Hiding behind the imposing walls of a medieval fortress, they struggle against all the odds to rebuild in a wasteland without electricity or government. Scraping a living, far away from the smoking ruins of the cities, they wait in hope, trying to make sense of what happened.Hurst Castle stands alone. Its seventy-four occupants united in a daily struggle, scavenging for food and supplies. The Millennial Virus is the least of their concerns. When the arrival of outsiders threatens to tip the balance of power, the people of Hurst are faced with a desperate choice: set aside their differences and join an alliance that promises new hope or unite against the newcomers and their plans for reconstruction. Who can be trusted? Only time will tell.The battle for Hurst has begun.

    Decades post-apocalypse, a man sets out on a perilous voyage into the undead badlands.

    The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely.Novellete-length, this story is the inspiration behind the popular Total Recall movies from 1990 and 2012.

    While the rest of the world has moved on, losing itself in the noise of a media-glutted future, survivor John Dominic Blaxton remains obsessed with the past. Grieving for his wife and unborn child who perished in the blast, Dominic relives his lost life by immersing in the Archive—a fully interactive digital reconstruction of Pittsburgh, accessible to anyone who wants to visit the places they remember and the people they loved. Dominic investigates deaths recorded in the Archive to help close cases long since grown cold, but when he discovers glitches in the code surrounding a crime scene—the body of a beautiful woman abandoned in a muddy park that he’s convinced someone tried to delete from the Archive—his cycle of grief is shattered. With nothing left to lose, Dominic tracks the murder through a web of deceit that takes him from the darkest corners of the Archive to the ruins of the city itself, leading him into the heart of a nightmare more horrific than anything he could have imagined.

    Save the present. Stop the future. Alastair Reynolds unfolds a time-traveling climate fiction adventure in Permafrost.2080: at a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers and physicians gather to gamble humanity’s future on one last-ditch experiment. Their goal: to make a tiny alteration to the past, averting a global catastrophe while at the same time leaving recorded history intact. To make the experiment work, they just need one last recruit: an ageing schoolteacher whose late mother was the foremost expert on the mathematics of paradox.2028: a young woman goes into surgery for routine brain surgery. In the days following her operation, she begins to hear another voice in her head... an unwanted presence which seems to have a will, and a purpose, all of its own – one that will disrupt her life entirely. The only choice left to her is a simple one.Does she resist... or become a collaborator?

    But is Susan who she claims to be? And was Gloria mentally competent when she made her will or was she manipulated in some way? Boston Investigator Mark Kane is hired to discover the truth, but as the investigation proceeds he soon finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery, and as the suspects mount up he needs all his wits about him to find out the truth, and prevent Greg’s adult sons from financial ruin or worse. As usual, Kane’s longtime companion Lucy is there to lend him a helping hand, but will she be able to help him solve the mystery? READ THE FIRST FIVE CHAPTERS AT www.johnhemmings.net. GET BOOK FIVE: ‘MISSING’ FREE OF CHARGE at www.johnhemmings.net