Showing results by narrator "Kevin Collins" in All Categories

Father John has lived his whole life without knowing a woman's touch. Hard at first, his self-denial grew easier over time, as he learned to master his urges with a regimen of prayer, cold showers, and jigsaw puzzles. That changes the day that Debra Rocks enters his confessional. A rough-talking adult film actress, she has come to ask him to pray for a murdered costar.

When the end finally occurred, everything about it was cinematic. The dead came back and ate people, civilization collapsed, and no one could do a thing. But Cyrus V. Sinclair couldn’t care less; he’s a sociopath. Amidst the chaos, Cyrus sits back and contemplates the gore stained streets and screams of his fellow man with little more emotion than one of the walking corpses. With his cache of guns and MREs, he rather likes the idea of hunkering down in his Seattle apartment while the world ends outside.

It's Saturday night in Santa Barbara and it seems like everyone is headed to the same destination. The reason is simple: To celebrate the end of school. But for eleven different people the motives are bit more complicated - to be noticed, to hook up, to make friends, to numb the pain, to get over an ex, to say goodbye. As each character takes a turn and tells his/her story, the eleven individuals intersect, reconnect, and combine in ways that none of them ever saw coming.

Carter Montgomery broke the family mold when he went to culinary school. Now a successful restauranteur, he's at a crossroads: Should he continue on his successful path or look for a new challenge? What he needs is time alone to think things through. But his matchmaking family has other ideas.

Donovan was shot by a cop. Four of the nine shots were lethal or would have been, if their target had been anybody else. The Foundation picked him up, brought him back, and trained him further. “Lethal” turns out to be a relative term when magic is involved. When Marci was 15, she levitated a paperweight and threw it at a guy she didn't like. The Foundation scooped her up for training too. “Hippie chick” Susan got well into her Foundation training before they told her about the magic, but she's as powerful as Donovan and Marci now.

Tensions are running high in the Spacetime Ocean. A single spark could lead to war. But it's nothing Sergey can't handle . . . right?

In the snow-globe world surrounding the Pillar, where survival stands on a knife's edge, it would seem differences should be set aside in the name of the greater good. But people are people, and even in the toughest conditions they divide themselves into groups and castes. Intrigue rules, secrets spread, and the cunning play games . . . but not all succumb. Several headstrong Lucovian explorers have found a friend and trusted partner in Hunter. They share a common goal of escaping their icy trap.

It almost seemed that the worst lay behind them. Hanuvar and his small band of allies had faced down warriors and horrors and sinister magics to free hundreds of their people from slavery. The emperor was dead and his successor had so little interest in finding Hanuvar he'd ordered his sorcerous revenants to cease their search and turn their sinister talents to other targets.

Hanuvar pledged to find the remnants of his people, scattered into slavery across the whole of the peninsula. This time he had no army. His would be a stealthy war of liberation, buying the freedom of some and arranging for the escape of others, aided only by a young playwright, the daughter of a hated political rival, the tattered remnants of his old spy network, and the unlikeliest ally of all, the general who once defeated him.

"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.

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.

Some dream of prosperity, of living a calm and peaceful life. But not me. Having reached the pinnacles of success, I can't stop thinking about the past, about a time when any misstep could spell disaster, when I had to pay, work, and risk everything for even the slightest gain and each day was like walking a knife's edge. That's all in the past now. This peaceful, predictable, and privileged life isn't so bad. But it's boring!

Married . . . With Children writer-producer Richard Gurman takes us behind the scenes of this boundary-breaking show to reveal how its inner workings were at times as disruptive and contentious—yet at other times, as hysterical and raunchy—as the Bundy family themselves.

A must-listen business biography from Stephen B. Siegel, chairman of global brokerage for CBRE, the world’s largest real estate firm.

Warfield hires Chad Hunter, a private weapons designer who had worked for the German company, to go to Germany to convince the company that Warfield is the perfect partner. To sweeten the deal, Hunter must first convince Frank Baldwin, a struggling optics engineer from Wyoming, who has developed the most advanced rifle scope ever conceived, that his scope would be the perfect match for this new German rifle.

Everyone thinks Emmy Dockery is crazy. Obsessed with finding the link between hundreds of unsolved cases, Emmy has taken leave from her job as an FBI researcher. Now all she has are the newspaper clippings that wallpaper her bedroom, and her recurring nightmares of an all-consuming fire. Not even Emmy's ex-boyfriend, field agent Harrison "Books" Bookman, will believe her that hundreds of kidnappings, rapes, and murders are all connected.

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.

It is the early months of the Arab Spring, 2011. But for three young men, two American and one Iraqi, their minds return again and again to 2006, to the bloodiest stretch of the Iraq War. Members of the same platoon, they were tasked with the often deadly job of repairing potholes in the roads of the Al Anbar Province: potholes that almost always concealed a home-made bomb. They have survived the war but now they must learn to live with themselves.

In working-class Bay Ridge, Michael drives for a car service and gives lifts to his father, a former sanitation worker and current small-time bookie. He has a friend with a heroin habit, and a longtime girlfriend who expects they’ll get married one of these days. Michael spends most of his time on the familiar streets where he grew up, but now he’s crossing the bridge into Manhattan for some college classes—where he meets a seductive female classmate who seems to come from a whole different world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forth global anxiety about linkages between the environment and society at a fundamental structural level. Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life provides an accessible exposition of the latest foundational knowledge on how natural and social systems science can inform planetary crises. Humanity has either tried to conquer or capitulate to natural order, whereas we should be seeking to understand latent structures and patterns that permeate all systems and develop an "earthly order," that is socially functional and sustainable.