Mostrando resultados por autor "Stephen Donald" en Todas las categorías

A thousand years ago, stoic Norsemen built resilient longboats from wood and iron. Through four centuries of conquest, in these robust vessels countless Viking adventurers set forth from homelands of ice and snow to claim victory or Valhalla along far western horizons. Cast into a vast, hostile ocean aboard a small longboat, a handful of stoic Norse mercenaries gamble their lives in pursuit of freedom and fortune. All are bound for horizons of history, inevitably destined to find their eternal home among sagas of the never seen.

His pranks are sinister and macabre, but each one offers a critical life lesson to his hapless victims. His neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances rarely associate their strange misfortunes with the odd young man in their midst. Yet he is always watching, always aware, and his cunning mind is inevitably filled with delightfully perverse plans for their future.

He's the proverbial grumpy old man and he ruthlessly keeps his hit-lists. You had better hope he never jots your name down in his notebook, because he'll make you the object of his obsessive ire and his dissatisfaction is notoriously relentless. Unfortunately, today is his last day on Earth... and god just topped his list!

When their yacht sinks just east of New Zealand during a round-the-world sailing trip, three survivors somehow manage to pile themselves into a single tiny life raft. Adrift on one of the wildest seas in the world, their struggle to survive is a desperate one, and their hopes for rescue dwindle daily. Antarctica is one of the last wild places left on Earth, and it undoubtedly harbors exciting secrets waiting to be discovered. These hapless castaways will experience its darkest threats.

On a sunny afternoon, he meets the love of his life and the bane of his existence in the same event. She is beautiful, wealthy, and sweet. Unfortunately, she is also the mother of an extremely intelligent and overly protective five-year-old boy who takes enormous delight in tormenting his mother's suitors.

It's the last stop for the most violent and incorrigible prisoners in the modern Russian penal system. Famously, it is said to have two ways in and only one way out. Inmates enter its cages in an aging boat or over a dilapidated foot bridge. They exit to their graves. Yet many of its worst criminals manage to disappear when an ancient evil visits Pyatak.

He's a notorious corporate spy. His last job uncovered a disturbing truth long and deeply buried by the powers-that-be. Though his corporate enemies have kept him imprisoned by endlessly flying him around the world, he is neither forgotten nor alone. Driven to rescue one of their own, a dedicated band of hackers will stop at nothing to free him and expose his prison in the sky.

Bad things happen to the people that Pablo loves. Bad, bloody things. One frustrated Texas detective believes Pablo is culpable after one fashion or another, but he can never prove these suspicions beyond reasonable doubt. Through decades of service and several promotions, a determined investigator receives an endless series of homicide cases that somehow involve Pablo. None end with a conviction.

Several of the best human hypocrisies are immortalized in catechisms. We say “violence never solved anything” when history repeatedly teaches us otherwise, and once we prematurely labeled an entire, global war as “The War to End All Wars” long before we recorded its half-formed outcome. Dynasties fall. Empires rise. In marble, granite and concrete, we immortalize these events, large and small, and we celebrate the human beings named heroes there. Rightly so. Pause a moment before The Wall – let your finger trace names in stone. From pits of despair and summits of glory, they ...

He was a child prodigy born with an irrepressible genius. When he graduated at the top of his class at a remarkably young age, the U.S. government quickly recruited him to run "Project Ogre". It's the most powerful information-gathering computer system ever constructed and it has fallen into the hands of a sociopath. How far will he go to enrich himself?

A special agent with a special job, he's the janitor of all the unhappy, unpleasant, bleeding places of the world. He'll clean up your messes and leave nary a living witness in the muck that remains. Man, woman, or child. His conscience is absent, his drive is relentless, and his soul is a ravenous void.

While we collectively fear wild animals and muggers, most contemporary plagues come in the guise of unavoidable corporate logos and unforgettable commercial jingles. This new and most modern form of disease presents symptoms that include unhealthy obsessions, unwise compulsions, and preprogrammed responses. Visualize anything except the latest fad slogan while engrossing yourself in a moment of hysteric interest, and then pause to think - if you can. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestry. Of fascinating grotesqueries, here study endless cases, and of afflictions, fourteen.

Boogeymen, banshees, werewolves, and vampires; all figments of horror drawn upon parchments of fable, each the scrawl of individual phobias revisited by trembling quills dipped into inkwells of collective nightmare. Despite vaguely amusing caricatures, these monstrous legends probably developed from grisly human origins. Even now, your secret devil whispers into the blackout parts of your mind. Listen. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestry. Of hidden dominions, here encounter endless landscapes, and of phantoms, flights.

Peddlers and snake oil, sideshows and seminars, lunatics and paranoia… each pair travels the same darkened alleyways to service identical shadow-bound gates. We receive them by the backdoor, thank you, and always well into the evening. Patience and due diligence may unwrap the enigma to decipher a hidden message, but let the interloper beware. Secrecy keeps company with slaughter. Such twisted threads weave life’s strange tapestry. Of conspiracies, here find intriguing catalogs, and of conspirators, four.

Born to the street and abandoned by his paranoid, drug-addicted mother, a young boy struggles to evade vicious predators, who hope to exploit him, and insistent authorities, who hope to save him. His only ally is his extreme natural intelligence, and his only home is the public library. Daily, the noose tightens after his mother, his last link to childhood, goes missing. His future seems as bleak as the cold, hard streets. Then he meets Longbow.

The plight of the village is desperate and dire. Once protected by a powerful shaman, their savior has grown old and decrepit, perhaps too weak to save them from a violent storm brewing on the horizon. Though dying, one last time he must perform the ritual that appeases the storm. When she comes, the devil.

On a brilliant fall afternoon, a powerful blast of energy erupted from the cosmos, burned across the solar system, and laid waste to every living thing on Earth. Notice was short and defense impossible. From the lowliest to the loftiest, none survived. This phenomenon, they called the Radiance. Thereafter the hapless victims of that unavoidable catastrophe wander the planet in a discorporate, ethereal state of existence. This, they call The Lingering.