Showing results by narrator "Richard Smith" in All Categories

The labyrinth of tunnels beneath Corvis is home to some of the city’s worst criminals, but now even these hardened thugs have reason to watch their step in the dark, shadowy undercity. Death moves in that darkness, leaving behind a trail of horribly mangled bodies. The identity of the killer is a mystery, although his calling cards - brutally savaged corpses and a distinct, repulsive odor - are constants at each bloody murder scene.

On the West Texas border, a behemoth is bellowing smoke, fire, and death. This monster is the infamous Abaddon Cannon Foundry, whose weapons of war have spread death and destruction around the world — and made a few men in Big Buck, Texas incredibly rich. Now, a Mexican-born teenager has disappeared into this fortress factory, where men work and sweat as slaves. This boy’s sister wants to learn her brother’s fate, and she just happens to know a man named Shawn O’Brien, the town tamer.

The Peach Blond Bomber introduces Zackary Nixon Johnson, private investigator, his sidekick Harv, artificial intelligence and the world and setting where the Nuclear Bombshell Series takes place.

Her feet are barely on Indian soil when archaeologist Annja Creed finds herself swept up in Hyderabad's modern prosperity. But something about the recent spate of killings seems unusual and Annja begins to dig deep for answers. Instead, she finds herself taken prisoner and held in a maze of ancient caves. She's being held captive by a cult of thieves who are under the thrall of a charismatic leader.

Boot Stoner spent 12 years of his life behind bars for stealing a horse and rustling cattle. Upon release, he adds murder and kidnapping to his criminal skills, slaughtering his own parents before exacting revenge upon the man responsible for his incarceration and abducting a young Creek girl his folks adopted. The best hope for stopping Stoner's bloody rampage in Oklahoma Indian Territory is the veteran manhunter, John Ward, deputy marshal.

When Harry French left home he was just another kid looking to make his way. But when he comes back four years later, things are different. He's different. Or at least the town thinks so. Now nobody looks him in the eye. He isn't just Harry anymore, he's the Shifter, a gunfighter who brings trouble with him wherever he goes. And as hard as Harry tries, he finds that a reputation is a lot harder to put down than a gun.

When Matt and Sam are ambushed by a violent gang led by the scurrilous Zack Jardine, who has his own reasons for wanting the blood brothers dead, Matt is badly wounded. After leaving Matt in a Navajo village to get patched up, Sam rides off hot on the trail of the Jardine Gang. Sam finds the cutthroats selling guns to the Indians, a move that will likely explode into an all-out tribal war. Outnumbered and outgunned, the blood brothers aim to settle Zack Jardine's hash once and for all — with a little luck, a lot of bullets and the courage to shoot true.

Young Lerris yearns to find a place in the world better suited to his skills and temperament. In Recluce this means taking one of two options: permanent exile from Recluce or the dangergeld, a complex, rule-laden wanderjahr in the lands beyond. Many do not survive. Lerris chooses dangergeld. Lerris will need magic in the lands beyond, where the power of the Chaos Wizards reigns unchecked, and he must learn to use his powers in an orderly way before his wanderjahr, or fall prey to Chaos.

Cornerstone is a ville like no other that Ryan Cawdor and his companions have ever encountered. Hoping to find medical treatment for wounds sustained combating Magus and his creations, especially Ryan’s own debilitating injury, they have been brought to Cornerstone by their new friends, a relationship forged from those same battles. The ville appears to be a prosperous bastion of civilization, sheltered from the savagery of the Deathlands by virtue of the community’s relationship with an extraordinary manifestation of the will of Gaia.

Shady Rest, Texas, has the dubious reputation for being the deadliest town in America. Getting yourself killed is as easy as blinking and twice as quick. Sure enough, Matt Jensen hasn't swallowed his whisky before the town's marshal is gunned down before his eyes. Matt defends himself by putting two bullets in the shooter's chest, unaware that he's in line for a $5,000 bounty - as long as he stays in Shady Rest to collect it. And staying gets even more tempting when a red haired beauty decides to be the next town marshal....

