Elwere - city of rainbows, where the fortunes of the planet Oroga are concentrated in the grasping hands of the privileged few. To David, stolen from Elwere as a baby and raised as a thief of the Lower City, it is a dream of paradise, a treasure trove to which he must find the key, no matter what the cost... And Eschteef - a schrift of the jewel-and-precious-metals schtann, twice the size of a human, more than twice as strong, with frightfully glowing eyes and rows of needle-sharp teeth.

Titus sought glory in the Free States Infantry. He ended up in the Engineers. When the chance came to prove himself, he grabbed it with both hands. And caught the eye of the Intelligence service. How could a boot enlisted engineer transform into a soldier who works behind the scenes to root out corruption in the ranks as easily as providing combat intel to the front lines?

When aging, balding, copy editor Ernest "Sparky" Hemingway (no relation) gets a call from the daughter of his Vietnam buddy George Washington (also no relation), he is faced with a choice. He can head out to Minneapolis to help her out of a jam or hang up the phone - and this phone call has the potential to turn Sparky's life upside down.

In the 17th century, in an alternate universe, much of Europe, Asia, and the New World are part of an Empire ruled from England. The Order of Crown, Shield, and Dragon is a legion of special agents for the Crown: special emissaries in time of peace, and invincible warriors in more violent times. They carry special weapons: swords, each of which contains the soul of someone of great power. Even in the hands of a knight of the Order, even wielded in the cause of righteousness, a red sword is terribly dangerous to its owner and all around him.

When strange wolf-like creatures kidnap his girlfriend and his mother, Torrie and his friend Ian Silverstein join Torrie’s father, Thorsen, and the mysterious "Uncle Hosea" on a rescue mission via a passageway to the exotic world from which Hosea and Thorsen had fled two decades earlier. Once entering the world of The Hidden Ways, they must battle gods, monsters and men, including the sinister Fire Duke, who seeks ultimate power and control of magical gems that can destroy the universe.

It began as just another evening of fantasy gaming with James, Karl, Andrea, and the rest ready to assume their various roles as wizard, cleric, warrior, or thief. But sorcerous gamemaster Professor Deighton had something else planned for this unsuspecting group of college students. And the "game" soon became a matter of life and death as the seven adventurers found themselves transported to an alternate world and into the bodies of the actual characters they had been pretending to be....

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.

Five days after Owen Zastava Pitt pushed his insufferable boss out of a 14th story window, he woke up in the hospital with a scarred face, an unbelievable memory, and a job offer. It turns out that monsters are real. All the things from myth, legend, and B-movies are out there, waiting in the shadows. Some of them are evil, and some are just hungry. Monster Hunter International is the premier eradication company in the business. And now Owen is their newest recruit.

For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the "Sliver of Infinity," reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison.

Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terrorist's worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world...and then tragedy struck.

Amidst a murky underworld of flesh-trafficking, prostitution, and institutionalized corruption, elite soldier Jez Kornfeld is thrown into a world where nothing is what it seems, nobody can be trusted, and everything can be violently torn from him.

The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.

Ella Patel, thief, con-artist and smuggler, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. One night, she happens upon a man and woman being attacked. The man freezes, leaving the woman to fight off five attackers at once, before succumbing. As she dies, to both Ella and the man's surprise, the sparkling light that rises from the woman enters Ella, instead of the man. She soon realizes she's been inhabited by Io, a low-ranking Quasing. Now Ella must help the alien presence to complete her mission.

Lt. General Nick Angriff has spent his adult life protecting family and country from a world of terrorism spinning out of control. On the battlefield, off the grid, in clandestine special task forces and outright black ops, Angriff never wavers from duty. But when a terror attack on Lake Tahoe kills his family, he's left with only the corrosive acid of revenge...that is, until a hated superior officer reveals the deepest of all secret operations. Against the day of national collapse, a heavily armed military unit rests in cryogenic storage....

Dave Elliot is about to have a very bad day at the office. This morning, just as Dave has finished knotting his tie, his boss comes into the office with a gun in his hand, prepared to murder him. From this moment onward, everyone Dave Elliot runs into today will be trying to kill him. And he has no idea why...

Ella Patel, thief, con-artist and smuggler, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. One night, she happens upon a man and woman being attacked. The man freezes, leaving the woman to fight off five attackers at once, before succumbing. As she dies, to both Ella and the man's surprise, the sparkling light that rises from the woman enters Ella, instead of the man. She soon realizes she's been inhabited by Io, a low-ranking Quasing. Now Ella must help the alien presence to complete her mission.

