In the wilds of a jungle planet, the Legion fights in brutal combat as Republic marines fly their SLICS from one tragedy to the next. H292, a repurposed warbot, shows the heart of a hero as he wades into the battle not to destroy - but to save.

Orcs. Trolls. Wraith riders. Dark wizards. Together, they form an unstoppable force. Or so they thought. Dark Army...meet the US Army Rangers. When a Joint Task Force of elite Rangers are transported to a strange and fantastic future where science and evolution have incarnated the evils of myth and legend, they find themselves surrounded, pinned down, and in a desperate fight for their very survival - against nightmares of flesh and blood made real. Which means only one thing. It’s time to Ranger up and stack bodies.

A U.S. Army Ranger sniper finds himself on his own and on the move far downrange and beyond the wire in an epic fantasy world filled with deadly monsters and dangerous foes in a total battle royale for glory, hoard—and flat-out survival. Adrift on the Sea of Riddles and lost in a dangerous world of epic fables, Sgt. Thor and his anti-materiel sniper rifle, Mjölnir, must survive brutal pirates, the darkest sorcery, and a catastrophic shipwreck on a strange island steeped in arcane mystery and containing the remains of a lost civilization guarding an ancient artifact of great and terrible power.

Tired of sitting out the war on Psydon in a mobile office lab, Legion Lieutenant Washam agrees to undertake a covert and unsanctioned mission with a band of Republic Recon Marines. Inserted deep behind enemy lines, the strike force uncovers a surprise key to ending a bitter war. Now they must navigate a hostile jungle teeming with murderous alien rebels, pushing themselves to the limits of their abilities, to get this vital intel to Legion Command - if they can survive that long.

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.

The scum hiding deep inside the Reach out along galaxy's edge thought they could kill her and not pay the price. For years these hardened killers have run roughshod over the lawless worlds where Republic justice is never as fast as the blaster in your hand and where double-crosses and death are a part of every deal. They thought this time would be no different. They were wrong. This time, the Guild sent the legendary bounty hunter Tyrus Rechs. As the infamous Rechs pursues the men who murdered his colleague, he's hell-bent on justice.

For recently expelled college dropout Dirk Wilson, picking up and re-selling other player's scraps from cleared dungeons and side quests gone sideways is the only thing keeping him from living on the streets. Tired of ramen noodles, past-due notices, and feeling like his future is over before it ever started, Dirk decides that if he's going to make something of himself, it'll be within the game, taking advantage of the real-life payouts from selling in-game goods on King's League's River Market. But the game leaves little margin for error, and Dirk's virtual problems grow.

Ragnar Beck only wanted one thing out of a life - the chance to soldier. In a war for the survival of the last continent untouched by the invader, Beck finally gets his shot to prove he’s a combat warrior. As the battle unfolds and the only choice is to fight to the bitter end, he performs like the soldier he was raised to be, leaving no enemy standing on the last battleground he’ll ever see. Or is it?

Surrounded and outgunned, a group of private military contractors known as “Strange Company” find themselves on a remote planet at the edge of known space, and on the losing end of a bad contract. Orbital D-beam strikes, dropships bristling with auto-guns, missiles, and troops - even Monarch space marines in state-of-the-art advanced battle rattle - will try to prevent the company from reaching the exfil LZ and getting off-world.

A secret buried in the Antarctic. A puzzle unsolved for thousands of years. And a Brooklyn-born master gunnery sergeant who's royally pissed that he has to babysit the researchers sent to figure it all out. But when Patrick "Wic" Finnegan finally sees what the team has uncovered, he can't believe his eyes, nor is he prepared for the violence to come. Soon, the portal opens and unleashes a storm of unbridled fury upon humanity.

Dennis E. Taylor, author of the best-selling Bobiverse trilogy, explores a whole different, darker world in this sci-fi stand-alone. Determined to give his wife and children a better life back home, Ivan Pritchard ventures to the edge of known space to join the crew of the Mad Astra as an asteroid miner. He's prepared for hard work and loneliness—but not the unthinkable. After coming into contact with a mysterious alien substance, Pritchard finds an unwelcome entity sharing his mind, and a disturbing physical transformation taking place.

We were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win. And that was the good news. The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.

Jack Kernigan is having a bad day...a bad year...a bad life. After being booted out of MIT, he’s back in his Ohio hometown, working for the family business, facing a life of mediocrity. Then one day, out on a delivery, his truck hits...something. Something big...something furry...something invisible. And, it turns out, something not of this Earth. Fate can play funny tricks. Which is why Jack suddenly finds himself the planet’s best hope to unravel a conspiracy of galactic proportions that could spell the end of the human race.

Get ready to experience two more origin stories in the Backyard Starship universe.

The Galahad, a faster-than-light spacecraft, carries 50 scientists and engineers on a mission to prepare Kepler 452b, Earth's nearest habitable neighbor at 1400 light years away. With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope. After 10 years in a failed cryogenic bed - body asleep, mind awake - William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.

Josie O'Conner travels to San Francisco in 1951 to locate her gay brother, a private dick investigating a blackmail ring targeting lesbians and gay men. Jimmy's friends claim that just before he disappeared he became a rat, informing the cops on the bar community. Josie adopts Jimmy's trousers and wingtips, battling to clear his name, halt the blackmailers, and exact justice for the many queer corpses.

