Showing results by narrator "Jay Ben Markson" in All Categories

Grayson Hawthorne was raised as the heir apparent to his billionaire grandfather, taught from the cradle to put family first. Now the great Tobias Hawthorne is dead and his family disinherited, but some lessons linger. When Grayson’s half-sisters find themselves in trouble, he swoops in to do what he does best: take care of the problem—efficiently, effectively, mercilessly. And without getting bogged down in emotional entanglements.

The day Death comes to Lazarus Gaumond’s town and kills everyone in one fell swoop, the last thing he expects to see is a woman left alive and standing. But Lazarus has her own extraordinary gift: She cannot be killed—not by humans, not by the elements, not by Death himself. She is the one soul Death doesn’t recognize. The one soul he cannot pry free from her flesh.

Ana da Silva always assumed she’d die young - she just never expected it to be at the hands of Famine, the haunting immortal who once spared her life so many years ago. But if the horseman remembers her at all, he must not care, for when she comes face to face with him for the second time in her life, she’s stabbed and left for dead. Only, she doesn’t quite die. If there’s one thing Famine is good at, it’s cruelty. In spite of themselves, Ana and Famine are drawn to each other. But enemies or reluctant lovers, if they don’t stop themselves soon, heaven will....

Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience, behavioral economic, and social psychology research, acclaimed author, former Harvard professor, and think tank founder Todd Rose reveals how so much of our thinking about each other is informed by false assumptions that drive bad decisions that make us dangerously mistrustful as a society and hopelessly unhappy as individuals.

Imagine everyone’s surprise when Carter von Oehson, a sophomore in Dr. Dylan Reinhart’s Abnormal Psychology class, posts on Instagram that he plans to kill himself. 24 hours later and still no one has seen him. Release the hounds. A massive search ensues. But when Carter’s sailboat rolls in with the tide without him or anyone else on it, the worst seems to be confirmed. He really did it . . . Or did he? The one person convinced he’s still alive is his father, Mathias von Oehson, founder and CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund.

Dockside is burning, and it's up to everybody's least favorite Army-surplus cyborg to fix it. It starts when somebody takes a hit out on The Chairman, and quickly spirals into a mystery that takes Roland and his hyper-kinetic partner Lucia far from New Boston and into the depths of unregulated star systems. To save his home, Roland will need to figure out who would risk upsetting the delicate truce in Dockside before the peace crumbles and the streets run red with blood.

On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son. At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories cap a 15-year project.

Roland Tankowicz wasn't even legally a person anymore. The aging cyborg had never really recovered from being betrayed and enslaved by his superiors in the Army, and the final insult of being permanently classified as "defunct military ordnance" had been a bitter pill to swallow. Now, he spent most of his time drinking beer and working as a fixer for the crime families in 25th-century Boston. It was easy money if you were the kind of guy who was bullet-proof and could pick up a house.

Thanks to shifts in our culture America is in the midst of an epidemic of sleeplessness, and unfortunately, sleep deprivation has bigger consequences than one might think, ranging from irritability, brain fog, and weight gain to serious conditions like hormone dysregulation, heart disease, memory impairment, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. In Better Sleep, Better You, functional medicine pioneer and sleep expert Frank Lipman, MD, and Casper co-founder Neil Parikh team up to offer a one-stop resource to help you reap the benefits of sleeping well every night.

War doesn’t scare Jerusalem. She’s a Saint. Thanks to powerful demigod-style reflexes, endurance, and strength, she’s fearless. And she has one goal—revenge. But she never expects to team up with the handsome, arrogant Alexei to accomplish it. He’s one of those Ancient Vampires. And ever since her family was enslaved and murdered by one, Jerusalem hates vampires. But in the year they've been fighting alongside one another against the Confederate Army and the vampires who benefitted off slavery, Alexei’s never done anything but prove he’s on the Union’s side and hers.

