Showing results by narrator "R. C. Bray" in All Categories

As something dark and deadly takes to the skies over Harrington Falls, Jake Caruso and his friends, Sam Travers and Katelynn Riley, find themselves drawn into a primeval conflict set in motion centuries before. When fresh blood is spilled and the death toll mounts, these three friends will find themselves faced with a terror beyond imagination, one that will require every vestige of their strength, faith, and determination to confront.

In its 500 years, no invader has ever infiltrated Sowdek Fortress. None but a select few know of its secret vault and what treasures it holds. Tonight, a lone thief intends to change that.

Jessup Burke, a lonely, naïve 16-year-old, has grown up without a father in a jobless, indifferent logging town. Out of high school a year early, he now bikes through the woods with his fishing gear, daydreaming of his sweetheart and their secret "home" in an abandoned farmhouse. When Reg, an embittered, paranoid recluse fresh out of jail for growing marijuana, encounters Jessup hitchhiking, he is at first drawn to the boy's easily manipulated naïveté, but the two soon become irreversibly bound.

Geoff Ashden is a regular guy trying to make an honest living as an antique dealer, but who has an uncanny knack for finding cursed objects and haunted places: a sinister Georgian clock carved with obscene and satanic designs, a hideous doll with deadly powers, a pair of old spectacles that let their wearer see a little too clearly, an ugly house with a terrifying secret, a church full of graffiti scrawled in decomposing human flesh.

Mark is the accused rapist. Miss P. is the victim, his former teacher. Moira M. is an apathetic juror. As the trial unfolds in this intense short story, three personal histories emerge, along with three alarmingly different points of view: Obsessed and angry. Menaced and disillusioned. Disaffected and searching through an unexamined life for moral conviction.

In the world of Altadas, there are no more human births. The Regime is replacing the unborn with demons, while the Resistance is trying to destroy a drug called Hope that the demons need to survive. Between these two warring factions lies Jacob, a man who profits from smuggling contraceptive amulets into the city of Blackout. He cares little about the Great Iron War, but a chance capture, and an even more accidental rescue, embroils him in a plot to starve the Regime from power.

When a disgruntled astronaut decides to get revenge, all hell breaks loose! By the time the final flight of the Russian space capsule, Soyuz, docks at the international space station, Derek Johnson - the oldest astronaut to fly in space - is sick with a severe case of food poisoning that does not respond to antibiotics, and he soon dies. Recruited to assist NASA’s medical team, Dr. Bob Kramer, a forensic toxicologist and expert witness, concludes that the cause of Johnson’s death is a mutated form of bacteria that is not normally found in nature.

In the morning, Bram finds the bones of a murdered child. At noon, the murdered child begs for his help. And by nightfall, they have killed a man together and set off into the afterlife, where nothing is what it was, and death is only the beginning of punishment. An eerie story about the nature of death and the self, Midnight Picnic inhabits an American landscape made strange and unfamiliar.

The last thing Jenna Landry wants is to fall in love. The former rock musician is getting ready to start a new job and a new life in L.A., and she's only back in her hometown for the summer. Nothing could tempt her to stay any longer than that...not even the sexy doctor next door. Michael Stone has a reputation for being as cold as ice. So what is it about his free-spirited neighbor that sets him on fire?

Derek Adams is a Glasgow PI with plenty of time on his hands. Until the Bogart Case walks in. A priceless family heirloom has been stolen and everyone in town is looking for it. The stars are right once more, and an ancient evil has been awakened from its dreaming sleep. It was supposed to be an easy case, fast money. But pretty soon Derek is up to his armpits in bodies, femme fatales, and tentacles. The city's dark side has him. And it doesn't want to let the Midnight Eye go!

