Showing results by narrator "Joshua Saxon" in All Categories

Four hundred years after their entry, Egypt, God’s chosen people, have managed to get themselves all enslaved. How can the omnipotent creator of the universe free his people from bondage and deliver them to the promised land? By sending a random shepherd with a speech impediment to repeatedly threaten the Pharaoh, that’s how.

When Klaus Von Kroft brings his band to the mountain village of Rathburg to perform a concert, a generations old tapestry of blood and darkness draws about him like a shroud. Delving into the disappearance of his parents, Klaus finds himself entranced by Rosa, a sunset-haired woman of mystery and darkness, her companions, and the eerily perfect music they play. But Rosa is far more than mysterious. She has stolen the blood and souls of men on the mountain above Rathburg for centuries.

Here are 17 of the author's favorite stories, including Five Days in April, along with the preceding story "Ten Days in July" and a story published here for the first time, "These are the Moments I Live For". Hopkins also won Stokers for his novel The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club, his novella El Dia de los Muertos, and the second volume of his Extremes anthology series. He is the author of several other collections, including Salt Water Tears, Phoenix, and Road's End, as well as two mystery novels.

Talon has returned to Acre, the Crusader port, after more than a year in Byzantium. He is now a rich man, the owner of ships and in possession of a license to play the merchant within the Empire to the north. However, riches bring enemies and his past is about to catch up with him as accusations of witchcraft have followed him from Languedoc. An investigation is about to disrupt his life but then everything is changed when he travels to a small fort with Sir Guy de Veres, his Templar mentor.

After the destruction of Sanctuary, the group continues on in search of a place they can call home. They need a place to prepare for the upcoming winter, but they want a place they can build more. The group fights to survive. With encounters from unexpected visitors, the past coming back to haunt them, and the group forced to divide, all of which proves to be a challenge.

The Nativity: During the reign of King Herod of Judea, an unwed teenage virgin called Mary is impregnated with a magical baby by the Holy Spirit. She and her fiancé, Joseph, travel to Bethlehem for a preposterous census, and Mary has to give birth in a stable. Meanwhile, a group of stargazing magi who have traipsed hundreds of miles after a star inadvertently inform the king of Judaea of the Messiah’s birth. Also included: "Herod’s Christmas Carol" and a bonus, "Parodies of a Visit from St. Nicholas".

The Phases of Harry Moon is violent and tender, inspired and earthy, and Harry himself is one of the most endearing, mad, and moving characters of fiction in the last decade. Harry Moon is a hero for everyone, and his world is our world - full of laughter and sighing and the bright if tenuous light of understanding.

Three lives. One man. Christopher Marlowe was the first rock star poet, a spy, an atheist, a gay rebel whose controversial plays thrilled audiences and challenged the government. Christopher Wild is Kathe Koja’s new novel, a daring remix of eras - the glitter and threat of Elizabethan England, a grimy mid-20th century, and a dark near-future of constant surveillance - as Marlowe loves and fights and writes his way through every dangerous age.

As a young dragon living by the ideals of virtue and honor, Dauria wanted nothing more than to live in peace and harmony with humanity. When that failed, she helped establish a pact that forced Dragonkind into the shadows. When she awakens after millennia of slumber, she finds the Earth a very different place than she remembers. To make matters worse, upon exiting her lair she finds herself stripped of all her draconic power and left to freeze, in human form, on the icy heights of her mountain home. Someone doesn’t want her to rejoin the rest of her kind.

What Shadows May Follow reunites Dr. Wayne Parsons and his small NASA JPL team as they strive to resolve matters of space/time displacement and evidence of Extra-Terrestrial activities on Earth and on Mars of which have put their lives at risk. With the launch of the first manned mission to Mars imminent, Clandestine Services and sinister Men in Black shadow Dr. Parson’s team as they race to discover the truth before Man sets foot on the Red Planet.

As the Dragon Moon continues to hold sway over Tiberos and the gods begin to take a hand in matters for their own gain, Rath the minotaur finally returns to the empire. However, accompanying him and his surviving crew is a cargo that immediately puts the mariner at odds with his own people...the wizard Amble, the knight Erik Constantin, Kaldara, the elven mystic, and Grey Gage, reluctant new emissary. There to attempt to close the rifts growing between the empire and the kingdoms, they are instead used as pawns by powers both mortal and not seeking to foment all-out war.

In a direct challenge to the People’s Republic of China, the United States Navy has been sent to the South China Sea. They, along with their Japanese allies are there to conduct Freedom of Navigation operations in International Waters near the disputed Spratly Islands chain. But as escalating tensions mount, something extraordinary has taken place. Lurking high up in the clouds at 20,000 feet above sea level, an elusive object of unknown origin or intent has intruded upon contested airspace leaving little room for error.

The world is not the same place it once was. America, once united, now known as The Divide is a savage land where the vicious and remorseful survive. Follow the story of Stuart and Malcolm. Two survivors of the wars that broke the country and sent life back several centuries. Stuart has a past he would rather forget. He was placed in a position of leading a small group of survivors. Now, he struggles to keep the group together and safe, as well as work toward a future where they can live in harmony...well, sort of.

Welcome to New Londinium, a city that developed from an enclave of stragglers who survived the culminating blast of the last world war. From beneath the lee of a mountain formed as a result of the devastation, a colony gathered and grew. After several hundred years, this post-apocalyptic city is filled to bursting, and everyone - well, nearly everyone - is struggling for a place amidst the city’s Chosen, the elite ruling faction.

1866, Japan. A time of sweeping change and open rebellion. Under threat of subjugation from the modern nations of the industrialized West, the non-hereditary Samurai clans demand action from the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate. Enter William Merrick of the American Consulate in Hakodate, who is tasked to rescue a group of shipwrecked Americans en route to Edo. As a whirlwind of events unfolds, he unwittingly becomes swept up in a deadly plot by a secretive faction’s scheme, who with their American co-conspirators, seek to seize power....

Maggie Collins, a newly minted NYPD detective, is lovely enough to be a model but wants a career chasing bad guys. She volunteers to go undercover to catch a serial killer. "Don't get in the car," her lieutenant says. But, of course, she gets into the car. The killer thinks he is in love, but his idea of love is a little strange.

In 2002, we learned that Pres. George Washington had eight (and, later, nine) enslaved Africans in his house while he lived in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1797. The house was only one block from Independence Hall. It housed the enslaved men and women Washington brought to the city as well as serving as the country's first executive office building. In Slavery in the North, Marc Howard Ross not only asks why enslavement disappeared from the North's collective memories but also how the dramatic recovery of these memories in recent decades should be understood.

This collaboration between best-selling author of westerns Russ Towne and fiction author Holly Bargo - the two “guns” - presents 12 tales of the Old West. Each author has contributed six stories or “bullets” to this anthology. We hope to satisfy audiences of the genre with rousing stories that not only meet expectations, but also add some uncommon insight into the short period of American history known as the Wild West.

The clash of armies in the American Civil War left hundreds of thousands of men dead, wounded, or permanently damaged. Skirmishes and battles could result in casualty numbers as low as one or two and as high as 10s of thousands. The carnage of the battlefield left a lasting impression on those who experienced or viewed it, but in most cases the armies quickly moved on to meet again at another time and place. When the dust settled and the living armies moved on, what happened to the dead left behind?

In preparation for the first manned mission to Mars, NASA’s latest robotic rover, Mars Prospector, has been sent to the Red Planet to survey potential landing zones. But when something unsettling was captured by the rover’s camera, it triggers a series of disturbing events for Dr. Wayne Parsons and his small JPL rover team that will place into question if we are truly alone in the universe.