The shot heard 'round the world at Lexington and Concord in 1775 birthed a nation. Less than a century later, cannons firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina thrust that same nation into a civil war. The assassination of an obscure archduke sparked a chain of events leading to World War I. The dastardly bombing of Pearl Harbor led America into the Second World War.Akart's new novel, Nuclear Winter First Strike, depicts a world on the edge of nuclear Armageddon. Will history repeat itself as warring nations take their battles to the highest level of destruction? Can America avoid being drawn into these conflicts beyond her borders?Nuclear Armageddon hangs over us like a mighty sword and ordinary Americans will be caught in the crosshairs.This is more than the story of nuclear conflict. It's about the devastating effects wrought by Nuclear Winter. Our possible future is seen through the eyes of the Albright family whose roots stretch back to the early settlement of the Florida Keys.Hank Albright, a widower and proprietor of the Driftwood Key Inn, is the epitome of the laid-back islander inhabiting the Keys. His brother, Mike, is a homicide detective for the Monroe County Sheriff's department. Along with his wife Jessica, a paramedic and member of the Sheriff's department water emergency team, they become involved in the investigation of a sadistic serial killer.Hank's son, Peter Albright, is a Washington, DC reporter covering the State Department. He's unknowingly thrust into the middle of the conflict in the Middle East. Upon his return home, he begins to unravel a conspiracy leading to an unexpected dynamic between the President, the Secretary of State, and North Korea.As the drumbeats of war beat louder, Hank's oldest child, Lacey McDowell, begins to sense the warning signs. Along with her husband, Owen, and teenage son, Tucker, she begins to prepare for a hasty exit from their San Francisco Bay Area home.Will America become embroiled in the nuclear conflict? Will the President cross the Rubicon, that point of no return after which lives and cities may be destroyed? For the Albrights, like their fellow Americans, their lives are about to change forever.It was not our fight, but it became our problem.

    At twenty-eight years old he was content to still live in the bedroom he grew up in, working as a manager at the fast food chain he first joined in high school. Upon the death of his father, Charles realizes there might be something more for him out there and decides to try his hand at the potential of social media for introducing himself to the masses.Starting as a web series of self-exploration, Charles soon finds himself seduced by the allure of faceless followers. What began as a first cigar or shot of whiskey soon escalates much faster, an entire new persona developing.Told after the fact, Going Viral follows first-person insight into the mind of a man that in just six short months manages to go from an anonymous face in suburban America to internet novelty to ultimately death row inmate Chaz D.

    It’s a one way trip to a new planet far away from everything he's ever known, and the trip is said to take hundreds of years.The colony world is another Earth, a new beginning for mankind... and completely uninhabited.But when Kent is prematurely woken up from his stasis pod and told by the ship’s AI that they are under attack by an unknown alien threat, he must recall his years of training and once again become the man he used to be.The battle for mankind's future is upon us... and it rests in the hands of one forgotten soldier.

    

    Delta Force, US Navy SEALs and the CIA’s Special Operations Group, all of them unaware of the conspiracy swirling around them and the politicians determined to see them fail.From the ice-capped mountains of Switzerland to the burning deserts of Iraq, from the grimy streets of south London to the teeming metropolis of Shanghai, the battle to seize ultimate control of the planet threatens every corner of the globe.The virus is out there. And humanity has never been closer to extermination.

    Drawn to the sounds of fighting, David immediately throws himself into a desperate battle against overwhelming odds to save the life of a beautiful young princess. Now, marooned without hope of rescue, David is swept into a world of steam-powered airships, treacherous pirates, brutal savages, bloodthirsty monsters, royal machinations, and plots within plots, where matters of strength and honor are most often settled with the clash of swords. As he struggles to learn the strange ways of this new world and who he can trust, one thing becomes clear to him: he must put aside his growing feelings for Her Highness and do everything in his power to return her to her family, even though this means giving her up to the prince she’s pledged to marry. Told in a relentlessly fast-paced and breathless style, SCOUT’S HONOR is an exciting modern homage to the classic tales of planetary romance made famous by writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, as well as the cliffhanger-driven energy of the early science fiction movie serials. If you like your heroes unabashedly heroic, your heroines feisty and true, and your plots filled with dangers, twists, turns, and double-crosses upon triple-crosses, you’ll enjoy SCOUT’S HONOR.

    But a treaty doesn't mean an end to the violence, corruption, piracy, or tyranny in the galaxy. The Galactic Fleet's solution is a crack team of Special Ops Marines: Drop Team Zero.Made up of the absolute fighting best from humans, alien races, hybrids, and even AI androids, Drop Team Zero is called on to handle the worst of the worst, missions that others would tag as pure suicide. But when Drop Team Zero arrives, the only threat of suicide is for the ones that stand in their way.

