…and the cards don't fall your way? When the brutal slaying of a prominent casino owner is followed by the murder of a well-known bookie, Detective Dale Dayton is thrown into the middle of a highly political case and leads the largest homicide investigation in Vegas in the last twelve years. What if you're dealt a Dead Man's Hand? Against his superiors and better judgment, Dayton is willing to give Calvin one last chance. To redeem himself, Calvin must prove his innocence by finding the real killer, while avoiding the LVMPD, as well as protect the woman he loves from a professional assassin hired to silence them.

    But beware of shocking twists and unexpected surprises that keep on intriguing, readying you for the ultimate gut punch. A wild escapade.” —Steve Berry, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of “The 14th Colony” What if our very survival rested in the hands of one man? A dead one… Iraq, 2003: Navy SEAL Austin McCord meets with his own end when he takes a lethal bullet. A single heartbeat, and all is lost. But after more than a decade Austin awakens with no sign of an injury; not even a scar. Held in a subterranean medical facility in present-day London, Austin discovers no explanation for the death he so clearly remembers. There are only two things present for him to see: a picture of his twin sister sitting on a table beside his bed, and a body—absent its head—lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Fearing for his sister’s safety, Austin pushes his questions and confusion aside and races to find Angelique. Unfortunately, a killer is heading in the exact same direction as the heroic SEAL—an infamous murderer suspected to be dead long ago, who has miraculously survived to continue his rampage. As Austin attempts to save his sister, a web of lies, cover-ups, and a historical past unveils itself. He soon discovers that he and his loved ones are major targets in a far greater war that began long ago at the hands of a secret society known as the Morvicti. The deeper Austin plunges into their realm, the more escape seems impossible. And the harder he fights, the clearer it becomes that not only does Angelique’s life depend on him, but so does the rest of mankind. “Inventive and audacious, “Morvicti Blood” is a ground-breaking thriller. If Bram Stoker had written “A Game of Thrones,” this is the book he’d have produced.” —Andrew Grant, Bestselling Author of “Run”

    It'll make those jerks at the Post look like idiots and Watergate look like a cop taking an apple off a fruit stand."It's 1972. The Watergate scandal has Washington on edge and Putnam, a Vietnam veteran and courier for one of the capital's leading television stations, is trying to get his life back together after his nightmarish ordeal in the war. Racing at breakneck speed through the streets of the capital, he not only intends to be the best courier in the business, he also intends to escape the demons that haunt him. But when Rick picks up film from a news crew interviewing a government worker with a hot story, his life begins to unravel as everyone involved in the story dies within hours of the interview and Rick realizes he is the next target. Enlisting the aid of friends who have discovered a way to hack into the government's computer databases, and a beautiful young Indian Rights activist, Eva Buffalo Calf, Rick races full throttle through the streets of the nation's capital to stay ahead of his pursuers as he searches for answers. When he discovers the killings have been orchestrated by a rogue CIA agent and his team of assassins, Rick isn't surprised when his road to the truth leads directly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

