She keeps a close eye on Dan, and not just because of what’s happened to her.She has reasons that are more genetic than environmental. Dan, like his grandmother, is a sociopath: manipulative, impulsive, and almost remorseless.Intensive therapy has helped him and his mother a great deal, but she has always worried that he is a ticking time bomb whose impulsiveness and lack of empathy will lead him straight to jail.So, when Dan’s girlfriend goes missing after the two get blackout drunk on a date and Dan believes that he may have killed her, Kelly scrambles to cover for him.But his vindictive grandmother has other plans and no qualms about lying to get what she wants.A desperate mother willing to take any steps to protect her son must face a grandmother with no conscience in the ultimate battle over the life of Daniel and be prepared to suffer the consequences.

    A tortured mind. A return to work that becomes a living hell ... When Rosie Taylor returns to work after a long recovery from a tragic accident, she can't believe how much things have changed for the worst. Not only is there a new HR guy in charge, everybody's fighting to keep their job and there are some new recruits with very unusual habits. Rosie needs this job. Social services are threatening to take her child, she's struggling to recover from mental illness and if she doesn't bring some money in fast, she'll lose the house. But somebody at work has got it in for her and she's struggling to hang on to what's left of her shattered life. Two Years After is an unsettling psychological thriller which will have you looking over your shoulder next time you go to work.

    Lumped into the burgeoning alt-country movement, the band soon landed a major label deal and recorded an instant classic: Strangers Almanac. That's when tour manager Thomas O'Keefe met the young musician.For the next three years, Thomas was at Ryan's side: on the tour bus, in the hotels, backstage at the venues. Whiskeytown built a reputation for being, as the Detroit Free Press put it, "half band, half soap opera," and Thomas discovered that young Ryan was equal parts songwriting prodigy and drunken buffoon. Ninety percent of the time, Thomas could talk Ryan into doing the right thing. Five percent of the time, he could cover up whatever idiotic thing Ryan had done. But the final five percent? Whiskeytown was screwed.Twenty-plus years later, accounts of Ryan's legendary antics are still passed around in music circles. But only three people on the planet witnessed every Whiskeytown show from the release of Strangers Almanac to the band's eventual breakup: Ryan, fiddle player Caitlin Cary, and Thomas O'Keefe.

    One woman will transform herself to gain power. And no one will emerge unscathed . . .Thorvald Spear wakes in hospital, where he finds he's been brought back from the dead. What's more, he died in a human vs. alien war which ended a whole century ago. But when he relives his traumatic final moments, he finds the spark to keep on living. That spark is vengeance. Trapped and desperate on a world surrounded by alien Prador forces, Spear had seen a rescue ship arriving. But instead of providing backup, Penny Royal, the AI within the destroyer turned rogue. It annihilated friendly forces in a frenzy of destruction, and, years later, it's still free. Spear vows to track it across worlds and do whatever it takes to bring it down.Isobel Satomi ran a successful crime syndicate. But after competitors attacked, she needed more power. Yet she got more than she bargained for when she negotiated with Penny Royal. She paid it to turn her part-AI herself, but the upgrades hid a horrifying secret. The Dark AI had triggered a transformation in Isobel that would turn her into a monster, rapidly evolving into something far from human.Spear hires Isobel to take him to the Penny Royal AI's last known whereabouts. But he cheats her in the process and he becomes a target for her vengeance. And as she is evolves further into a monstrous predator, rage soon wins over reason. Will Spear finish his hunt, before he becomes the hunted?"

    Within minutes, she and her family hastily pack up their belongings and abandon their home. Where did the family go and why? Det. Roberta Hobbs has been assigned to uncover the family's whereabouts. Hobbs is a confident, intelligent police veteran. However, each passing day brings her closer to her unresolved past. When Hobbs digs deeper into the mystery, all leads point to her own longtime ex-boyfriend - a former drug dealer turned philanthropist named Steven Vance -- as the primary suspect. This riveting dual-timeline suspense novel takes us back to 2004 -- the year Greta Carpenter first realizes something is wrong with her young son, John. Over the course of his childhood, John's learning disabilities become apparent. Greta's unfaltering advocacy on his behalf puts her at odds with the school system and strains her relationship with her husband Griffin. Eventually Greta and Griffin's marriage falls apart, and during the divorce trial, Greta reveals that she was a teenage runaway, and a local entrepreneur named Steven Vance rescued her from the streets. Vance is certainly a man of many shades - a local celebrity for his philanthropy, a cunning CEO who sits atop a questionable mini-empire, a benevolent former father figure to Greta and a lying, evasive former companion to Hobbs. It seems that only Vance has the power to make people disappear in this small town and he emerges as the most obvious suspect...but Hobbs remains uncertain of his role. While her colleagues question whether she can truly be impartial, Hobbs realizes she has a reason to suspect them as well. Nothing is obvious in this thrilling mystery...except that Hobbs must race to solve the mystery before it's too late.

