Showing results by narrator "Kevin T. Collins" in All Categories

Back in Washington, DC for the funeral of his college roommate, Mac Callahan reluctantly agrees to spend one night in Senator Price Redding’s apartment before flying home to Alabama. But when a dead, naked woman falls from the closet of Redding’s secret bachelor pad and into Mac’s arms, someone must atone for the sins of the sitting senator. The perfect setup for murder will lead to an immaculate warrant for the arrest of former FBI agent Mac Callahan. But the scandal he stumbled into wasn’t meant for him.

Executive assistant Emma Taylor is desperate for a little time away - away from her job, from her life, and from thoughts of her boss' son, who doesn't seem to know she even exists. Tired of waiting for the time to be right, she takes advantage of her boss' generous offer for a little weekend getaway to thank her for helping out with a difficult business deal.

All work and no play...would make Jason Montgomery a very happy man. Ever since his brother had married a woman who worked for their company, Jason has been walking around fending off the unwanted advances of all of the single women in his employ. Now, with a make-or-break business expansion in the works, Jason needs an assistant he can trust not to mix business with romance.

"Something Passed By", a story by Robert McCammon, was originally published in his short fiction collection Blue World and was selected for inclusion in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection.

Without warning, something has gone terribly awry. In the remote and unnoticed places of the world, small pockets of death begin occurring. As the initially isolated extinctions spread, the world's eyes focus on this unimaginable horror and chaos. Out of the ecological imbalance, something new and extraordinary is evolving and surviving to fill the voids left by these extinctions. Evolution is operating in ways no one could have expected, and environmental damage may be the catalyst.

In the early 1980s, Brian O'Dea was operating a $100 million a year, 120-man drug smuggling business, and had developed a terrifying cocaine addiction. Under increasing threat from the DEA in 1986 for importing seventy-five tons of marijuana into the United States, he quit the trade - and the drugs - and began working with recovering addicts in Santa Barbara. Despite his life change, the authorities caught up with him years later and O'Dea was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in Los Angeles Harbor.

Hunter continues his journey through his icy alien world. Having adapted to the merciless conditions beyond the Bunker, he has begun to expand his "territory" and explore new points on the map around the enormous Pillar.

Earth is a dead cinder beyond the dense clouds. On a terraformed Venus, the land is ruled by savage plants and the even more savage beasts that prey on them, while monsters out of nightmare swim though the globe-girdling seas. Mankind huddles in domed underwater Keeps, living a purposeless static existence - dedicated to pleasure but destined for oblivion later if not sooner. Only the Free Companions, the mercenaries who fight proxy wars for the Keeps, live on the surface of Venus.

Dr. Gideon Box, world-famous surgeon, is extremely good at his job. He’s never lost a patient…but he has issues. He’s antisocial. Doesn’t mix well with others. Breaks into people’s homes and assumes their identities. Occasionally kills other doctor’s patients. He’s had bad luck with women his entire life. Big surprise, right? His psychiatrist tells him to join a dating service. Tells him to seek women from small towns. Says they’ll possess basic core values, be less shallow and self-centered than the hookers and strippers he’s been dating.

Vasilis "Billy" Kostopolos is a Bay Area Rust Belt refugee, a failed sci-fi writer, a successful barfly, and, since the exceptionally American zombie apocalypse, an accomplished "driller" of reanimated corpses. There aren't many sane, well-adjusted human beings left in San Francisco, but facing the end of the world, Billy's found his vocation trepanning the undead, peddling his one and only published short story, and drinking himself to death.

From the introduction by David L. Ulin: "For me, Cape Cod is a repository of memory: forty summers in the same house will do that to you. But it is also a landscape of hidden tensions, which rise up when we least anticipate. In part, this has to do with social aspiration, which is one of the things that brought my family, like many others, to the Cape. In part, it has to do with social division, which has been a factor since at least the end of the nineteenth century, when then summer trade began."

I knew from the moment I first saw him he was the one. The only boy I could ever want. The only boy I could ever love. They say he's bad for me. But I know he's not. Until the day he rejects me. And breaks my heart. Completely. Everything changes in the blink of an eye. My entire life as I've known it is...gone. Secrets are revealed. Promises once made are irrevocably broken. There's no way my family can get back to what we once were. So when Nicholas Fairfield walks back into my life like he never left it, I'm furious.

The last place you'd expect to find a team of criminals is at a prestigious Philadelphia prep school. But on a class trip to the US Mint - which prints a million new coins every 30 minutes - an overlooked security flaw becomes far too tempting for a small group of students to ignore. United by dire circumstances, these unlikely allies - the nerd, the slacker, the athlete, and the perfect student - band together to attempt the impossible: rob the US Mint.

James Patrick Kelly, the author of Planet of Whispers and the co-author, with John Kessel, of Freedom Beach has been nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo awards for his short fiction. This is a fable about a dissatisfied architect who travels "up-time" and changes shape to design a temple for a goddess.

In the land of Beryl, there is a forest, and in those woods lived Widow Abigail and her two dear daughters Snow and Rosie. The girls are opposite to each other in their dispositions, but they love each other dearly. Living off what the forest provides, they play games and help their mother with chores around the home, but the sisters love most for their mother to tell them stories after dinner. One winter’s night, the line between fairy tale and reality begins to blur when their mother begins the tale about a forest spirit who falls prey to his own inner demon of greed.

The Keerah War is getting personal for the Dragon Host. Their original home world is out there somewhere. Answers which Bud and Willow seek still elude them. And now the tigers have made their job more difficult. The Dragon Host is taking the war to the tigers, and the Imperium must step up to support them. But Bud has a bigger worry. Just how will the Keerah react if they actually find the Dragon Homeworld?

Two years after the devastation of mass human extinctions in kill zones, mankind is still grasping for survival. An oppressive union of government and big business controls an exhausted America, which is divided between walled-in Protectorates and the unpoliced Outlands.

The new Dragon Host goes operational with a mission for the Terrans. But as their numbers and skills rise, so do the questions. Why did the last Host end? Why are dragon kind so scattered? Are there any more to be found? And most importantly, where did the dragons come from originally? But what gets Bud started on all of these is an even deeper mystery. Why do the Keerah fear the dragons and no-one else? The Host must quest for its own past. But for Bud, it's become the Dragon Imperative.

After a stint living and working in Korea, Nebraska native Bart Schaneman sets out on a quest to live deliberately and with strength and purpose before returning to the States and figuring out what to do with his life and his writing. The only constant, his copy of The Idiot, Bart meets many eclectic characters along the way, themselves young travelers like him, and together they share adventures and experiences against the breathtaking backdrops of China, Mongolia and Russia.

It is the late 1970s and criminal defense attorney Harrison J. Walker, better known as Jaywalker for his rebellious tactics, is struggling to build his own practice when he receives a call from a desperate mother. Her son, Darren Kingston, has been arrested for raping five white women in Castle Hill, an area of the Bronx long forgotten by the city. A young, good-looking black man, Darren is positively identified by four of the victims as the fifth prepares to do the same.