     Now featuring Volume Two, Diversion Guns of the Waste Land is an epic retelling of Arthurian Legend in an American Western setting. In late 1800s just outside the Texas town of Bretton, four men wander the American desert. Percy Murratt seeks Sheriff Ardiss Drake to learn the fate of his late father. Meanwhile, Ardiss’ deputies, Gary Wayne Orkney and Boris Bennick, are in the pursuit of the outlaw Lancaster O'Loch flees, who has seduced and stolen Ardiss’ wife, Guernica. Featuring a host of familiar characters reminiscent of Gawain, the Green Knight, Lancelot, Merlin and, of course, King Arthur, Guns of the Waste Land is a timeless adventure of chivalry, revenge and honour. Now, in Book Two: Diversion , follow Percy and co. on their epic quest as they traverse the frontier of the American Waste Land, in pursuit of their own Holy Grail… Guns of the Waste Land “impressed the hell out of me with its inventiveness and wonderfully colorful dialogue, […] you may have a genuine classic on your hands.” –T.E.D. Klein, author of Dark Gods & The Ceremonies “Leverett Butts is a real talent. His Guns of the Waste Land is an original way to use a genre. I like a guy who has a mad literary streak and walks the wobbly tightrope: so far he's gotten across. This is the first installment in a longer narrative, and I can't wait to read the next if it's as good as the first or even close.”—Richard Monaco, author of the Parsival series “Guns of the Waste Land brings us back to a genre that has mostly been out of fashion for a time, but I believe this work has the power to bring us back to why we loved westerns. The western story is the story of America. In the western, the lines between good and evil are often vague, just as they are in real humanity. The western shows us the difficulty to survive and how it changes people for better or worse. Butts has explored these ideas and many more in a book that is unique and as well written as anything you'll read this year.” –Scott Thompson, author of Young Men Shall See & Eight Days Leverett Butts teaches composition and literature at the Gainesville campus of the University of North Georgia. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Eclectic and The Georgia State University Review. He is the recipient of several fiction prizes offered by the University of West Georgia and TAG Publishing. His first collection of short fiction, Emily's Stitches: The Confessions of Thomas Calloway and Other Stories, has been nominated for the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Short Fiction. He lives in Temple, Georgia, with his wife, son, their Jack Russell terrier, and a couple of antisocial cats. Venture Press is a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Endeavour Press, the UK’s leading independent digital publisher. We are committed to the discovery and rediscovery of immensely talented authors in the SFF genre, and continue to push boundaries in search of great literature. Join us as we venture across universes and unknown landscapes – past, present and future. Sign up to our newsletter: http://bit.ly/1LUVI4n Follow us on Twitter @venture_press Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1NnFow7

    Her body was discovered days later, her beautiful face bashed in with a rock. Police determine her brutal death to be a mugging gone wrong and drop the matter into their cold case files.Over a year later, Tracy’s sister, Sondra, still can’t come to grips with what happened. She throws herself into her work as a documentary filmmaker to try and forget the cruelty of her sister’s death. However, a chance encounter with a man from Tracy’s past rips the wound open and sends Sondra on a desperate search for answers about the secrets from her sister’s life that may have led to her death.As Sondra struggles to uncover what happened to Tracy, she’s launched into a tangled web of deceit and danger that put her on a collision course with life and death…

    And that of strangers, too. Wherever she goes, she’s being watched. Each stalker is different from the last, except for one thing—their alarming obsession with Nicki.Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Nicki’s father is turning to someone who can protect her: retired private detective and ex–Navy SEAL Jon Lancaster. Teaming up with FBI agent and former abduction victim Beth Daniels, Lancaster can help—his way. He’s spent most of his career dispatching creeps who get off on terrorizing the vulnerable. Unlicensed, and unrestricted, he plays dirty…But this case is unusual. Why so many men? Why this one girl? Does Nicki have something to hide? Or do her parents?Trawling the darkest depths of southern Florida, Lancaster faces a growing tide of secrets and deception. And the deeper he digs, the more he realizes that finding the truth won’t be easy. Because there’s more to this case than meets the eye.

