Showing results by narrator "Peter Berkrot" in All Categories

Tales of blood, magic, and steel by masters of the craft!

David Sparrow is an awesome stay-at-home dad. He gets his kids ready for school while his wife, Amy, commutes to New York City, where she was recently promoted to deputy district attorney. In fact she just inherited a major case: prosecuting crime lord Dante Payne. Meanwhile David is content chatting with the moms at school drop-off, making dinner at night, and doing housework.

The halls are decked, the deck is stacked, and here comes that jolly old elf. Junior Bender, divorced father of one and burglar extraordinaire, finds himself stuck inside the Edgerton Mall, and not just as a last-minute shopper (though he is that too). Edgerton isn't exactly the epicenter of holiday cheer, despite its two Santas, canned Christmas music, chintzy bows, and festive lights. The mall is a fossil of an industry in decline; many of its stores are closed, and to make matters worse, there is a rampant shoplifting problem.

Running from a life she didn’t choose, in a city she doesn’t know, Sukanya, a young Thai girl, loses herself in the vastness of Tokyo. With her Bangkok street smarts and some stolen money, she stays ahead of her former captors who will do anything to recover the computer she took. After befriending Chiho, a Japanese girl living in an internet café, Sukanya makes plans to rid herself of her pursuers, and her past, forever.

Ned is not just any troll. Even though Ned is nearly seven feet tall, with a nose the size of a pickle, Ned has a heart full of love! A heart that swoons over poetry and craves true friendship! And when it comes to humans...it's complicated. So complicated that, long ago, Ned fled the Enchanted Realm for the one place no one would notice a troll hiding in plain sight: New York City. But one human boy - Cody - has noticed.

In Against Football Steve Almond details why, after 40 years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions: Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood--run, leap, throw, tackle--into a billion-dollar industry?

In the aptly titled Offbeat, Richard Matheson, a modern master of strange fiction, offers 13 excursions into the unsettling and bizarre. In these stories you will encounter a major league pitcher with a horrific secret for his astonishing success; an ordinary man who wakes to find himself in a silent, empty world; a death row prisoner with an extraordinary explanation for his innocence; and a novelist whose fictional creations transcend the printed page.

When Kenny is chosen for InterRealm, a real-life wargame where defenders are portaled in from their homeworld, he is forced to survive in a violent fantasy landscape. Build a powerful presence in InterRealm and his homeworld will likely remain safe. Fail, and the invaders will break through.

From the butchery of the Crater, where stunning success collapsed into a massacre, through near-constant battles fought by heat-stricken soldiers to the crucial election of 1864, The Damned of Petersburg resurrects the American Civil War's hard reality, as plumes and sabers gave way to miles of trenches.

Forced out of the work-hard, play-hard world of Wall Street following the Crash of ’87, financial analyst Cary Cimino was determined to maintain his lifestyle of luxury and ease. Under the guidance of dubious businessman Jeffrey Pokross, Cimino embarked on an illegitimate underground career as a “financial adviser” to naïve investors. Cimino’s small-time operation soon spiraled into a large-scale crime ring when he and Pokross were reunited and met with Mafia wiseguy Robert Lino.

Along Comes the Association is the story of how Russ Giguere and his fellow band members in the legendary and influential pop group The Association came together to create unparalleled music, unique to the time and place, and never again to be repeated.

The ATLAS mechanized battle suits are the pinnacle of military technology, boasting awesome destructive power - but what is behind the armor is only human. Rade Galaal, elite soldier and ATLAS operator, has been tested - and broken - by savage battles and devastating losses. Now, an old enemy poses a new threat.

When a former army veteran suddenly murders a colonel in New York, he claims that he had to do it because he was being used in mind control experiments. Surprisingly, a top Wall Street criminal defense lawyer, one with ties to the White House, decides to defend the killer, arguing that his client suffered from post-traumatic stress from his tours in Afghanistan and that it's his patriotic duty to assist him.

When a controversial religious leader is immolated in the Mission District of San Francisco, the local police chalk it up to a bizarre suicide. Yet witnesses claim a mysterious robed figure set fire to the priest. When a cult leader in Paris dies under similar circumstances, Interpol asks Grey and Viktor for help. Convinced the culprit is a charismatic New Age prophet who has become an Internet sensation, Grey and Viktor undergo a perilous journey into the world of the occult as they try to penetrate the prophet’s inner circle.

When the top American diplomat in Tokyo, Bernard Mattson, is killed, he leaves more than a lifetime of successful Japan-American negotiations. He leaves a missing manuscript, boxes of research, a lost keynote speech and a tangled web of relations. When his alluring daughter, Jamie, returns from America wanting answers, finding only threats, Detective Hiroshi Shimizu is dragged from the safe confines of his office into the street-level realities of Pacific Rim politics.

Buddha Standard Time shares one of the great realizations of Buddhism, one that anyone can learn to apply. Buddhist wisdom teaches that the minutes and hours of our days do not simply march from future to present to past---looming, engulfing us, passing us by forever. Rather, each moment is intersected by a fourth dimension, a dimension of timelessness.

In 1907 Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung began what promised to be both a momentous collaboration and the deepest friendship of each man's life. Six years later they were bitter antagonists, locked in a savage struggle that was as much personal and emotional as it was theoretical and professional. In between them stood a young woman named Sabina Spielrein, who had been both patient and lover to Jung and colleague and confidante to Freud before going on to become an innovative psychoanalyst herself.

In the world of Solstice, every Christmas myth is real. Dying on Christmas Eve, Jacob is reborn in a winter-locked realm of monsters, magic, and cultivators. A land where the Knights of the North Pole hold back the darkness. At least, they used to. Cultists of the Krampus are raising a wicked ritual in the ice. The goat lord of ShanYang enslaves the elves in manufactories. The polar bear king leads his people to war against the Northmen. The Knights are nowhere to be found.

After experiencing a future where all of humanity’s planets and colonies had been purged, Eric refused to fall. And so, the Entity chose him to be humanity's last hope—to be Reborn.... The Reborn are galactic boogiemen. Myths and legends used to terrify children and curb the aggression of advanced alien civilizations. They are usually granted boons and abilities able to grow powerful enough to destroy star systems, making them the number one target of every alien race out there.

Henry Wong and Sylvia Todorovich have gathered the interstellar powers of the Ra Sector into a tentative alliance—an alliance that is tested by the return of the Sector’s former rulers: the Kenmiri Remnant. The Sector’s only hope of withstanding a genocidal faction of the Kenmiri is the Twelfth Fleet of the United Planets Alliance. But when Wong’s scouting flotilla collides with the Kenmiri, he discovers they now have a weapon that could easily destroy Twelfth Fleet.