Showing results by narrator "James Patrick" in All Categories

Prize-winning author Benjamin Hale's fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the seven stories in this collection are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.

Lew Sherry and Pete Lang accept an offer they simply can't resist. Oliver Wilton is willing to pay the cowboys $1,000 a day for ten days to protect him from danger that has him living in a state of terror. A seafaring man has arrived at the inn in town and has made no secret of the fact that he's come to settle a score with Wilton.

The year is 1922. The carnival is Pontilliar's Spectactular Star Light Miraculum, set up on the Texas-Louisiana border. One blazing summer night, a mysterious stranger steps out onto the midway, lights a cigarette, and forever changes the world around him. Tattooed snake charmer Ruby has traveled with her father's carnival for most of her life and, jaded though she is, can't help but be drawn to the tall man in the immaculate black suit who has joined the carnival as a geek, a man who bites the heads off live chickens.

His abductors forced him to a lying position in the box, placed a lid on top, jammed in four lengths of 3/4-inch plastic pipe for breathing tubes, and started shoveling in dirt to fill the hole. To cover their handiwork, they scattered some worn-out tires over the burial site. Then they drove away.

The 1967 kidnapping of 10-year-old Kenneth Young loomed as one of the few unsolved major kidnaping cases in the FBI's history. His ransom of $250,000 was the second-largest payoff in the annals of the bureau's cases at the time. Yet more than 30 months had passed without a clue being found to the criminal's identity.

In the third volume of Exordium, this swashbuckling space opera continues with Brandon and the Rifter crew of the Telvarna arriving at the Panarchic Navy's headquarters. The Rifters are imprisoned, and Brandon finds himself, as sole heir to the Phoenix Throne, fighting a battle of symbols, his only weapon his wits as he strives against the powerful and sophisticated aristocrats who hide lethal intent behind urbanity and style.

Jaeme, new lord of Castle Elfwood, Decutonius, an unpredictable mage, the druidess Laela, and the venerable knight Cedric must confront the evil that threatens to crush Elfwood in only three days.

Having reclaimed her throne, Queen Myriam is now desperate to find her missing grandmother. Over Ganry's protests, she embarks on a dangerous rescue mission. But with an unexpected threat, and mysterious forces at work, even Ganry's sword may not be enough to protect her.

Believed to be little more than small-town smugglers at first, their trail would lead the FBI to the world's most dangerous terrorists.

Bereaved and exiled from his homeland, Ganry ekes out a living as a wandering mercenary. A contract to protect a 15-year-old princess sees him embark on a quest across the kingdom. Confronted with danger at every turn, they get help from some unlikely companions. And Ganry discovers that there is more at stake than his own survival.

It was dangerous enough being an honest prosecutor in Mexico. But "Pepe" Patino had spent more than a year working closely with the US DEA, investigating a vicious drug syndicate run by two notorious brothers that was pumping cocaine into America, murdering their rivals, and routinely torturing and killing informers.

In 2013 Eli Mandel decided to recreate the 642-mile trek that John Keats completed in the summer of 1818, hoping to learn more about the famous poet who died at the age of 25. As Mandel matches his "ghostly companion's" journey step-for-step, the moments of discovery turn inward and Mandel is forced to face his own ghosts.

Magentite. The rarest of gems, one capable of turning any mage into an unstoppable force of destruction. A gem found only in the empty lands surrounding the Tyber River. And now war has come. Endless war between Esteria and the native Tyberons, a savage and mysterious people who prowl the grass-covered land with spearpoints ready. Unable to end the conflict the Esterians rely on mercenaries to bolster their military, desperate men like Dain Gladstone, a disgraced Paladin.

A new full-length collection of high fantasy by Dave Smeds. A lover spun from moonlight. A wife banished for carrying the child of a demon. A queen, beheaded ten years ago, whose sage counsel may still save the realm. Here are tales of swords, of magic, of romance. And of the struggle to be splendid of heart whether the opponent be within or without.

You live on a lake and it's Christmas. You go skating and you happen upon a man frozen under the ice. Who is he? No, don't ask! You're in a horror story.

A psychological study masquerading as an experiment in time travel lures an undergraduate English major to volunteer. To the astonishment of the psychologists in charge of the study, he takes their instructions to heart - with horrific results.

Nick Moulin is a rational, thinking man, who one day acquires a fascinating old book that brings him a dream of a beautiful woman and an adventure of long ago.

Orphan-warrior Caltus Talienson must capture Skryling's Blade, the ancient rune-carved sword and the only weapon that can slay the Dark Lord's fire-breathing servant.

They are four outcasts brought together by the god Vili, bonded by a sacred oath and sworn to each other's fealty. Bith the young sorceress. Cal warrior and outlaw for a crime he didn't commit. The troll Hathor who has foresworn his people's barbarous ways. The enigmatic elf Endril. Each had pledged to defeat the Dark Lord and his minions...or give their lives trying.

In Modern Families, Joshua Gamson brings us extraordinary family creation tales - his own included - that illuminate this changing world of contemporary kinship. Combining personal memoir and ethnographic storytelling, Modern Families tells a variety of unconventional family-creation tales - adoption and assisted reproduction, gay and straight parents, coupled and single, and multi-parent families - set against the social, legal, and economic contexts in which they were made.