For dinosaurs, it was a big rock. For humans: Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). When the Earth is hit by the greatest CME in recorded history (several times larger than the Carrington Event of 1859), the combined societies of the planet's most developed nations struggle to adapt to a life thrust back into the Dark Ages. In the United States, the military scrambles to speed the nation's recovery on multiple fronts including putting down riots, establishing relief camps, delivering medical aid, and bringing communication and travel back on line. Just as a real foothold is established in retaking the skies (utilizing existing commercial aircraft supplemented by military resources and ground control systems), a mysterious virus takes hold of the population, spreading globally over the very flight routes that the survivors fought so hard to rebuild.

Drake, a retired police detective, receives a call in the dead of night from an alien-obsessed podcaster. He hastily departs for Montana the following morning. The phenomenon continues all over the globe. What are they? What do they mean? Britt is on assignment for a digital magazine when she encounters one of the Glass in a tragic boating accident, leaving her no choice but to follow the lead. Panic ensues as mysterious creatures are sighted.

Celine Sutherland is dead - her body half-hidden under the Atlantic City Boardwalk - and Damien Dickens, P.I. killed her. Detective Lt. James Holmes found Damien's gun and wallet near the crime scene, and discovered Celine's cash-filled, emerald-studded evening bag hidden in Damien's apartment. Sylvia Sutherland, Celine's older sister and CEO of the family's tobacco empire, insists that Dickens pulled the trigger. And the Sutherlands carry a lot of influence in Atlantic City.

Yesterday’s mystery requires the detective of tomorrow. Fans of hard-boiled, tough-as-nails detectives have a new hero in this action-packed three-book mystery collection from Nathan Van Coops. Snappy dialogue, mind-bending time travel, and laugh-out-loud humor will keep you up late solving this series of electrifying whodunits.

New York Police Lieutenant Danny Pak has a problem. When one of his officers calls him out to an unusual crime scene, Danny realizes that it’s terrifyingly similar to something the department thought was dead and buried. Across town, Agent William “Buddy” Redhorn of the FBI has two problems. He’s been assigned a potentially career-ending case with magical ties, and his sorceress boss is out of town. The case involves a stolen statue that belongs to the government of Brunei, but the more he chases the thieves, the more bodies begin to drop. Bodies affected by an unknown magic.

Magnus "Steps" Craig is part of the elite three-man Special Tracking Unit of the FBI. Called in on special cases where his skills are particularly needed, he works as a tracker. The media dubs him "The Human Bloodhound", since Steps is renowned for his incredible ability to find and follow trails over any surface better than anyone else. But there's a secret to his success. Steps has a special ability - a kind of synesthesia - where he can see the "essence" of a person, something he calls "shine", on everything they've touched.

Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police force has a serious problem: in a community where a decade could pass without a single murder, the body count is suddenly mounting. Innocent citizens are being killed - and others set up - seemingly orchestrated by a mysterious ski-masked man. Signs suggest that a three-year-old murder trial might lie at the heart of things, but it's a case that many in the department would prefer remained closed. A man of quiet integrity, Lt. Gunther knows that he must pursue the case to its conclusion, wherever it leads.

College professor Stephen Barlow needs cash. Badly. He puts his skepticism aside and signs on to a paranormal research organization in the hopes of scoring a fat bonus. Enter Chaythe Asylum: a long-shuttered and controversial institution where patients were allegedly subjected to unethical experiments. Stephen deems the old building, closed in 1989 after a series of grisly murders, as good a place as any to explore the possibility of the supernatural, and arranges to take a tour with his students. But it turns out that the asylum is not as abandoned as it seems. There is something sinister in the building.

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.

On his first night with Detroit PD, Officer Walter O’Brien is called to a murder scene. A terrified 20-year-old has bludgeoned her kidnapper with skill that shocks even O’Brien’s veteran partner. The young woman is also a brilliant escape artist. Her bold flight from police custody makes the case impossible to solve - and, for Walter, even more impossible to forget. By the time Walter’s promoted to detective, his fascination with the missing, gray-eyed woman is approaching obsession.

When Detective Douglas Jones' son goes missing under strange circumstances, everyone assumes he ran away. The first break in the case comes when a long-lost relative shows up with a new name and a strange tattoo on the palm of his left hand. His name is Tallow Jones. He is a private detective... and a wizard. A wizard is needed too, because in Atlanta, strange abductions are just the tip of the iceberg.

Reed Ferguson loves film noir and classic detective fiction, and he wants more than anything to emulate his hero, Humphrey Bogart. So Reed tries his hand at the detecting business and what follows is a humorous journey into suspense territory.

Detective Reed Mattox, just three months removed from the death of his partner, has turned invisibility into an art form. Switching to the K-9, taking over the graveyard shift, moving to a farmhouse miles outside of Columbus - his every move has become predicated on putting as much distance between himself and the outside world as possible. That distance is shattered, though, when bodies begin turning up in The Bottoms, the poverty-stricken section of town he is assigned to patrol.