    No shelter. No way out but through.A calamitous pair of storms.Two women on the run from their past caught in the whirlwind.They'll either stand and fight - or be consumed in the aftermath.***Twin hurricanes obliterate the eastern coast of the United States, bringing with them a blight that devastated America's breadbasket.As the nation's food supply withers on the vine, the population turns upon itself and millions die from starvation, infighting and disease within days of the storms' passing.In the midst of the devastation left by the storms, two women in the Gulf Coast must fight against the dangers from their past to survive the aftermath of the storms and find a new order in a broken nation.

    Then the enemies are forced to become allies when everyone becomes lost in an unfamiliar region of the galaxy and must fight their way back through primative planets and against alien fleets. As always with Smith, romance and action are equally mixed. The Seaton is forced back into action to stop a menace that threatens every civilized planet in the galaxy, but to do it he must create the greatest starship ever conceived. Finally read Triplanetary, the story that helped launch the Lensmen series. A brainy man and heroic woman fight against ruthless space pirates for life and love.

    And Earth’s about to be blindsided with annihilation...It’s up to Emma to rise up.Her problems go far beyond carb-counting mean girls. She’s got ears pointy enough to pass for an elf and a stuttering problem brought on by anxiety. A mother not of this world is about to enter her life with dire news. And by “dire news,” we mean Earth is about to get an atomic wedgie by the bully of the universe. If Emma is going to step up and help her home planet survive the oncoming invasion, she’s going to have to say, “#byefelicia” to unicorn Frappuccinos and gluten-free pizza and “Heyo” to new blasters and ancient martial arts.

    Thirteen people survived. Sixteen years later one of the survivors is found brutally bludgeoned to death. It looks like a crime of passion but DC Lucy Davies knows something is wrong. They were trying to find the bombers. Lucy’s search for the killer brings her into conflict with her long lost father – who has his own secrets. Dangerous secrets which Lucy must expose so she can confront a vicious murderer with only one thing on their mind. To keep on killing to stop the truth from getting revealed.

    No one has heard from him. He’s disconnected from his friends, from his family, and from the job he dedicated his life to—the job that cost him everything.Then a new, all too familiar murder occurs on his patch and Kidd has no choice but to throw himself back into the fold. A young woman has been found with a smile cut into her throat, eyes carved into her cheeks, the brutal signature of The Grinning Murders—one of the most ruthless serial killers the country has ever seen. A killer who lies behind bars.However things are not as they seem and not everything adds up. Only one thing is clear: Kidd may be the only one who can figure this out before this copycat killer strikes again.

    Ever since she was little, she had been taught how to live and survive outdoors, and how to use firearms to protect herself and those around her. Some of the training had been a bit extreme. Or had it been? Many of her questions were answered the day the world as she knew it ended. Now, the skills she had been taught serve an essential purpose. They keep her and those she cares about alive. Even in the sparsely-populated mountains of West Virginia, where she and her family have been forced to relocate for their safety after the collapse, peril lurks around every corner. Normal life has taken on a whole new meaning for Lauren, her family, and the community they have become a part of. In this different world, the new status quo is self-preservation. There is no more middle ground. People either live, or they die. Lauren’s father didn’t make it home on the day the world changed forever, and she misses him more than anything. Now, in What’s Left of My World, she and her family must learn to endure life’s horrors—without him.

    Adult readers only!

    The Race is On to Stop a Catastrophic Pandemic.After an exchange student with bubonic plague turns up in a Reno hospital, a contractor with identical symptoms dies in Los Angeles.The government‘s official stance is that the cases are isolated, and the outbreak is under control. But George Mack, a 30-year public health veteran, quickly realizes this is no ordinary plague. The death toll is too high, and the spread pattern make no sense. As Reno’s hospitals fill with plague victims, Mack begins to believe that there is more to the epidemic than the CDC is letting on—and that he must take drastic steps if he hopes to save his city.Medical resident Dr. Susan Barry just wants to finish her training and get a real job. But when plague patients start showing up in her Los Angeles hospital, her plans for the future suddenly go off the rails. Faced with a growing crisis, Susan teams up with an old research mentor to determine the unthinkable: is the rapidly spreading plague an act of bioterrorism? Racing against the clock, Susan must also confront another disturbing possibility. She may be one of the plague’s few survivors.In Eastern Oregon, John Harr makes a pact with his fellow ranchers to keep the “California” plague out of the high desert where they live. Using roadblocks and quarantine, Harr and his neighbors think they’ve secured their home—until a mysterious and heavily armed convoy comes to town, and Harr must use his training from his past life in the military to protect the people he loves.