Clandestine corporate operations have weakened the treaties between Dockside’s gangs just in time for a disaster at the docks to shut down Earth’s mightiest marketplace. On the verge of economic catastrophe, Gateways Inc. lands an army of corporate troops to seize control. Criminals and corpos make for a tense pairing, and it’s only a matter of time before something breaks and the shooting starts.

The 330s, BCE, Greece: Alexander, a handsome young warrior of Macedon, begins his quest to conquer the ancient world. But he cannot ascend to power, and keep it, without the women who help to shape his destiny. His spirited younger half-sister, Thessalonike, yearns to join her brother and see the world. Instead, it is Alexander’s boyhood companion who rides with him into war while Thessalonike remains behind. Far away, crafty Princess Drypetis will not stand idly by as Alexander topples her father from Persia’s throne.

Grayson Hawthorne was raised as the heir apparent to his billionaire grandfather, taught from the cradle to put family first. Now the great Tobias Hawthorne is dead and his family disinherited, but some lessons linger. When Grayson's half-sisters find themselves in trouble, he swoops in to do what he does best: take care of the problem - efficiently, effectively, mercilessly. And without getting bogged down in emotional entanglements. Jameson Hawthorne is a risk-taker, a sensation-seeker, a player of games.

Finding himself alone in a posh New York City hotel room for the night, Aidan does what any red-blooded 17-year-old would do - tries to hook up with someone new. But that lapse in judgement leads him to a room with a dead guy and a mysterious flash drive...two things that spark an epic case of mistaken identity that puts Aidan on the run - from the authorities, his friends, his family, the people who are out to kill him - and especially from his own troubled past.

When dark comet UD3 was spotted near Jupiter's orbit, its existence was largely ignored. But to individuals who knew better - scientists like Benjamin Schwartz, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies - the threat this eight-kilometer comet posed to the survival of the human race was unthinkable. The 150-million-year reign of the dinosaurs ended when an asteroid impact generated more than a billion times the energy of an atomic bomb. What would happen to Earth's seven billion inhabitants if a similar event were allowed to occur?

The drug and booze-filled streets of New Boston’s spaceport district are no place for the uninitiated. Take a walk down these dirty thoroughfares and slip into their darkened alleys with eight new stories centering on what goes on when the most famous fixer in space is not there to hold things down.

There's a stranger in town, and he just wants to be left alone. But Dockside doesn't like strangers, and the dirty old town never leaves anyone alone. Not emotionally scarred top-secret ex-army cyborgs, and certainly not good cops with bad habits. Join New Boston's most famous fixer for his first week in the most dangerous part of town. All he wanted was a quiet place to hide, but now he has to team up with the last good cop in Dockside if they expect to stop a gang war and protect the hard-working folks just trying to make an honest living.

Wild Monsters Dance About is a collection of 21 short stories that will take into author M.J. Sewall’s unruly mind. These finely tuned tales jump through genres, concepts and characters, predicaments, adventures, and conundrums. Whether about everyday-science going terribly wrong in "Unintended Science" to animal evolution suddenly speeding up in "It Finally happened" or the prickly family politics of road trips in "Sibling Warfare", these stories will thrill, delight, and discombobulate your imagination.

For weeks, Rachel has been noticing the same golden-haired young man sitting at her Brooklyn bus stop, staring off with a melancholy air. When, one day, she finally musters the courage to introduce herself, the chemistry between them is undeniable: Thomas is wise, witty, handsome, mysterious, clearly a kindred spirit. There's just one tiny problem: He's dead. Stuck in a surreal limbo governed by bureaucracy, Thomas is unable to "cross over" to the afterlife until he completes a 90-day stint on earth, during which time he is forbidden to get involved with a member of the living.

A killer stalks the streets of Dockside, and he has a bone to pick with Roland Tankowicz. Old friends, former clients, and even rivals find themselves in the sights of a murderer who loves his work a little too much and seems custom-built to take on New Boston’s most famous Army-surplus cyborg. Roland and his team will have to play detective to piece together the identity of this strange assassin before all his associates end up face down in the street.