    OBSESSION. REVENGE. Years after she fell out with her best friend, Laura remains terrified of the past coming back to haunt her… Laura, the only child of doting parents, is at the centre of what seems a perfect family. Daughter of a well-known television personality, she spends her time between their idyllic Northumberland farmhouse and summers on the Amalfi coast. New girl, Evelyn, arrives at Laura’s prestigious boarding school desperate to escape her miserable home life. The two quickly become friends, inseparable, and Evelyn relishes the chance to become close to Laura’s family. But when Laura discovers her friend has betrayed her and her family she calls an immediate end to their friendship with devastating consequences. Decades later, Laura is forging a successful career as a journalist, happily married and keen to leave the past firmly behind her. Evelyn, however, filled with resentment and blighted by their estrangement, believes she paid a price that should have been shared… It’s time to settle the score.

    But before long, she discovers how little she really knew about the man she married.Lies, betrayal and double-crossing shock to the core, and treachery that threatens to destroy more than a marriage…

    One of only two Emotion Conduits in that world's history and the only one to have survived to maturity, Lira struggles to adapt to being an unprepared cultural icon while coping with the loss of her only family, safeguarded by her violent and troubled Guardian, Rease and her loyal dog, Night. Discovering her gone, her widowed father Jonas must confront his own dark past, forcing him to return to a life he had thought abandoned long ago. Aided by his criminal contacts and spurred on by a prophesy foretelling global conflict in a world without war, he races to save his beloved little girl once more, just as he did when she was an infant. Surrounded by allies and enemies, unable to tell them apart, Lira soon learns she must determine the course of her own life or remain a pawn in this new world. Written for readers of all ages and filled with tasteful romance, intrigue, drama and adventure, Our Lady of Joy is the first book in a series of seven novels, all of which will be available for Kindle download no later than 1/1/16 so that the series may be enjoyed by readers in its entirety without delay.

    It touches on its evolutionary development, its algorithmic nature and its scientific history by bridging ideas across Neuroscience, Computer Science, Biotechnology, Evolutionary History, Cognitive Science, Political Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence.Never before had there been nearly as many scientists, resources or productive research focused on these topics, and humanity has achieved some understanding and some clarification. With the speed of progress it is timely to communicate an overreaching perspective, this book puts an emphasis on conveying the essential questions and what we know about their answers in a simple, clear and exciting way.Humans, along with the first RNA molecules, the first life forms, the first brains, the first conscious animals, the first societies and the first artificial agents constitute an amazing and crucial development in a path of increasingly complex computational intelligence. And yet, we occupy a minuscule time period in the history of Earth, a history that has been written by Genes, by Cultures and by Consciousnesses. If we abandon our anthropomorphic bias it becomes obvious that Humans are not so special after all. We are an important but short and transitory step among many others in a bigger story. The story of our computational minds, which is ours but not only ours. What is the relationship between computation, cognition and everything else? What is life and how did it originate? What is the role of culture in human minds? What do we know about the algorithmic nature of the mind, can we engineer it? What is the computational explanation of consciousness? What are some possible future steps in the evolution of minds? The underlying thread is the computational nature of the Mind which results from the mixture of Genes, Cultures and Consciousness. While these three interact in complex ways, they are ultimately computational systems on their own which appeared at different stages of history and which follow their own selective processes operating at different time scales. As technology progresses, the distinction between the three components materializes and will be a key determinant of the future.Among the many topics covered are the origin of life, the concept of computation and its relation to Turing Machines, cultural evolution and the notion of a Selfish Meme, free will and determinism, moral relativity, the hard problem of consciousness, the different theories of concepts from the perspective of cognitive science, the current status of AI and Machine Learning including the symbolic vs sub-symbolic dichotomy, the contrast between logical reasoning and neural networks, and the recent history of Deep Learning, Geoffrey Hinton, DeepMind and its algorithm AlphaGo. It also develops on the history of science and looks into the possible future building on the work of authors like Daniel Dennett, Yuval Harari, Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick, George Church, David Chalmers, Susan Carey, Stanislas Dehaene, Robert Boyd, Joseph Henrich, Daniel Kahneman, Moran Cerf, Josh Tenenbaum, David Deutsch, Steven Pinker, Ray Kurzweil, John von Neumann, Herbert Simon and many more. Andres Campero is a researcher and PhD student at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department and at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

    As an AI researcher with 25 years of experience, professor Mike Wooldridge has learned to be obsessively cautious about such claims, while still promoting an intense optimism about the future of the field. There have been genuine scientific breakthroughs that have made AI systems possible in the past decade that the founders of the field would have hailed as miraculous. Driverless cars and automated translation tools are just two examples of AI technologies that have become a practical, everyday reality in the past few years, and which will have a huge impact on our world.While the dream of conscious machines remains, Professor Wooldridge believes, a distant prospect, the floodgates for AI have opened. Wooldridge's A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence is an exciting romp through the history of this groundbreaking field--a one-stop-shop for AI's past, present, and world-changing future.