Aida Palmer performs a spirit medium show onstage at Chinatown's illustrious Gris-Gris speakeasy. However, her ability to summon (and expel) the dead is more than just an act. Winter Magnusson is a notorious bootlegger who's more comfortable with guns than ghosts. Unfortunately for him, he's the recent target of a malevolent hex that renders him a magnet for hauntings. After Aida's supernatural assistance is enlisted to banish the ghosts, her spirit-chilled aura heats up as the charming bootlegger casts a different sort of spell on her.

In 1945, a ruthless female assassin attempts to take down the ultimate target: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And an unlikely hero, Professor Mikhal Lammeck, may be the only one who can stop her.

In a charming cozy mystery series debut, Leslie Nagel's irrepressible small-town heroine finds that her fellow book club members may be taking their Agatha Christie a bit too literally - and murder a bit too lightly.

In number-one New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris’s "Dahlia Underground,” venerable vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers survives an attack by an anti-vampire terrorist group, only to show them they tried to blow up the wrong bloodsucker. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, a ghost assigned to assist humans in trouble, steps into the middle of a marital dispute with surprising twists in Carolyn Hart’s “Riding High”....

FBI analyst Kassidy Bishop is assigned to the "'For You' Killer" task force after a series of sadistic murders bearing the same signature arise in different parts of the country. The homicides are both calculated and savage, occurring in different states, but bearing the same signature: the words "for you" scribbled at each crime scene. The case chills Kassidy, bringing back memories of her own encounter with a violent criminal five years earlier.

In Azalea, Mississippi, the only thing steamier than the summer days are the men of the King family. When the patriarch Randall King is found dead, Detective Arabella Matthews will race the clock to stop the killer from striking again. Benton, the eldest of the King siblings, has to decide if he wants to cooperate with the feisty detective or conduct his own investigation. The more he finds out about his father - and the closer he gets to Arabella - the more he wants to keep her safe. But the killer has different plans....

It is more than just the late November weather that has cast a chill over the campus of Atherton University. When the wife of respected professor Eric Eberman is killed in a tragic accident, his secret student lover, Randall Stone, fears the professor tried to avert career suicide by committing homicide. Or do the dead woman’s haunting last words point to an even more damning crime? Fearing the truth, Randall digs into his lover’s hidden history.

Five years after the brutal slaying of her husband, software technology executive Jill Shannon is finally ready to take the next step in her life. With her wedding to Phoenix Arizona prosecuting attorney Conner Manning just eight weeks away, the only cloud on Jill's horizon is her future father-in-law's political ambitions for his son. Jill has dark secrets in her past. Secrets she can't afford to have exposed under the relentless lights of a political campaign.

Join scholar and spell-caster Everson Croft in this five-book urban fantasy set, from the discovery of his magic in the prequel novella, Book of Souls, to his battle against a mind-warping evil in the shocking finale, Death Mage.

Modern gods and goddesses, remote, revered - and like the pantheon of heroes and heroines of ancient myth - possessing great power tempered with flaws. Now, find within this anthology great tales by gifted and award-winning authors who move superheroes from the four-color panels of comic books to the fantastic pages of fiction, stories that will remind anyone who ever wanted to wear a cape or don a cowl of the extraordinary powers of the imagination!

Mae Malveaux, an attorney with Minneapolis Child Protective Services, is burnt-out, tired, and frustrated. Passing on an invite from Jill, her flirtatious coworker, Mae just wants a quiet night in. Leaving the office late, she's surprised to find the Heritage Line streetcars up and running and hops aboard, eager for a quick trip home. But this is no ordinary streetcar....

There are things in the darkness, things much worse than the tracks and abandoned pieces of equipment that trip the children up and gash at their feet and legs, things that brush silently past them, touching their faces before disappearing again....

Years ago, the Gypsy Kumpania where Janeal Mikkado lived was attacked by outsiders. With her best friend about to be consumed by a fire, Janeal had two options: try to save her friend—at serious risk to her own life—or disappear with the million dollars that she had just discovered. But the past is quickly coming back to haunt her. Both the best friend and the boyfriend that she was sure were dead have reappeared in her life, as has someone who knows about the money. There's a debt to be paid for the money she found, but there's an even greater debt she must face.

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.

Agent Isaac Steele has problems. He spends all his splibs on drink and drugs. He has some deep-seated and very much unresolved issues with his parents. And his robotic partner at Greatest Britain’s Department of Clarification, Dr Timothy Stephens, is ruled more by his heart than his hard drive. But all these issues take a back seat when Isaac stumbles upon a case involving the most sensitive information in the cosmos - a Never File, inaccessible to all except those with the highest clearance. He is expressly forbidden to involve himself. So naturally he does.

The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a mari­juana overdose - and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

Orcs. Trolls. Wraith riders. Dark wizards. Together, they form an unstoppable force. Or so they thought. Dark Army...meet the US Army Rangers. When a Joint Task Force of elite Rangers are transported to a strange and fantastic future where science and evolution have incarnated the evils of myth and legend, they find themselves surrounded, pinned down, and in a desperate fight for their very survival - against nightmares of flesh and blood made real. Which means only one thing. It’s time to Ranger up and stack bodies.

The Amazon rainforest holds a world-changing secret—a ship lost to time from another world. College student Will Kaufman unearthed the biggest archaeological discovery in human history… he just needs to find a way back to Earth to tell people about it. Four thousand years ago, a Federation bounty hunter Void ship crashed on a remote and primitive planet. There it remained until Will found it and accidentally reactivated it, launching him light-years away.

In the wilds of a jungle planet, the Legion fights in brutal combat as Republic marines fly their SLICS from one tragedy to the next. H292, a repurposed warbot, shows the heart of a hero as he wades into the battle not to destroy - but to save.