Showing results by narrator "William DeMeritt" in All Categories

Local outcast Rigby Sellers lives in squalor on a dilapidated houseboat moored on the Mississippi River. With only stolen mannequins and the river to keep him company, Rigby begins to spiral from the bizarre to the threatening. As a year of drought gives way to a season of squalls, a girl is found trembling on the side of the road, claiming her boyfriend was murdered. The townspeople of nearby Oscar turn their suspicions toward Sellers.

As New York came to a halt with COVID, Michael Kimmelman composed an email to a group of architects, historians, writers, and friends, inviting them to take a walk. Wherever they liked, he wrote—preferably someplace meaningful to them, someplace that illuminated the city and what they loved about it. At first, the goal was distraction. At a scary moment when everything seemed uncertain, walking around New York served as a reminder of all the ways the city was still a rock, joy, and inspiration.

Traffic is piling up, and strange things are headed your way in this new story collection by World Fantasy Award-winning author Tobias S. Buckell. In these twenty-four stories you’ll find inhabitants of a small town who won’t vaccinate against a zombie plague, a lone sentry keeping motorists from stumbling into something ancient and evil, a man who puts stranded ghosts to rest, an ex-soldier traveling the seas who trades his new life of hardship for a return to swords and blood, and many more tales of speculative fiction.

Heat is building in the Rancho Tajuata Housing Projects, and not just because it’s summer in L.A. An immigrant family is firebombed and killed in their apartment. Rage threatens to explode. The pressure is on to solve the murders quickly, lest more death and destruction follow. At the request of the controversial onsite security force, P.I. Ivan Monk is called in to investigate.

In “Whispers in the Dark,” an ex-con sells his organs to ensure his brilliant nephew’s future. The boy will grow up to have the highest IQ ever recorded, but the uncle, who sold his eyes, won’t be able to see it. In “Voices,” a history professor becomes addicted to a drug called pulse, which gives him access to a world of vivid fantasy while tearing his brain to shreds. By the time the professor qualifies for a brain transplant, he’s no longer sure what’s real and what’s imagined. And in “Angel’s Island,” a convict in the world’s largest private prison reveals the facility’s chilling secrets.

Meet Gerald. Gerald is a griffin - a creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. According to the Code of the Griffins, that means he should be: 1. Brave and fierce in all situations! 2. A guardian of a great treasure! 3. Completely and totally hidden from the human realm! But what if a Griffin isn't brave or fierce? What if he's never found a great treasure (or any treasure, for that matter)? What if he feels like such an embarrassment that the only thing left to do is run away?

Robert “Scatterboy” Williams is a small-time hustler selling bogus Cartier watches in Pacific Shores, a port city south of Los Angeles. One day, he’s gunned down in the street, seemingly at random. The police categorize Scatterboy’s murder as business as usual. But his girlfriend convinces private eye Ivan Monk to find the killer. What looks like three unrelated shootings of Black men in Southern California will put Monk on a tortuous trail unraveling a larger nefarious plan: the rise of an extremist demagogue.

Ex-majordomo and bodyguard to an industrial tycoon-cum-US senator, Badja Adeyemi is in hiding and shortly on his way to either a jail cell or a grave, depending on who finds him first. In his final days as a free man, he hires Isaiah Coleridge to tie up a loose end: the suspicious death of his nephew four years earlier. At the time police declared it an accident, and Adeyemi isn't sure it wasn't, but one final look may bring his sister peace.

A fabulous heist: on the evening of November 24, 1971, D. B. Cooper hijacked Flight 305 - Portland to Seattle - with a fake bomb, collected a ransom of $200,000, and then parachuted from the rear of the plane, disappearing into the night...and into history. A brutal crime steeped in legend and malevolence: 50 years later, Agent Pendergast takes on a bizarre and gruesome case: in the ghost-haunted city of Savannah, Georgia, bodies are found with no blood left in their veins - sowing panic and reviving whispered tales of the infamous Savannah Vampire.

In the dying days of the American Civil War, newly freed brothers Landry and Prentiss find themselves cast into the world without a penny to their names. Forced to hide out in the woods near their former Georgia plantation, they're soon discovered by the land's owner, George Walker, a man still reeling from the loss of his son in the war. When the brothers begin to live and work on George's farm, the tentative bonds of trust and union begin to blossom between the strangers.

America Second exposes a deep network of Beijing’s influence in America, built quietly over the years through prominent figures like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Disney Chairman Bob Iger, and members of the Bush family. And it shows how to fight that influence - without being paranoid, xenophobic, or racist.

In the Forest of No Joy captures in vivid detail the experiences of the men, women, and children who toiled on the railroad, and forces a reassessment of the moral relationship between modern industrialized empires and what could be called global humanitarian impulses - the desire to improve the lives of people outside of Europe. Drawing on exhaustive research in French and Congolese archives, a chilling documentary record, J.P. Daughton tells the epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad and in doing so reveals the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.

The planet is dying, a mega-corporation controls everything, but at least you don’t have to work another day in your life, not when an Organic AI controls your body every night. Eric Noble is beginning to realize that nothing makes a Day feel more like a complete waste of space than having all the time in the world. Detective Noble is starting to see the truth that he and the other Nights are nothing more than programmable slaves living inside someone else.

Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn’t have a realistic water gun. She said she feared for his safety, that police tend to think of little Black boys as older and less innocent than they really are. In this immersive audiobook adaptation—with wall-to-wall sound design, an expansive music soundtrack, and full-cast narration including the author and his son—Bell uses his sharp humor to examine how The Talk shaped intimate and public moments from childhood to adulthood.

Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat these onslaughts, people everywhere - rich and not so rich, in business and in their personal lives - are turning away from traditional police, lawyers, and government regulators toward a new champion: the private investigator.

Prisoners and their families will appreciate these heartfelt and supportive stories and will feel part of a wider community of people striving to improve and reach their personal best. Hope, healing, forgiveness, and even a few laughs are delivered in the form of these personal and revealing stories.

Carte Blanche is the alarming tale of how the right of Americans to say "no" to risky medical research is eroding at a time when we are racing to produce a vaccine and treatments for COVID-19. This medical right that we have long taken for granted was first sacrificed on the altar of military expediency in 1990 when the Department of Defense asked for and received from the FDA a waiver that permitted it to force an experimental anthrax vaccine on the ranks of ground troops headed for the Persian Gulf.

Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance and Other Stories is Tobias S. Buckell's seventh short fiction collection and is comprised of 15 stories, several of which are original to the collection or were previously only available through his Patreon. This collection ranges from galactic adventures to intimate explorations of humanity—sometimes in the same story—rich with a sense of wonder and deft storytelling.

In 17th-century Peru, St. Martin de Porres was torn from his body after death. His bones were pillaged as relics, and his spirit was said to inhabit those bones.

Curtis finds love in Iraq as he struggles to stay alive in a war he doesn't want to fight, and Letha discovers her own beauty in the love of her child. There is the "good daughter" who realizes that there's only one way to help her brother and her family. Other stories center on the daily drama of the Curl-E-Que beauty shop, or capture the slapstick side of passion.