Sebastian Drake is a novelist who’s trying to come up with his next story idea. But he’s stuck. Drake receives an unexpected visit from a man interested in hiring him for a project and who thinks he has just the solution to Drake’s writing challenges. His proposition to Drake is simple: become a hired agent to investigate a cold murder case involving one of Chicago’s most powerful political families.

When Caleb Wardell, the infamous "Chicago Sniper", escapes from death row two weeks before his execution, the FBI calls on the services of Carter Blake, a man with certain specialized talents whose skills lie in finding those who don't want to be found - a man to whom Wardell is no stranger. Along with Elaine Banner, an ambitious special agent juggling life as a single mother with her increasingly high-flying career, Blake must track Wardell down as he cuts a swathe across America, apparently killing at random.

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.

Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police force has a serious problem: in a community where a decade could pass without a single murder, the body count is suddenly mounting. Innocent citizens are being killed - and others set up - seemingly orchestrated by a mysterious ski-masked man. Signs suggest that a three-year-old murder trial might lie at the heart of things, but it's a case that many in the department would prefer remained closed. A man of quiet integrity, Lt. Gunther knows that he must pursue the case to its conclusion, wherever it leads.

Maggie's latest case is an unidentified female in her early teens, discovered in a local cemetery. More shocking than the girl's injuries - for Maggie at least - is the fact that no one has reported her missing. She and the detectives assigned to the case (including her cop ex-husband) are determined to follow every lead, run down every scrap of evidence. But the monster they seek is watching every move, closer to them than they could possibly imagine.

Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels is having a bad week. Her live-in boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer, chronic insomnia has caused her to max out her credit cards with late-night home shopping purchases, and a frightening killer who calls himself "The Gingerbread Man" is dumping mutilated bodies in her district.

Chicago private investigator Michael Kelly is hired by his former partner, John Gibbons, to help solve an eight-year-old rape and battery case, a case it turns out his old friend was once ordered to forget. When Gibbons turns up dead on Navy Pier, Kelly enlists a team of his savviest colleagues to connect the dots between the recent murder and the cold case it revived.

Stephen Leeds, AKA 'Legion,' is a man whose unique mental condition allows him to generate a multitude of personae: hallucinatory entities with a wide variety of personal characteristics and a vast array of highly specialized skills. As the story begins, Leeds and his 'aspects' are drawn into the search for the missing Balubal Razon, inventor of a camera whose astonishing properties could alter our understanding of human history and change the very structure of society.

When Professor Wilson Bledsoe is brutally murdered, two loathsome white supremacists seem like the obvious culprits. But Bledsoe's younger brother Sterling, an FBI agent in New York, has other ideas. A look around Wilson's lab and interviews with his students, his fellow professors, and the college's president pique Sterling's curiosity about Wilson's nearly-completed project on the mysterious death of hundreds of local blackbirds.

The title character from ABC's hit television series Castle kicks off his new series of books featuring tough and sexy New York police detective Nikki Heat with a bang.

If you've never read a Repairman Jack novel, this is the place to begin. It's 1990. A twenty-one-year-old named Jack has dropped out of college, leaving his old life behind to build a new one in New York City. Manhattan's rough edges are jagged enough to shred any unwary newcomer, but perhaps not one who is determined to stay off the grid, at any cost, in the busiest metropolis on earth. And to do so, he'll have to take jobs of a less than legal nature.

West Berlin, 1979. Helen Abell oversees the CIA's network of safe houses, rare havens for field agents and case officers amidst the dangerous milieu of a city in the grips of the Cold War. Helen's world is upended when, during her routine inspection of an agency property, she overhears a meeting between two unfamiliar people speaking a coded language that hints at shadowy realities far beyond her comprehension. Before the day is out, she witnesses a second unauthorized encounter, one that will place her in the sight lines of the most ruthless and powerful man at the agency.

It's the middle of a sweltering late-summer heat wave in Los Angeles. In the nearby mountains, a seasonal wildfire burns out of control. If not for this fire, authorities might never have discovered wreckage of an Alfa Romeo convertible - or the body of the car's driver - in the dense underbrush at the bottom of Topanga Canyon. But when firefighters happen across the crash site while battling the nearby blaze, it's only a matter of time and basic forensics before the apparent accident is upgraded to homicide.

In the future, there are many parallel Earths - but only one of them has time travel. Known as Primetime, its criminals break into the pasts of other worlds, far beyond the reach of conventional police. Blake Din is the top agent of the Cutting Room, the group tasked with stopping these trespassers. After a mission to undo the murder of a young boy, he uncovers extensive damage to another world's timeline - and a conspiracy that reaches all the way back to Primetime.

Who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side - "a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting" for his clients, and perhaps for himself: He hints at a much worldlier past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse.

It will take more than angels and demons to stop him. Reporter Spencer Finch is embroiled in the hunt for a missing book, encountering along the way cat burglars and mobsters, hackers and mysterious monks. At the same time, he's trying to make sense of the legacy left to him by his late grandfather, a chest of what appear to be pulp magazines from the golden age of fantasy fiction.

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.