Showing results by narrator "Aiello" in All Categories

Assembled here are stories new and old, spanning from 1960 to today. Meet the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese launder in Coney Island in search of love, a frontiersman who saves himself from a mauling grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver dam, three men from a circus looking for trouble at a rodeo, a washed out boxer trying to hang onto his career, and dozens of others rich characters.

At age 26 Dave Cicirelli found himself at a crossroads. While his friends on Facebook appeared to have lives of nonstop accomplishments, his early adulthood felt disappointingly routine. So one October morning, Dave announced on Facebook that he was dropping everything and heading west. Many thought him brave - or crazy.

From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie over the course of three decades: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression.

Speed: the most demonized - and misunderstood - drug in the land. Deprived of the ingrained romantic mysticism of the opiate or the cosmopolitan chic of cocaine or the mundane tolerance of marijuana, there is no sympathy for this devil. Yet speed - crystal meth, amphetamines, Dexedrine, Benzedrine, Adderall; crank, spizz, chickenscratch, oblivious marching powder, the go-fast - is the most American of drugs: twice the productivity at half the cost, and equal opportunity for all.

The finale of the second series of Deadlocked. The High Rollers are ready to take revenge against the forces aligned against them. A hard and long winter has forced them into hiding, but has also given them a respite from something else…something far worse than anything they’ve battled so far. The Noah Initiative has begun, and the land will soon be devastated by a new virus. The people lined up against the High Rollers are fighting among themselves as well, and everyone is at risk. This isn’t just a fight for survival anymore, it’s a fight to save the entire human race.

Seven years have passed since the outbreak of the Tilian Virus and the effects of the disease devastated the world.

A resilient band of survivors have overcome insurmountable odds. But now, on the brink of human extinction, can hope's dim light be strengthened? Can a cure exist to purge the darkness before the infected complete their domination?

The virus spread quicker than anyone could have imagined. Within days, over half the world's population became infected. Now a small band of survivors, led by high school teacher Mike Allard, must learn to live in a world ravaged by the deadly victims of the Tilian Virus. Weaving together two separate time frames, The Tilian Cure is a tale of humankind's most dire hour. Faced with imminent elimination, humanity's last glimmers struggle to break through the darkness of a pandemic the world has never before experienced.

A scientist's claim that he's found the secrets of the universe's origin encoded in DNA sparks a race against time to uncover the truth in this fast-paced thriller of science and faith, power and murder, loss and redemption.

Solace. Shelter. Safety. For the survivors of the Tilian Virus, they thought their escape would lead them to a new beginning. But the effects of the virus reach far beyond simply infection. A trusted member of the survivors hides a horrible past. While in the wastelands of America, a new threat grows. The bonds of friendship strain and shatter. And the Tils become more deadly than ever. The virus was just the beginning. Now the world must face the Tilian Effect.

"Sun and Steel" illuminates the origin of Jirom, one of the main characters of the Book of the Black Earth epic fantasy series. This story explores the brutal nature of this world as well as the honor and duty that bind its characters together.

Working as a barmaid in the rough-and-tumble city of Half Town, Jancy the Quick keeps her true profession a secret but is poised to respond whenever injustice is found. In this instance injustice has found her. But this time Jancy may have bitten off more than she can chew.

When a remote island's rain forest is threatened by the greedy timber company Loggocorp, the Humans Who Know (that mice have evolved) develop a secret plan to save the forest. And they need all the help they can get from the Big Cheese, Trey, and their other friends in the Mouse Nation. First the team must unravel a centuries-old mystery: Who actually owns the rain forest? The mission to find that person brings Megan and her family across the ocean to England, where everything starts to go just a little bit...weird.

The most civilized and 'decent' among us find that we are complicit with the most brutal murderers. We enter into literally unspeakable alliances - of which we dare not speak except through the obliquities and indirections of fiction, poetry, and visual art of the sort gathered here in New Jersey Noir.

In Rocket Science, Jay Lake's first novel, Vernon Dunham's friend Floyd Bellamy has returned to Augusta, Kansas after serving in World War II, but he hasn't come back empty-handed: he's stolen a super-secret aircraft right from under the Germans. Vernon doesn't think it's your ordinary run-of-the-mill aircraft. For one thing, it's been buried under the Arctic ice for hundreds of years. When it actually starts talking to him, he realizes it doesn't belong in Kansas-or anywhere on Earth.

Detective Mike Palazzola of Detroit’s Third Precinct is good at catching the bad guys. But after several mishandled criminal cases, he becomes increasingly frustrated with the judicial system and its prosecutors. The alleged murderers he worked so hard to capture and indict are either dismissed on a legal technicality, exonerated, or given lenient sentences by the court system.

With the ACA and Hive invasions successfully thwarted, Tranquility's newest colonists are struggling to rebuild. Peace has finally come to humanity's furthest colony, and life is finally starting to return to normal. The peace was not meant to be. After receiving a distress call from a distant scouting mission, Lander and the newly formed military find themselves deploying to a dead alien world, where the heart of the Hive lies in wait.

A mysterious new contagion is decimating the population. It starts in the lungs, like the flu, then moves to the bones, where it weakens and breaks them, eventually killing the host. The disease's origin, methods of propagation and means of contraction are all unknown. There is no vaccine, and none is expected, as the virus is protean and elusive. If it remains unchecked and mutates into a more virulent form, it will become an extinction level event.

What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle's break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut's remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting Earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor's buried longing.

A small ship like the Veho quickly becomes a makeshift family. Especially in the far reaches of space. Samantha had been working mining and salvage operations with Jack and Benji for years. While prospecting a new claim, they come across an abandoned ship and what comes next will change the course of human history.

The mission seems simple enough: extract a pharmaceutical magnate from Russian soil, a volatile man who holds the secret to a deadly bio-weapon. But nothing is as it appears to be. A conspiracy of world-shattering scope unravels as Tucker and Kane struggle to keep one move ahead of their deadly enemies. From the frozen steppes of Russia to the sun-blasted mountains of South Africa and Namibia, a biological threat millions of years in the making strikes out at the heart of America.