Showing results by narrator "Aiello" in All Categories

Three offbeat stories of crime and conundrum, set in the present moment, from the New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award-winning author of Underground Airlines and The Last Policeman.

Emperor Mollusk. Intergalactic Menace. Destroyer of Worlds. Conqueror of Other Worlds. Mad Genius. Ex-Warlord of Earth. Not bad for a guy without a spine. But what's a villain to do after he's done... everything. With no new ambitions, he's happy to pitch in and solve the energy crisis or repel aliens invaders should the need arise, but if he had his way, he'd prefer to be left alone to explore the boundaries of dangerous science. Just as a hobby, of course. Retirement isn't easy though.

Bill Buford spends a wild night in the park; Jonathan Safran Foer envisions it as a tiny, transplanted piece of a mythical Sixth Borough; and Marie Winn answers definitively Holden Caulfield's question of where the ducks go when the park's ponds freeze over. There are bird sightings and fish sightings; Jackie Kennedy and James Brown sightings; and pieces by Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, and Francine Prose. This vibrant collection presents Central Park in all its many-faceted glory, a 51-block swath of special magic.

Seven years ago the New Earth colony received one final message from Earth...a warning. First a global pandemic, then the emergence of a new species. A war for survival ravaged the Sol system. Now they are coming for the colony. Many colonists don't believe it, but Connor does. They must prepare. They must fight. But how can they survive something that killed every person back on Earth?

A dance club full of bodies. Cause of death - a mystery. The lone survivor - a man, raving like a lunatic, wearing only a deerstalker hat. Now, the man who calls himself Sherman Holmes is being studied like a lab rat by a top-secret government agency. How is it he can be barely clinging to reality one minute - yet be a seeming genius the next? Within his brain might just be the greatest scientific breakthrough of the millennium, if anyone can figure out how to access it. Enter the agent code named Watson.

Sherman Holmes has officially settled into his new city, and the World's Greatest Detective Agency has opened its doors. While his put-upon partner, Watson, would be happy to keep the jobs as simple as missing pets, when a worried worker with an outlandish tale of ghosts walks in, there's no stopping Sherman from taking the case. Now, the new duo must investigate a local "haunted" tourist site where the scares are going off-script and otherworldly interference is suspected.

Falling in love wasn't the plan. But how could I resist his promises of hope? Of forgiveness? Of a future I had stopped dreaming of? We were shattered. We were scarred. We were something strange and beautiful. We were two lost souls holding on to the only thing that could keep us together. Each other.

En route to London from New York, Flight 305 suddenly loses power and crash-lands in the English countryside, plunging a group of strangers into a mysterious adventure that will have repercussions for all of humankind. Struggling to stay alive, the survivors soon realize that the world they've crashed in is very different from the one they left. But where are they? Why are they here? And how will they get back home?

When your fairy godmother threatens to enslave you with a curse - when a malevolent piper solves your rat problem but steals your children - when you seek revenge on the prince who turned you into a frog - who can you turn to in your hour of need? The band of scoundrels known far and wide as the Bastard Champions - the swashbuckling trio who travel a world of legend, seeking adventure and righting wrongs - as long as there's enough gold to be earned.

Contains books three and four of Time Wars Last Forever. Fragmented Time: Time is tearing apart. The Earth and every soul on it are not just gone; they never even existed. Jon Ryan's hopes of pulling off yet another miracle are evaporating like drops of rain on hot desert sands. Shattered Time: Time has not been kind to Jon Ryan. It almost seems personal between the two of them. His mission to resurrect a lost Earth gets more complicated, more dangerous, and less likely to succeed with each new barrier thrown in his path.

In Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?, neuroscientists and zombie enthusiasts Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek apply their neuro-know-how to dissect the puzzle of what has happened to the zombie brain to make the undead act differently than their human prey. Combining tongue-in-cheek analysis with modern neuroscientific principles, Verstynen and Voytek show how zombism can be understood in terms of current knowledge regarding how the brain works.

Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures in The Cyberiad, they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers.

When former soldier Everett Cole signed on to help colony planets prepare for joining the Federation, his employers were disconcertingly vague about their identity and his duties. Yet, the pay was good, and it got him off Earth and on the way to a fresh start. More reservations arose when, 11 light-years from Earth, he met his partner, Edgar Millen, an enigmatic man with a penchant for violent solutions and a fetish for the mythology and language of the American Wild West.

Life is good for the four humans in Cleveland who know that mice have evolved into possibly the smartest species on Earth. Eleven-year-old Megan and her cousin Joey have great summer jobs at the mouse-powered factory that makes Thumbtops - the tiny computers mice use to spread the word about climate change. But suddenly, the Big Cheese, leader of the Mouse Nation, needs their help. There's trouble at his Headquarters in California.

The longer Everett Cole was on the planet Astrild, the more he understood the nature and mission of the Federation of Planets agency he had signed up with. Unfortunately, at the same time, understanding seemed to be associated with more people trying to shoot him. The new knowledge included that Astrild was more than the innocuous, developing colony planet it should be. Outside forces were using the planet and its unique ecosystem for purposes that must be stamped out.

In Jon Ryan's life, two billion years down his time stream, he's see many an odd thing. But mixing in the bizarro world of the Ancient Gods has burdened him to the brink with the crazy, the inexplicable, and the just plain wrong. But he remains true to his mission. He must stop the Cleinoid threat to his universe. An impossible appearing task to be certain.

When a remote island's rain forest is threatened by the greedy timber company Loggocorp, the Humans Who Know (that mice have evolved) develop a secret plan to save the forest. And they need all the help they can get from the Big Cheese, Trey, and their other friends in the Mouse Nation. First the team must unravel a centuries-old mystery: Who actually owns the rain forest? The mission to find that person brings Megan and her family across the ocean to England, where everything starts to go just a little bit...weird.

When 10-year-old Megan helps her uncle invent the Thumbtop, the world's smallest computer, mice are overjoyed, and they want one for every mouse hole. The Big Cheese, leader of the Mouse Nation, has orders: Follow that girl - even if it means high-tailing it to Megan's new home on the other side of the country. While Megan struggles as the new girl, the mice wait for their chance.

Healer Blackthorn knows all too well the rules of her bond to the fey: seek no vengeance, help any who ask, do only good. But after the recent ordeal she and her companion, Grim, have suffered, she knows she cannot let go of her quest to bring justice to the man who ruined her life.

Contains books five and six of the Rise of the Ancient Gods series: Fury of the Ancient Gods and Fall of the Ancient Gods.