It began as just another evening of fantasy gaming with James, Karl, Andrea, and the rest ready to assume their various roles as wizard, cleric, warrior, or thief. But sorcerous gamemaster Professor Deighton had something else planned for this unsuspecting group of college students. And the "game" soon became a matter of life and death as the seven adventurers found themselves transported to an alternate world and into the bodies of the actual characters they had been pretending to be....

When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it. He isn’t. As of last night, he has a passenger in his brain - an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Over the millennia his people have trained human heroes to be great leaders, to advance our species at a rate far beyond what it would have achieved on its own. Split into two opposing factions - the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix - the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries.

With Earth in the path of the rapacious Posleen, the Galactic Federation offers help to the backward humans - for a price. You can protect yourself from your enemies, but God save you from your allies!

With this stunning series opener, Django Wexler leaps to the upper echelon of today’s best fantasy authors. The Thousand Names opens his Shadow Campaigns series with a tale of bloody rebellion that will reshape an empire -- and a world. Captain Marcus d’Ivoire and Winter Ihernglass see their fortunes rise under the command of military genius Janus bet Vhalnich. But Janus’ obsession with the supernatural portends a dire fate for the realm.

For a thousand years the ash fell and no flowers bloomed. For a thousand years the Skaa slaved in misery and lived in fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler, the "Sliver of Infinity," reigned with absolute power and ultimate terror, divinely invincible. Then, when hope was so long lost that not even its memory remained, a terribly scarred, heart-broken half-Skaa rediscovered it in the depths of the Lord Ruler's most hellish prison.

American lawyer and former police detective Judge Devlin is in Europe sifting through evidence of Nazi atrocities. He is part of the International Military Tribunal, but his agenda is personal. He hopes to convict SS member and former Olympic sprinter Eric Seyss, the man responsible for his military chaplain brother’s death. When Judge learns Eric has just escaped from an American POW camp, the American sets off in a desperate race for vengeance.

Mariko Oshiro is not your average Tokyo cop. As the only female detective in the city’s most elite police unit, she has to fight for every ounce of respect, especially from her new boss. While she wants to track down a rumored cocaine shipment, he gives her the least promising case possible. But the case - the attempted theft of an old samurai sword - proves more dangerous than anyone on the force could have imagined.

In the time of the Ancients the universe was united - but that was so far in the past that not even memory remains, only the broken artifacts that a few Makers can reshape into their original uses. What survives is shattered into enclaves - some tiny, some ruined, some wild. Into the gaps between settlements, and onto the road that connects all human reality and the reality that is not human and may never have been human, have crept monsters.

This two-story compiliation, read by Stefan Rudnicki, offers two stories from David Drake's popular Hammer's Slammers series. In At Any Price, Col. Alois Hammer's indomitable Slammers are called in to support human colonists against a native uprising in this novel-length adventure. But even though the natives' off-world weapons are no match for the Slammers, their ability to teleport gives them a frightening advantage! In Rolling Hot, the battle-crazed troop of recruits and vets, led by Captain Ranson, must cover 300 miles of hostile enemy territory.

Evan Gabriel wasn't always a feared and respected North American Federation Navy Commander. Before dangerous missions to the ice-bound planet of Poliahu, the deadly jungle world of Eden, and politically corrupt Mars, he was a simple recruit, fighting to make his mark in the elite Naval Special Forces…and was part of a top-secret military experiment that would change his life forever. Zero Point tells the tale of a young man faced with difficult choices and dangerous trials.

Simon Kovalic, top intelligence operative for the Commonwealth of Independent Systems, is on the front line of the burgeoning Cold War with the aggressive Illyrican Empire. He barely escapes his latest mission with a broken arm and vital intel that points to the empire cozying up to the Bayern Corporation: a planet-sized bank. There’s no time to waste, but with Kovalic out of action, his undercover team is handed over to his ex-wife, Lt. Commander Natalie Taylor.

Drug dealers, hustlers, brothels, dirty politics, corrupt cops...and sorcery. Welcome to Low Town. In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its cham­pion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs.

York August Sixteen was abandoned as a baby, abused and molested as a child, and beaten and harassed as a teen and had his rightful place in the Republic's Space Navy stolen from him. Fighting back against huge government systems was useless. Dispensing justice on an individual, case-by-case basis was more to his liking, yet even that was taken away when he was stationed on a lonely communication space station. York's life would change when he decided to seek justice for people even less fortunate than him.

It is 500 years ago. A group of Spanish conquistadors searching for gold, led by a young and brilliant commander named Simon De Oliveras, land in the New World. What they find in this uncharted land is a treasure far more valuable: the Fountain of Youth. The Spaniards slaughter the Uzita, the Native American tribe who guard the precious waters that will keep the conquistadors young for centuries. But one escapes: Shako, the chief's fierce and beautiful daughter, who swears to avenge her people - a blood oath that spans more than five centuries.