Showing results by narrator "David Bendena" in All Categories

Patrick Dunn, a fifty-something ex-cop, thought his days of action were over after a gunshot forced early retirement. But when an EMP plunges the country into darkness, Pat's mission to reach his children in Salem becomes a race against a brutal winter and devastating chaos. Alongside Holly, an escaped patient with a troubled past, and her steadfast dog Butler, they navigate treacherous terrain where danger lurks at every turn.

Everyone makes mistakes, and brilliant scientist Harry Coover is no different. But Harry keeps making the same extra-sticky mistake, and he begins to wonder whether it's such a mistake after all....

After some traumatic teenaged years in rural Connecticut, Cale and Ambrose Casey had nothing left to say to each other. Cale ran off to Hawaii to sell luxury real estate. Ambrose stayed behind and built up his construction company. Neither thought they’d be in touch again and were glad for it—until they learned of a real-estate developer’s plan to drain and expand Gibbs Pond.

Doig Gray is fifteen when his father is killed in a mining accident, which Doig comes to realizes was no accident. Torn from his mother and sister, Doig is sent off to college, his every movement monitored in case he has inherited his dissident father's unacceptable attitudes . . . or passwords. Doig has nothing but his own sense that there's something desperately wrong with the world—and a last name that evokes the assumption that he's destined to be the next traitor-hero.

In the endless game of Sphere of Words, the trader named Cat continues searching for the Keys hidden by the dead creators of the virtual reality.

Firmly rooted in the modern American West, this story collection follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A 74-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird-flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered sage grouse.

Thaddeus Kaufman, the son of booksellers, and Grace Cornell, raised in a basement apartment she longs to escape, meet at a neighborhood art fair in Chicago. Soon after, they head to New York, aloft on the wings of young love. Jennings Stratton, the son of a caretaker, and Muriel Sanchez, the daughter of a cop, meet in a house he is refurbishing in New Mexico, and they, too, head for the big city. In a vast Hudson River estate, the lives of the two couples ultimately intertwine.

In an overgrown industrial area of wartime Munich, 27 children hide from the Gestapo, scared and hungry. Their parents have been sent to concentration camps, and they have nowhere to go. Teacher Claudia Kellner discovers the group when she first takes in two homeless victims, risking her own safety by giving them shelter. Meanwhile, Commando Peter Chesham, a spy working for the British, succeeds in entering Third Reich territory. But his top-secret mission is threatened when he discovers the hiding place of the orphans.

Hi, I’m Dee, and I’m captain of the friend zone. I didn’t ask for this dubious honor, but don’t worry, I like it this way. I’m happy not dating and just being “one of the guys” on my volleyball team. At least I was until my scary new boss informs me that my job—I’m a developer at a dating app (ironic, right?) that I coded from scratch, an app that is essentially my baby—is in jeopardy. So I lie—tell him that I’m living proof the app works, because I’m engaged to a man I met on it. And who do I name as my lucky (fake) fiancé? My best friend, Noah Jackson.

Santa has it so easy: a workforce of elves to make the presents, a team of reindeer to deliver them, even a hi-tech factory! The Easter Bunny has to make and wrap all the chocolate eggs and deliver them all by himself. Now Bunny has had enough. But will his plan for a Christmas disaster turn into a Christmas delight?

In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of the Millennial Generation - the 25-year-olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reactions, unsure of what's public and what's private. Holding Still explores an unusual love triangle involving Billy, a former teen idol, now an anxiety-ridden agoraphobic; Josh, a shy transgendered paramedic who travels the city patching up damaged bodies; and Amy, a fashionable filmmaker coping with her first broken heart.

Diana Wolf likes to think she has it all: a rock-god husband, an empty nest, a wine cellar, and a dream home in the woods. Life is good. It has to be. But when she hires a cartographer, Kerry Perkins, to survey and map her estate in rural Tennessee, she pulls back a frayed corner of the lie that is her fairytale life. On his first night at Wolf Hollow, Kerry stumbles across a young girl's skeleton buried in the woods. But what really scares Diana is a familiar symbol carved into the girl’s skull: two wolves.

In this new collection, Patrick Barb explores themes of family found and lost, media consumption and the dangers of runaway nostalgia, the supernatural in our lives, and the impact of violence in both the long- and short-term. From rural backwoods to Park Slope brownstones, Barb's characters face impossible, awful situations, testing their inner strength and understanding of reality. Covering quiet horror, weird fiction, supernatural horror, slasher horror, topical dark fiction, and more, these stories spotlight supposedly familiar terrors and fears in new and unexpected ways.

Since reluctantly accepting the marshal's job at South Pass City, Jake's life has become an unending run of solving other people's problems. When outlaw boss Dutch van Zandt and his ruthless band mount a campaign of mayhem in Jake's corner of the Wyoming Territory, Jake learns that Lucien Ashley, his persistent adversary, might be aiding the criminals to expand his burgeoning cattle fortune.

Will true artificial intelligences be able to appreciate or even create art? Explore dystopian societies, where AI generates most of the content and human artists must eke out an existence, and utopias where artificial minds help unlock and enhance human creativity.

Jane has just received some terrible news. A phone full of missed calls and sympathetic text messages seems to indicate that her husband, Jim, a chaplain at the hospital where she works as a surgeon, is dead. Only, not quite—rather, his head has been removed from his body and cryogenically frozen. Jim awakes to find himself in an altogether unique situation, to say the least: his body gone but his consciousness alive, his only companion a mysterious disembodied voice.

Pandorum is launching a massive offensive, aiming to destroy Cat and his clan. As they’re blazing through everything in their path, thousands of players clash in battle, and the biggest alliances of Sphere join the fray. Can Cat stay on the sidelines? After all, he’s able to buy and sell almost anything in the game—even victory itself. Cat fights his own war in economics and trade. Which role will the merchant play in a bloody war fated to go down in the history of the game as the Battle for the North?

Jake Paynter is in deep trouble. With a $1000 bounty on his head, every lawman, bounty hunter, and desperado west of the Mississippi is gunning for him. His plan to lie low with the Shoshone quickly falls apart, but before he can leave for far Yellowstone, his two best friends, Gus Rivers and Stacy Blue, show up with a dilemma. Miners at South Pass City are getting murdered by a man or beast—no one is certain—and his immigrant friends from the Oregon Trail are in danger. Against his better judgment, he travels to the mining fields to bring the culprits to justice.

Patrick Dunn, a retired ex-cop haunted by his past, has faced relentless challenges since an EMP attack plunged the country into darkness. After navigating a brutal winter to escape Salem, he finds himself in Meadowview, desperately trying to protect his children and guide Holly, an escaped psychiatric patient turned fierce survivor. But as they settle into this new reality, they quickly realize that the greatest battles lie ahead. In this new landscape, old friends and allies converge as familiar faces from the End of Days series join the fight for survival.

The Seven Keys have been collected, and the world created solely to entertain has come alive. The one who gains control over them will rule Sphere. Who will it be—the Demon King, the digitized players, the corporations, or the people hiding under the masks of the Seven Brothers? The stakes are higher than ever, and the merchant’s life is once again at risk—after all, he holds one of the Keys that grant the power to create and destroy worlds at will.