    They used him to kill. Now they’ve lost control. When a man wakes up face-down in the middle of a garbage dump, he naturally has a few questions.Why is he in a hand-tailored suit with a bullet hole in his back? Why are there homicidal robots trying to kill him? Why can’t he remember his own name? And how did he get so good at killing? But the more he learns, the less he likes—and the more he starts to think this will end very, very badly. With a faceless organization hunting him, bloody flashbacks haunting him, and an intriguing new companion helping him, the clock is ticking on whether he can escape his past before it devours him.Will he recover his memories before it’s too late, or be forced to become a pawn for the forces hunting him down?Perfect for fans of The Bourne Identity and James Prescott, The Quantum Price is the thrilling first book in the brand-new Ethan Price series. If you like your technothrillers with a side of cyberpunk, scroll up and grab your copy today!

    She can't change her own traumatic past, but she can save other women. When Tomo introduces a deceptive new product that preys on users' fears to drive up its own revenue, Angie sees Tomo for what it really is--another evil abuser. Using her coding and hacking expertise, she decides to destroy Tomo by building a new social network that is completely distributed, compartmentalized, and unstoppable. If she succeeds, it will be the end of all centralized power in the Internet. But how can an anti-social, one-armed programmer with too many dark secrets succeed when the world's largest tech company is out to crush her and a no-name government black ops agency sets a psychopath to look into her growing digital footprint?"

    But when her husband, David, survives a plane crash and is left with severe brain damage, she faces a choice: will she dedicate her life to caring for a man she no longer loves, or walk away?Their marriage had been rocky at the time of the accident, and though she wants to do the right thing, Rachel doesn’t know how she is supposed to care for two kids in addition to a now irrational, incontinent, and seizure-prone grown man. And how will she manage to see her lover? But then again, what kind of selfish monster would refuse to care for her disabled husband, no matter how unhappy her marriage had been? Rachel wants to believe that she can dedicate her life to David’s needs, but knows in her heart it is impossible.Crash tackles a pervasive dilemma in our culture: the moral conflicts individuals face when caregiving for a disabled or cognitively impaired family member.

    But can she survive long enough to use it? A riveting science-fiction thriller from the million-copy NY Times bestselling author.When Allie Keane makes a revolutionary discovery in quantum computing, she kicks the ultimate hornets' nest. She doesn't know it, but a hidden battle for tech supremacy is raging around the world, and whoever controls her discovery will dominate the globe. Soon, Allie is being hunted by ruthless forces desperate to learn her secret, and only Zachary Reed, a gifted operative within a shadowy government agency, stands in the way.But as extraordinary as Allie's breakthrough is, it holds the key to unleashing something far bigger. An unrelated technology thousands of years beyond current science. A staggering advance capable of bringing about a utopia, rewriting the laws of life and death, and helping humanity spread throughout the stars.As long as it doesn't wipe out all life on Earth before that can happen . . .The Immortality Code is a masterful thriller. One crammed with breakneck action, unexpected twists, mind-blowing science, and ethical dilemmas readers will be contemplating long after they've read the last page.

    In this intriguing novel full of drama and plot twists, one family tries to hold on to their “perfect” life before their secrets, lies, and scandals are exposed.On the outside, the Joneses seem like the ideal family: Royce Jones, a funeral home mogul, and his wife, Lexi, are parents to Charity, Hope, and Lovie—and everybody wants to be them. But it’s true that money can’t buy happiness, and the Joneses are harboring secrets that can’t stay hidden forever… The funeral home business has been slow lately, and Royce is in serious trouble. When Lexi learns of their financial strain, she vows to hold on to her status by any means necessary—even if it means going behind her husband’s back. Lovie, seeing his beloved mother so stressed, will do whatever it takes to put a smile back on her face. And sibling rivalries tense up when Charity and Hope both fall for the same guy. On top of this, they all have secrets they’re hiding not only from people outside their family—but from each other. It’s only a matter of time before the Joneses’ perfect life goes spinning out of control and they’re revealed for who they truly are.