    In a serpentine story that races from small-town Montana to the vaulted halls of Windsor Castle, nothing is as it seems, including the works of the great Shakespeare himself. Former military and current police officer Cody Byrne is unforgettable--a heroine you want to root for. I love this book!" -- New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author J. Carson BlackLise McClendon (as Rory Tate) weaves a thrilling police procedural as Iraqi war veteran turned police officer Cody Byrne investigates the death of a Montana professor who may have been hiding one of the biggest secrets in academia—or perpetuating one of the biggest frauds—one that could scandalize the royal family of Great Britain. An entertaining read! -- Robin Burcell - award winning author of THE BLACK LISTThis is one of the best crime/mystery novels I have ever read and I've read a lot of them. The action begins in the first chapters and continues up to the end. It is exciting, spellbinding and riveting. -- Ruth Ann Hixson, Book Pleasures bloggerPolice officer Cody Byrne is dealing with the psychological effects of her Iraq tour when she’s assigned to find the next-of-kin for a Shakespeare professor at Montana State University who is injured in an explosion. The trail to find his relatives, and who he really is, leads her around the world where she confronts her estranged father, an MI5 agent. A (possibly) forged Shakespeare play, a massive cover-up, panic attacks and the nature of duty in the face of tragedy… you’ll find all this and more in PLAN X."Her heart was thumping through her uniform as she pulled the car to the curb. She jogged past cruisers and ducked under yellow tape, trying to contain the exhilaration. Action: god, she loved it. The tingling in her fingers, the edge so close. The thrill would engulf her with its seductive ways, wrapping its arms around her, hugging the fear out of her. Would excitement kill her or cure her? Was there any other way to live but like this, in the middle of everything?She took a breath. The smoke was pungent. Stay calm. Right now she wanted it, all of it. The good, the bad, the freaking drama of it all. But she had to stay cool. Firefighters pulled on hazmat suits. Smoke, nerves, shouts of Now! Bro! Let’s do it! She wanted a chemical suit, a vest, a tank. She was just a police officer but she wanted to go."

    Who could have killed rising artist Marc Solomon, and what does Castle Cay, the Solomon's mysterious Caribbean island, have to do with it? Before long, Julie's sixth-sense pulls a hidden string that unravels a deadly conspiracy...and her own troubled past.

     The Dirty Lowdown wrote: "Nick James has nailed it. The all too dark side of our legal industry, and the type of character we're all too afraid to admit exists!" It looks like disbarred attorney Bobby Custer has won the lottery. After serving four years of a seven-year sentence, he gets an offer he can’t refuse – from the feds. They just want him to keep an eye out for shady goings-on at one of the most prestigious law firms in the city. And suddenly he’s out – out of jail, but also totally cast out of his old life: shunned by family and friends. Bobby Custer is psychotic, narcissistic, psychopathic, greedy, unprincipled...and always charming. He did all the right things -- went to law school, got a job in a good law firm -- right up until the conviction for “a minor dalliance with a trust fund”. You could almost feel for the guy – a young man tempted by the high life could make a mistake he regrets and end up losing everything. And a guy who’ll help you hide a body could just be a good friend. But as the bodies start piling up, you have to wonder if there’s something about Bobby that’s just not … right. Chilling and action-packed, Corridor Man exposes a dark, violent undercurrent just beneath the surface of “perfectly legal and above-board”. A combination of Breaking Bad and House of Cards, Corridor Man is a sinister, disturbing legal thriller series that's bound to keep you awake at night. Books one, two and three in the Corridor Man series.

    He beat and choked her to death. I'm told that he was found hanging from a homemade noose in his cell. I want to know why he waited so long to do it." Sydney Brennan isn't sure how to answer her client's question, short of holding a séance, and the Tallahassee detective has some questions of her own. Why does Noel Thomas remember so little about her childhood? Why is she delving into her father's suicide now? And, most importantly, why isn't Noel telling her the truth?Sydney crisscrosses the Florida Panhandle, reconstructing the tragic Thomas family history. The violence that destroyed the Thomas family connects to a present-day web of deceit and corruption through a desperate man willing to do anything to keep his secrets safe. To discover his identity, Sydney must go Back to Lazarus, back to the town where Noel's beautiful but troubled mother began her inevitable descent over twenty years ago. But by following in the footsteps of the murdered woman, does Sydney risk sharing her fate?Rooted in bars and back roads and Panhandle prisons, forgotten towns and forgotten people, at its heart Back to Lazarus is about stories: the stories people tell us, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when we realize it's all a lie.

