Showing results by narrator "Christopher Kipiniak" in All Categories

"In The Falling World", Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud Court, has traveled with Chime and Balm to another Raksuran court. When she fails to return, her consort, Moon, along with Stone and a party of warriors and hunters, must track them down. Finding them turns out to be the easy part; freeing them from an ancient trap hidden in the depths of the Reaches is much more difficult. "The Tale of Indigo and Cloud" explores the history of the Indigo Cloud Court, long before Moon was born.

All his life, Moon roamed the Three Worlds, a solitary wanderer forced to hide his true nature - until he was reunited with his own kind, the Raksura, and found a new life as consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court. But now a rival court has laid claim to him, and Jade may or may not be willing to fight for him. Beset by doubts, Moon must travel in the company of strangers to a distant realm where he will finally face the forgotten secrets of his past, even as an old enemy returns with a vengeance.

An expedition of groundlings from the Empire of Kish have traveled through the Three Worlds to the Indigo Cloud court of the Raksura, shape-shifting creatures of flight that live in large family groups. The groundlings have found a sealed ancient city at the edge of the shallow seas, near the deeps of the impassable Ocean. They believe it to be the last home of their ancestors and ask for help getting inside.

The inspiring story of Max Britsky, who grew up in the slums of New York and became one of the most powerful men in the American movie industry. Max tells the story of the rise of Max Britsky, entwined with the film industry’s beginnings near the turn of the twentieth century. When he was twelve, Max's father died, leaving him to scrape out a living in Manhattan's Lower East Side slums to provide for his mother and siblings. But Max was a natural entrepreneur, and he followed his business instincts and love of the theater to become one of the first film moguls in the history of American moviemaking.

Moon, Jade, and other favorites from the Indigo Cloud Court return with two new novellas from Martha Wells, who continues to enthusiastically ignore genre conventions in her exploration of the fascinating world of the Raksura. Her novellas and short stories contain all the elements fans have come to love from the Raksura books: courtly intrigue and politics, unfolding mysteries that reveal an increasingly strange wider world, and threats both mundane and magical.

Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora. Upon the novel's publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter.

Among Howard Fast's historical fiction, Citizen Tom Paine - one of America's all-time best-sellers - occupies a special place, for it restored to a generation of readers the vision of Paine's revolutionary passion as the authentic roots of our national beginnings. Fast gives us "a vivid picture of Paine's mode of writing, idiosyncrasies, and character-generous, nobly unselfish, moody, often dirty, frequently drunken, a revolutionist by avocation" ( Library Journal).

Quarry doesn't kill just anybody these days. He restricts himself to targeting other hitmen, availing his marked-for-death clients of two services: eliminating the killers sent after them, and finding out who hired them…and then removing that problem, as well. So far he's rid of the world of nobody who would be missed. But this time he finds himself zeroing in on the grieving family of a missing cheerleader. Does the hitman's hitman have the wrong quarry in his sights?

LoveStar, the enigmatic and obsessively driven founder of the LoveStar corporation, has unlocked the key to transmitting data via birdwaves, thus freeing mankind from wires and devices, and allowing consumerism, technology, and science to run rampant over all aspects of daily life. Cordless modern men and women are paid to howl advertisements at unsuspecting passers-by, REGRET machines eliminate doubt over roads not taken, soul mates are identified and brought together (while existing, unscientifically validated relationships are driven remorselessly asunder), and rocketing the dead into the sky becomes both a status symbol and a beautiful, cathartic show.

Darcy Shaughnessy has gotten used to her overbearing brothers chasing away any man she wants to date. But a chance meeting with a brooding - and deliciously handsome - artist is about to make this holiday season one to remember.

Moon, once a solitary wanderer, has become consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud court. Together, they travel with their people on a pair of flying ships in hopes of finding a new home for their colony. Moon finally feels like he’s found a tribe where he belongs. But when the travelers reach the ancestral home of Indigo Cloud, shrouded within the trunk of a mountain-sized tree, they discover a blight infecting its core.

Doctor Dealer is the story of Larry Lavin, a bright, charismatic young man who rose from his working-class upbringing to win a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, earn Ivy League college and dental degrees, and buy his family a house in one of Philadelphia's most exclusive suburbs. But behind the facade of his success was a dark secret - at every step of the way he was building the foundation for a cocaine empire that would grow to generate over $60 million in annual sales.

Do you ever feel like life isn’t going the way that you thought it would? That’s what Sebastian Bradford is realizing as he tries to figure out how everything went wrong so quickly. He’d never expected things to end like this, but then again, he’d never expected a lot of things, and that was the problem. He just needed to figure out how to fix this before it was too late. There’s only one problem with that...he’s about to learn a life lesson that he will never forget.

Moon has spent his life hiding what he is - a shape-shifter able to transform himself into a winged creature of flight. An orphan with only vague memories of his own kind, Moon tries to fit in among the tribes of his river valley, with mixed success. Just as Moon is once again cast out by his adopted tribe, he discovers a shape-shifter like himself... someone who seems to know exactly what he is, who promises that Moon will be welcomed into his community.

This guidebook covers the essentials of macroeconomics and examines, in a simple and intuitive way, the core ideas of output, money, and expectations. Early chapters leave you with an understanding of everything from fiscal policy and central banking to business cycles and international trade. Later chapters provide a brief monetary history of the United States as well as the basics of macroeconomic accounting. You'll learn why countries trade, why exchange rates move, and what makes an economy grow.

You know the feeling: you can't focus; you feel increasingly overwhelmed by a mix of nonstop demands and technology that seems to be moving at the speed of light; and you're frustrated just trying to get everything done well--and on time. Not only is this taking a toll on performance, it's impacting your sense of well-being outside the office. It's time to reclaim control.

Set in both the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and the bohemian maelstrom of the Village, Mercy of a Rude Stream echoes Nabokov in its portrayal of sexual deviance, and offers a harrowing and relentless family drama amid a grand panorama of New York City in the 1910s and Roaring 20s.

When Americans think of modern warfare, what comes to mind is the US army skirmishing with terrorists and insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan. But the face of global conflict is ever-changing. In Out of the Mountains, David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading experts on current and future conflict, offers a groundbreaking look at what may happen after today's wars end.

Poor Stanley Hastings. After getting hired by a hit man and nearly getting shot, the put-upon PI needed some fun, so when a gorgeous damsel in distress walked through his office door she seemed just what the doctor ordered. Wrong again. The fair maiden turned out to be a married mom who wanted Stanley to find out why her teenage daughter was skipping school. Playing truant officer wasn't exactly Stanley's idea of fun, but at least it should be easy. Fat chance.

The Shaughnessy brothers have spent the years since their mother's untimely death taking care of each other and trying to make their father proud. The oldest son, Aidan, is hardworking, handsome, successful - and still single. Sure, he'd like to have his own family someday, but who has the time?