Every stellar rise deserves a cosmic fall. Inhumanly callous and ruthlessly selfish, he made a fortune in predatory mortgage loans prior to the economic collapse of 2008. In its calamitous aftermath, executive handlers staged him for a corporate patsy and left him to answer alone for their collective crimes. Facing financial ruin and certain incarceration, his reduced prospects force him to move his family into a rat-infested bungalow. One family confronts an epic plague of vermin when they move into a modest country home. They have all the benefits of human civilization in such a contest,...

A thousand years ago, stoic Norsemen built resilient ocean-going longboats from wood and iron. They used these robust vessels to conquer the Arctic Ocean, discovering North America centuries before the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria sailed from Lisbon. We have no intact, complete record of their journeys, but history has preserved a patchwork of sagas that describe many wonders of the age. These are tales of both victory and vanquish, success and failure, and, though they on occasion echo the violent fortunes of many lost Viking explorers, we will never know what became of those who sailed away...

In a utopian future, humanity divides itself into two kinds. A vast majority of citizens represent the first kind, and they are as physically flawless as they are psychologically perfect. Second-kind live apart, confined to the Deviant Compartment. They are the last damaged remnants of a primitive past defined by genetic ambiguity and reproductive anarchy. They are also humanity's last hope. Where "separate but equal" transforms from innocuous fringe slogan into accepted social norm, the resultant peace becomes a fatal disease of compromise and inadequacy.

Insomnia is a special kind of torture. Its short-term effects are something everyone experiences from time to time, but its long-term effects are known only to an unfortunate few. These effects include panic attacks, paranoia, and phobias. Eventually, hallucinations and convulsions become noticeable, followed by symptoms of dementia, coma and then death. Inevitably, the difference between waking and sleeping dissolves and the two become inseparable. After months of restlessness, a chronically sleepless man loses the ability to differentiate between nightmares, daydreams and reality. While...

Forty years a soldier. Forty years a spy. Forty years an international trafficker of weapons and drugs. All, the accomplishments of one nameless man, a "spook." From the frozen highlands of Korea, through the sweltering hinterlands of Vietnam, into the arid wastes of Afghanistan and Iraq, then across the Atlantic to the oppressive deserts of Mexico, his career followed an opium highway through the highlights of modern history. His perspective will change you. With all the powerful innovations of modern technology, no nation on Earth has succeeded in closing its borders to the illegal trade of...

After he follows a wealthy runaway debutante from Boston to the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, an American investigator must hire a local guide to lead him into the dense jungles of the Mesoamerican interior in search of her. As they penetrate deeper into the forest, civilization disappears and they find themselves lost amid a mysterious land of bloody legend and savage myth. Within the ruins of a forgotten Mayan city, they ultimately encounter a contemporary death cult and discover the old gods reawakened. Five centuries ago, countless Mayans perished atop the chacmool, their beating hearts...

On Friday the 13th, 1307, the Knights Templar ceased to exist. Imprisoned, tortured and executed, in a single day every soldier of that once-powerful order became a capital offender with no hope for reprieve. Fabulously wealthy at the time, the Templars owned vast estates that safeguarded legendary caches of treasure. Though their enemies seized much of their property, rumors of lost hordes echo through history to the present day. Having survived the disastrous purge of 1307, a Templar sergeant and chaplain flee to the relative safety of Portugal, where they learn the fate of the order's most...

As the zombie apocalypse begins, a small group of civil servants find themselves locked in their tollbooths, which are heavily armored against run-away automobiles. At first they curse their situation. As they watch the world fall apart around them, however, they realize they are safe for the time being. It's better than being outside among the crazies, but how long can they survive? It's cramped, dinghy and institutionally depressing. Better a tollbooth than a cannibalistic feeding frenzy

In the limitless expanse of the cosmos, intelligence need not be confined to water-filled flesh. For every form of imagination, there is an embodiment of it out there in the void. On this world in this system, everything may be uniquely alive, from the rocks to the sandstorms. How does one conquer the wind? It is an alien intellect in the shifting sands of a waterless planet. Journey here to die. Or be reborn.

Klis would be their first failure and it would mark the end of their conquest. When the Mongol envoy entered into the city walls, he offered its citizens the same thing the Mongols offered every conquest - tribute or extermination. The city inhabitants would refuse the former to brave the latter and they would survive. The Mongol hordes once marched from the Far East into Europe. There, they encountered their first breaking point at the fortified city of Klis.