

    Medallion Honoree ***Cyrus Konami is the Chief Inspector on the first colony vessel, Aotea, to leave Earth's solar system. Deep within the machinery of the ship, a suspicious death upends the routine on board. Mysterious signals from deep space add to the confusion, along with a series of debilitating malfunctions.Cy and Lieutenant Beatriz Mattoso dig into the deceased crewman's background. The first signs point to a tragic accident. Ship scuttlebutt points to the deep-space signals -- is a mysterious force trying to prevent humanity from spreading into deep space? Or are the radical pacifists and cultural separatists who funded the journey somehow involved?With an increasingly uncooperative populace, a shocking assassination attempt, and a spaceship falling apart around them, Cy and Bea must unravel secrets that threaten the lives of thousands before it's too late...

    But the impact on her grandmother and the answers that Kali gets are anything but what she expected. Kali’s questions intensify the profound paranoia that has dominated her grandmother’s adult life -- that someone from the past has found her – and with Kali’s demand for the truth, Lillian sinks into a life of nightmares and paralyzing fear. Will her life in 1930’s Berlin, her loves and lies, and the true meaning of the small painting that she has hidden for more than seventy years be exposed to reveal the hideous secret that has haunted Lillian to this day? Or will the hunt to uncover her past lead to the imminent murder of Lillian and her pregnant granddaughter? Perhaps murder is the only means to keep Kali and her unborn child from a future that no one in the world would ever want to face?

    At fifteen, she has adjusted to moving without notice and never fitting in, but everything changes with her adopted mom's hometown. There Jes falls for her mom's nephew, a love she hides when his betrayal leaves her isolated and driven to unravel the past.After Jes befriends a strange new student, she discovers an amazing secret: he's from another planet and searching for a missing girl who might be her. As Jes will learn, truth comes at a cost, but will she give up love to find out?

    Wealthy, immortal lords control the developed planets. It’s a feudal society, but they don’t fight with swords.The feudal lords fear the mysterious quantum-mind Erins. With a directive to travel in the past and eliminate the Erins, two vicious Factions are ready for a dirty war. Their invasion does not go unnoticed. As past becomes future, a secret mission led by the Observer of that planetary system jumps into action to save the Erins. They must remain in the shadows to avoid the Factions’ spies, chrono-devices and SAT-mines. Hit by a SAT-mine, the target is not only destroyed, it is erased from history. That person would never have existed, and all its offspring, actions or interactions would be reversed.Helped by a Gate, a shadowy intelligent entity part of the Universe’s fabric, neither life, nor technology, a man from Earth, a not yet accepted planet in the Galactic Federation, is teleported three hundred years into the past to stop the genocide and change the pattern of history. His survival and the survival of the Erins rests on his ability to fend off the Factions, but when past and future collide, his skills may prove useless.When failure is not an option and survival isn’t guaranteed how far will the man go to save lives and test fate?

    He has, after all, been bouncing around New York city ever since, causing mischief and having fun as a supernatural being. But recently some problems have been cropping up: not only is he hallucinating things in garbage cans, but his mentor doesn't think he's working up to his full potential, his best friend can't offer any solace but drunken confusion, and his wife is dying in Central Park. See, the past twenty years haven't meant a thing because now it's time for Matthew to make his second choice and become a tester of humanity. And that's all before the zombies show up. Come explore the world of Matthew and Epp and see what a samurai from Feudal Japan has to do with the course of modern physics, what a two-thousand year old Roman slave has to do with the summit of Mount Everest, and what a dead man from Brooklyn has to do with the fate of the world.

    Protected, admired and living in the lap of luxury, Jaspar is reeling from the news that his government jet has crashed just as her children vanish without a trace. An ominous message warns her to keep silent about her husband's role in the President's economic plan. Or else. Determined to save her children, she'll go to hell and back, form alliances with assassins, traitors and Mafioso, and commit unspeakable acts-if that's what it takes. With alarms sounding around the world, hunted from all sides, and unsure of who to trust, she finds herself depending on a mysterious figure without an identity. Jaspar journeys from the Australian outback to the palazzos of Rome, the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, and to the magnificence of the Vatican, in her quest. Can she rescue her children before the plot to crash the global economy is unleashed?

