Showing results by author "Stephen Donald" in All Categories

Listen to mystery stories by today's top writers and the masters who inspired them. The idea for this collection came to Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Lawrence Block when he was asked, "What is your favorite mystery story?" Block compiled this unique collection by posing the same question to some of today's favorite writers of the genre, including Stephen King, Tony Hillerman, and John Lutz.

On a beam of light as in the fog of dreams, a hundred human beings of all ages and walks-of-life find themselves standing on narrow pedestals in a strange auditorium filled with noxious, frigid liquid. With no room to sit or recline, they cannot rest or sleep. They can only shift from foot to foot atop the pedestals, standing for hours then days, their fears unresolved and their fate unknown. They disappear all over the world. Some of them eventually return home again.

She is the most devestating weapon known to a galaxy filled with violence, and tonight she has come to Planet Earth aboard an alien spacecraft. To save us all. The key to unlocking this mysterious device is a naive, unassuming young cheerleader named Dee. Selected among the dwindling remnants of a population in the last throes of extinction, she alone has the power to control the terrible entity known as "Super B**ch".

This course provides a detailed executive-level review of contemporary topics in supervised machine learning theory with specific focus on predictive modeling and linear regression. The ideal student is a technology professional with a basic working knowledge of machine learning theory. Additionally, to better inform the interested student, the final lesson of this course presents samples in Python describing the essential implementation of described regression methods.

Zuzu is a futuristic time clipper, a spacecraft capable of zapping backward and forward in time. As it embarks on its latest combat mission, one of its crew smuggles a forbidden keepsake onboard. This is a rose-shaped medallion given to him by his youngest daughter. The smallest things count in large amounts given sufficient time. Worry for the tiniest details of a thing, for these trifles sometimes bury the truth.

When dinosaurs of all eras suddenly appear all over the world, questions abound. Time for answers diminish faster than the human population. One thing is certain, during a plague of prehistoric thunder lizards, a feisty poodle can come in handy!

If you had known him as a young man, you would not be surprised to learn that he ended up on the coroner's slab with a bullet hole in his forehead. Yet if you knew him as a man, this is the last fate you would imagine for him. We all got it coming. The start doesn't always dictate the end, but the end is certain, nonetheless.

He returns to keep their lawn year upon year, from his youth to middle-age, and never a charge or missed appointment. Their lawn is immaculate, their hedges invariably neat and trimmed, their fall leaves absent, and their home well-kept. It's a burdensome debt to repay. He's choking up every last cent.

Awakening night upon night in a feverish chill, fresh from the throes of disturbing nightmares, one hapless human being ponders the separation of dream and reality. Eventually, muddy feet betray the truth. Black River runs through the center of Pecan Groves, Texas. Lately, it floats.

They are the perfect couple, if perfection is a measure of lies and deception. They travel from town to town, conning their way across country while working confidence games, large and small. When their past turns up to haunt them, they both quickly realize they are but hours away from certain death. Life then becomes a contest of ruthless cunning, but this is a game they play well.

The lumps on Tuggle Imp’s head will soon converge atop his dented skull. After eons of review, he suspects this merger will correspond to a portentous lunar alignment. Yet trials of perdition are never simple or easy. During the final desperate hours of his quest, Tuggle must confront the amorous pursuit of Toad Woman and her relentless guide, little-dog. Each in their own way, both are dedicated to his torment. To avoid descending into a lower level of the underworld, he must overcome his infernal nature to embrace a detested change of character. Somehow, Tuggle Imp must learn to love!

Terminus Part I: Civilization deconstructed itself like a riot in a madhouse. In the aftermath, a handful of guilt-wracked holdouts stumble onto a terrible secret. To learn the final truth and save their species, they must cross a blood-soaked wasteland to investigate the long-standing enigma we call “Area-51”, where Terminus begins. Terminus Part II (Control): A handful of desperate post-apocalyptic survivors will uncover many unsettling truths about the past, present and future of their species. Most startling of all, they will discover why their thoughts are not their own when the ...

Nightland resides within an extraordinary region of time and space bound only by limits of sheer imagination. Its ephemeral pinnacles soar near the apex of human aspiration while its abysmal valleys plunge deeply into the darkest landscapes of global apocalypse. It is alternately violently wild and oppressively regimented. Nightland is older than all of recorded human history and it is many things to come.

This course provides a detailed executive-level review of contemporary topics in graph modeling theory with specific focus on Deep Learning theoretical concepts and practical applications. The ideal student is a technology professional with a basic working knowledge of statistical methods. Upon completion of this review, the student should acquire improved ability to discriminate, differentiate, and conceptualize appropriate implementations of application-specific ("traditional" or "rule-based") methods versus deep learning methods of statistical analyses and data modeling.

Modern cultures are awash in the reflections of humankind's primitive past. Often, only graven images of ancient violence pass through eons of time to speak to us today, and it is these Death Eidolons that enable us to understand the darkest point of our collective origins. Whether looming implacably through a dense jungle tangle or winking grotesquely through the uncertain blue light of our television sets, we cannot escape countless contemporary examples of humankind's base nature, which most of us constrain daily with a tenuous mastery.

It shapes our cosmos by confining the stars and is, perhaps, the interstellar sire of human spawn. Within each mind Dark Matter abides, the primordial ancestor of all things chaotic, violent, and destructive. Gravitational and inert, it unyieldingly obsesses our most deviant desires while alternately flinging our most violent impulses into the fringes of destructive behavior. Take time to embrace the Dark Matter of life, if only because it is utterly inescapable.

Near the turn of the First Century, the Ninth Legion disappeared from frontier borderlands separating Romanized Britannia from the uncivilized lowlands of Caledonia. Between its first deployment there during Agricola’s invasion in 84AD and the return of Emperor Hadrian in 122AD, all mention of the Ninth fades from memory. No authenticated record confirms the legion’s military annihilation on a field of battle, and no evidence confirms its reassignment to any other region of the empire. Contemporary Rome, and all of history, seems to have simply forgotten the Ninth. Until now.

1943. World War II. The U.S. government drafted him out of his life of normalcy and complacency into the life of a United States Marine Corps officer. After intensive training, he would serve during some of the bloodiest assaults of the war. The violent rigors of combat would teach him the rules of long-term survival amid the most lethal fighting in human history. Those who failed to learn these lessons would not return home to their families.

Every man who murders his wife and every wife who murders her husband does so with the firm belief that they will never be caught, although this belief belies the inevitably obvious suspect. From time to time, however, chance mates with fortune to present the perfect crime. She's worth a life and the price of a bullet. He will risk all with one selfish act of violence.

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.