The last freelance PI on earth, Zach Johnson has been hired to track down a young beauty who happens to be a deadly secret weapon for the World Council. Figuring girls just want to have fun, he follows Natasha to various vacation destinations, but she eludes him, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. Zach, however, isn’t surprised to discover that things aren’t what they seem, and to save the world, he’s going to have to find a way to team up with the woman he’s supposed to destroy....

"Work Sets You Free" by David Barnett is an original short story featuring the protagonist of the forthcoming novel Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl. Gideon is a young fisherman in Yorkshire, England, in an alternate 1890, who embarks on a journey to find Captain Lucian Trigger, the famed Hero of the Empire, to deal with a mystery plaguing his home village.

He was 15 when he killed his first man. Before his murderous ways ended, Hardin killed 42 men in cold blood - one, the legend goes, because he snored too loudly. From then on, John Wesley Hardin stayed true to his calling, killing man after man after man, spending most of his life being pursued by both local lawmen and federal troops.

Several baronies have disappeared, as if swallowed by the Earth. Strange disturbances lead Kane and the others to a giant sinkhole in a remote and wild area of Mexico, where reality merges with an ancient culture of sorcery. Here, a beautiful, mysterious guerilla leader wages war against a terrifying army of demons spiriting humans into the subterranean netherworld. Joining the fight, the Cerberus rebels invade the cavernous chambers of a hidden world, and confront a self-styled warlord using predark nuclear tech to rule the depths of the planet.

In the epic conclusion to the Cornerstone saga, the sinister forces at work in the troubled ville grow insidiously stronger, and Ryan Cawdor is the only one with first-hand knowledge of the true enemy. However, he’s trapped outside the ville, wanted for murder, and, with a hijacked Cornerstone mission team, must return to the redoubt where he and Jak Lauren nearly died, in hopes of finding the means to defeat the monster in Cornerstone’s midst.

He is brave, tough as leather, and has left behind a trail of deadly enemies - outlaws he's hunted down or killed with the cold heart of a man used to violence. A feared bounty hunter and the scourge of bad men everywhere, Flintlock carries an ancient Hawken muzzle-loader, handed down to him from the mountain man who raised him. He stands as the towering hero of a new Johnstone saga.

The pot-smoking and relentlessly abrasive mad scientist Dr. William Hammersmith, whom the companions first encountered in DL 124 Child of Slaughter, has made “New Zea” his home. The mad scientist uses private-sector mat-trans technology to track and transport Ryan Cawdor’s small team of survivalist warriors from the Deathlands to the islands under siege in order to enlist their aid in training the soft local populace for the imminent attack and lend their own battle-tested mettle to rescue the imperiled community.

Deep in an archaeological dig in England's Midlands, Annja locates a braided necklace around a mummified king's neck. Made of an unusual material - not quite obsidian, but gleaming with multihued color - the torc is an astonishing find. But someone knows exactly what the torc means. And he will do anything to get his hands on the Tear of the Gods. When the dig is compromised and innocent archaeologists are slain, even Annja herself is left for dead. Now she is fleeing for her life, not knowing the terrifying truth about the relic she risks everything to protect.

With danger dodging his heels at every turn, Private Investigator Zachary Nixon Johnson, while protecting Sexy Sprockets, a talentless redheaded teen media superstar, from terrorists, finds himself at the mercy of three psionic, superhuman dominatrices bent on world domination.

In the year 2057, the last freelance private investigator, partnered with an experimental AI named Harv, solves cases involving androids, future tech wizards, and all sorts of mayhem.... When Ona Thompson, a genetically altered superwoman, media darling, and one of the indestructible Thompson Quads, discovers her sister's murdered body, a freelance private investigator who is wired to an experimental AI named HARV comes to the rescue.