    

    Just a few days earlier she’d discovered that Alison, her mousy receptionist at Sage Consulting, had been working as a loan shark on the side. And now Alison, her husband and those thick-necked men in the cheap suits wanted the money back. When a desperate Jane had come to Euphemia, of course she had to help. After all, wasn’t this what she was supposed to do? Euphemia had waited more than twenty years to find out if the story in the mysterious letter she’d received on her thirtieth birthday was true. So when at 53 her first hot flush triggered a genetic switch and gave her unexpected powers, she felt more than ready to save Jane and deal to Alison. But what had seemed simple suddenly became complicated when Alison produced a gun.

    What lies on the other side and what will it be like? This mind expanding story takes you on a supernatural journey through the Afterworld in a quest for truth and understanding about what resides in our own soul and in the souls of others. Even more importantly - What is our ultimate destiny?While FINAL BALANCE can easily be read as a standalone work, it's actually follow-on from my first book, THE ZOO: An Allegorical Adventure. In the first book, a major metropolitan city was utterly destroyed and reduced to an uninhabited state of rubble, abandoned and desolate for all eternity. That book explored the behaviors seen by a society and its leadership and the extreme consequences of the actions the characters took. FINAL BALANCE goes well beyond the original work with an entirely different setting and experience for the reader. In the new book, Dan Alexander, the central character from THE ZOO, travels on a supernatural journey through the Afterworld exploring the ultimate consequences of his earthly existence. Both books, FINAL BALANCE and THE ZOO, go beyond conventional boundaries. In a fictional and entertaining way, they provide a social commentary that resonates with our times. At the core, both books aim to enlighten others about the personal and material consequences associated with the decisions taken by society and its leadership.

    He enjoys his expensive toys, lush mansion, and life of comfort, but something is missing. A chance meeting with fellow billionaires sparks his imagination and he sets forth on a new venture. He will buy a nuclear aircraft carrier, sail it through the Great Lakes, drag it across Northern Minnesota to an Indian reservation, and hook it up to the power grid. With this bold publicity stunt, he hopes to reinvigorate the nuclear energy debate in this country. Intrepid visionaries see into the future and trudge forward. They are the builders of societies and the makers of progress. But sometimes they get sidetracked and lull into comfort. Along the way Tyler encounters an echelon of obstacles from angry energy companies to zealous environmentalists, and even his own nuclear physicist peers. The government wants to shut him down, his own wife thinks he’s crazy, and he’s running out of money. But Tyler also learns that people love getting behind a man with a vision. In this adventure we learn of leadership, ingenuity in the face of overwhelming odds, and what it is to take people with you. Who will you take with when your inspiration comes?

    the world of angels and devils, of Lucifer and Lucifer's son, the world of temptation and seduction in his latest masterpiece of deviltry and suspense. In a world of horror and fear that is almost too realistic to be fiction, Mavrodi's characters burst from the pages, come alive and open up their innermost beings... revelations that will shock and astound the reader, who--while filled with fear and anxiety--will be unable to put LUCIFER'S SON down until the last terrifying scene.

    John Mandel's Station Eleven and Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood.In this prequel to Eric Barnes's acclaimed cli-fi novel The City Where We Once Lived, six sets of characters move through a landscape and a country just beginning to show the signs of cataclysmic change.A father and his young children fleeing a tsunami after a massive earthquake in the Gulf. A woman and her husband punishing themselves without relent for the loss of both their sons to addiction, while wildfires slowly burn closer to their family home. A brilliant investor, assessing opportunity in the risk to crops, homes, cities, industries, and infrastructure, working in the silent comfort of her office sixty floors up in the scorching air. A doctor and his wife stuck in a refugee camp for immigrants somewhere in a southern desert. Two young men working the rides for a roadside carnival, one escaping a brutal past, the other a racist present. The manager of a chain of nondescript fast-food restaurants in a city ravaged by the relentless wind.While every night the news alternates images of tsunami destruction with the baseball scores, the characters converge on a city where the forces of change have already broken—a city half abandoned, with one part left to be scavenged as the levee system protecting it slowly fails—until, in their vehicles on the highway that runs through it, they witness the approach of what looks to be just one more violent storm.