    FearsThis first in the "Dark" series of Mike Angel, Private Investigator mysteries is a wild ride, set in the New York/New Jersey and Chicago areas in 1960. If you like complex plots, soul-tortured protagonists, and suspense, you'll be hooked by this series. The first volume is historical fiction, involving names and places connected with remnants of the infamous Purple Gang of the 1930s. Suspense, seduction and even some supernatural elements are involved, though this is more of a mystery series in the vein of Chandler, Spillane, Hammett. Burdened by the unsolved murder of his father, a career NYPD lieutenant whose "voice" warns whenever danger is near, 30-year-old Mike Angel is a Korean vet and bored private investigator of insurance fraud. When a wealthy ex-college buddy hires him to tail Joe Ambler, a petty blackmailer, Mike fixates on Kimbra, the blackmailer's woman, a stunning beauty who commits murder. Mike impulsively helps her dispose of the body and finds himself on the wrong side of the law.Mike then discovers the dead man was the grandson of a feared and legendary mob leader, founder of Detroit's Purple Gang of the 1920s and 30s, possibly still alive. The same week, a well-dressed thug comes looking for Ambler, and the wealthy buddy who hired Mike runs off with Kimbra and is murdered in the Bahamas. Kimbra disappears. While searching for her Mike stumbles across connections to the Russian-Cuban branch of the ring responsible for a string of unsolved murders in three states. Seduction, deception, murders, shootouts, and crooked officials take Mike on a dangerous mission to the final showdown at Russian mob headquarters outside the small town of Mattoon, Illinois, where he hopes to discover who killed his father and save the life of Nika, a woman he has fallen for. You may have quite a few laughs at Mike's sarcasm and approach throughout. Consistenly rated high.

    Aside from raging headaches and no idea what's happened, they appear to have nothing in common. Troy thinks it's 2001 and he's still a combat surgeon fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. Emmy believes it's 2002 and she's still grifting a living from the streets of L.A.Are they archenemies or coconspirators? Lovers or friends? What are they doing in the Caribbean, and why is a Croatian assassin determined to kill them? The only thing they know for certain is that they'll be spending the rest of their lives in prison if the police catch them before they learn the truth.

    Downloaded by more than one million readers!Attorney Sasha McCandless has one goal: Make partner at the best firm in town. Then a plum assignment plunges her into a world of deceit and danger.When a commercial flight crashes, killing everyone on board, she's tapped to defend the airline. It's her big chance ... high-stakes litigation for an important client. But, as she digs into the evidence, people close to the case start dying.She discovers the crash was intentional, caused by a smartphone app capable of overriding the cockpit controls. But she's not sure who she can trust with the horrifying truth. She teams up with a federal air marshal, and they race to prevent another airline disaster.Soon, Sasha finds herself with a brand-new life goal: Stop a madman before he kills her.

    Adam Kaminski, with a delegation to Philadelphia's sister city, is meant to be a polite observer only. But a good man doesn't walk away when he sees wrong being done, and he's not about to start now.Visiting his family's homeland, Adam's been warned by his superiors to be on his best behavior. In a country that has known centuries of wars and occupation, politics are complex and layered with old prejudices and loyalties impossible for foreigners to understand. But when Adam meets a Polish cousin in Warsaw who believes his daughter was murdered, Adam is troubled by the indifference of the police… and by the strange behavior of the delegation's Polish liaison.Adam begins uncovering clues that point to the killer, clues that lead him inexorably into an investigation of the intricate web of Polish politics and the legacy of the Secret Police. But the past isn't always black and white, as Adam is forced to accept as he learns more about the killer and about his own family legacy. Will looking into the murder only beget more murder?

    Harper is visiting the small Ohio town of Cooper's Mill, trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter and a grandson he's never met. But he finds the town gripped in fear-two young girls have gone missing, taken in broad daylight from a busy street. And the police are coming up blank. But once Harper is drawn reluctantly into the investigation, he'll stop at nothing to find the girls. And he doesn't care who gets in the way.