Angelo DiNoto is the most powerful crime lord in New Jersey, his empire sustained by pure heroin from the poppies of an old Turkish farmer. That is, until a $5 million dollar shipment goes missing. Richard Mundi, a shady developer, sees the lost heroin as capital infusion for his failing business. His daughter, Gloria, literally in bed with would-be revolutionaries, thinks it's her ticket out. "Mailman", a long-time postal clerk dying of cancer, believes finding the heroin would be perfect ending to a failed life....

The Resistance races against time to complete the missile-launcher known as the Hometaker, capable of opening a gateway to the land the Regime came from, and exposing the Iron Emperor for all the evils he's done. Everything rests on the secrecy of the mission, but from day one, tongues are wagging. With no time left on the clock, General Rommond is forced to make an audacious plan: finish the construction of the Hometaker on the move, driving straight towards the enemy, who've assembled in unimaginable force. The Great Iron War is coming to an end.

Every victory is its own defeat. General Rommond's efforts to amass technological superiority over the enemy has resulted in the creation of a weapon that could destroy everything, and a faction just mad enough to use it. The Armageddon Brigade has awoken from its deep slumber, and it seeks to wake the world with it. Attracting the brightest and most unstable of minds, this splinter group of the Resistance has become the greatest thorn in Rommond's side.

The Resistance takes to the clouds aboard the Skyshaker, the newly completed airship aimed at dominating the heavens, when the land far below has become a hellish place ruled by demons. General Rommond fixes his attention on the city of Blackout, the old capital of the world, controlled by the Treasury, who are themselves controlled by the ruthless Regime. That center of the old civilized world will either shift allegiance to the Resistance, or it'll burn to the ground.

The Regime is on the hunt, forcing the Resistance to take refuge aboard the Lifemaker, an advanced submarine that houses a special cargo: a handful of women who can still give birth to human children. Locked inside his tin can prison, Jacob can no longer escape his role in the Great Iron War. He's forced to face life as a father, life as a soldier, and life beneath the deep blue sea. More than anything, he's forced to face himself.

The Wild North is full of nasty places, but there are some places you just don't go. One of them is that scrapyard desert known as the Rust Valley. The bounty hunter Nox made a promise to himself that he'd never be caught dead there. Yet when a couple of kids end up wandering inside that metal maze, he finds himself with no other choice. He decks himself out in his finest armor. He'll need it. That land is where the rust-covered Clockwork Commune live, and if they don't scavenge the metal off you, they'll scavenge the flesh instead.

Nox is a wanted man. While searching for a criminal, the fabled Coilhunter wanders into a tribal village massacre. He didn't do it, but that doesn't matter. The clues point to him, and he's made a lot of enemies over the years. Many would happily see the tables turned. His pleas of innocence fall on deaf ears. No sooner does he try to find the real killers than posters go up across the Wild North - posters with his face and his name. He isn't the only bounty hunter out there. Dozens assemble to cash him in.

Ten-year-old twins Ashlynne and Julian share a special ability: the power to enter each other's dreams. They call it "sharing" dreams. It's usually a great time...until one night when the twins find themselves stuck inside a dream that feels all too real. The pair must work together to find a way to wake up - and they need to hurry - because the dream is quickly turning into a nightmare, thanks to an ancient evil bent on ensuring they never escape....

Graylin Alexander is a model 14-year-old. When his adolescent curiosity gets the best of him, Graylin finds himself embroiled in a sexting scandal that threatens to ruin his life. Jenny Ungerman, the attorney hired to defend Graylin, is smart, confident, and committed. She isn't thrilled, however, when ex-prosecutor Angela Evans joins Graylin's defense team. The two women instantly butt heads. Can they put aside their differences long enough to ensure Graylin gets justice?

In Wolf's Revenge, the fifth novel in Lachlan Smith's Shamus Award-winning series, attorney-detective Leo Maxwell seeks an exit strategy from his family's deepening entanglement with a ruthless prison-based gang. Caught between the criminals and the FBI, Leo charts his own path in defending a young woman who was manipulated into brazenly murdering a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood.