Showing results by narrator "Craig Jessen" in All Categories

Explore the tangled lives of these men and women in 14 short tales set in River City!

Carl is a Yankee cop in a small Texas border town. Isabella is a beautiful Mexican woman that everyone in town loves, including the hapless Pete and the wealthy, powerful Jack Talbott...but most of all, Carl.

George “Mase” Masaryk knows about secrets. He has a few of his own, including the reason he left the police department. The son of Czechoslovak hippies, his life has been a strange journey from rebel to cop to private investigator. It is a path his parents would never have chosen for him. One full of secrets and regrets.

Earl Marcus found new hope after confronting the unspeakable evil unleashed by his father’s fundamentalist Church of the Holy Flame. Now plying his trade as a private investigator in the North Georgia mountains, he’s drawn once again into a dark abyss of depravity, and murder.

Earl Marcus thought he had left the mountains of Georgia behind forever, and with them, the painful memories of a childhood spent under the fundamentalist rule of his father RJ’s church - a church built on fear, penance, and the twisting, writhing mass of snakes. But then an ominous photo of RJ is delivered to Earl’s home. The photograph is dated long after his father’s burial, and there’s no doubt that the man in the picture is very much alive.

Sugar Got Low contains a tale of grifters, a prequel story to the well-regarded Ania series, several trips back to River City, and one to La Sombra, Texas. Enjoy a Walter Mitty homage set in San Francisco, a deadly day in Roman Britain, the heartbreaking story of a junkie, and the suspenseful one of a murderer in a black car. And at the end of it all, you’ll experience the dark but inspiring title story of perseverance that was only made possible because of a misunderstood lyric.

Good Shepherd is a three-story collection of erotic crime fiction swirling with lust, revenge, and insatiable sexual gluttony. Three very different men and women sit at the center of each story. Yet, in the end, they’re all the same — forever changed by forbidden temptation in a world where justice pretends to be blind.

John Hendry, a leading management scholar, looks at the nature and practice of management in this Very Short Introduction. Tracing the development of management over the last century, he looks not only at what managers do, but also provides an insight to modern management theory. He considers the influences of national and organizational culture, the relationship between power and domination, managing in different cultures, approaches to management, and at the accountability of managers and morality.

A battered starship is reborn as the galaxy's greatest weapon vs. a horde of armored transhuman warriors...The RCS Musashi is an antique ship - a last-chance posting for the unmotivated and undisciplined in the Fleet. But their captain, aging war hero Harrison Kane, believes that his crew of misfits can summon their talents to become the very best.

In the brave new world of angels and procurers, rentadeath prostitutes will let you sexually abuse them and even hack them to pieces for a fee. In anticipation of your own death, be sure to keep up payments on your life crystal. After you die, you can enjoy life to the hilt in a very attractive new body with your memories intact. Young body, old memories. Violent death is the ultimate repeatable pleasure.

A wanderer with a troubled past follows a sensitivity to magic that pulls him hard to a mountain in the middle of nowhere, where he's caught up in impending apocalypse, powerful practitioners...and a blood feud.

In these pages, you will thrill to some of the most exciting superhero stories ever to star a caped avenger, all written by DC Comics writer Robert T. Jeschonek. Don't miss these edgy, exciting, and surprising tales from this award-winning storyteller. This volume includes six superhero stories for one low price.

In this tale of two lives immutably intertwined, Sister Rachel is a nun in a failing order, a painter with a history of madness, devoted to her dying Mother General. Her brother Phillip is an accountant serving time for embezzlement, a man capable of great violence and anger who has turned his back not simply on the church, but faith as well. They have nothing in common except for a shared childhood tragedy. Or do they?

A botched drug raid took her father's life when she was seven. On her 13th birthday she witnessed her mother's murder. Alone in the world, Jennifer Blade sets out to even the score. At 33, enmeshed in a game that knows no rules, she is about to fulfill her quest when everything unravels. Fleeing for her life, she heads to the mountains of upstate New York, where she unexpectedly finds new reason to live. Steve Sanders, a 38-year-old psychologist with a predictable life, is on a fishing trip in the mountains.

"You mean we're truly going to play for the fate of the Universe?" "Exactly," the Overlord said, "a forty-one game chess match to be broadcast throughout all civilized sectors of your Universe so that everyone can witness it." "But why chess? Why me? Why this planet?" "Because chess is ideal for such a final judgment; it is a methodical game with absolutely no element of luck, and therefore there can be no complaints by the loser. Chess is known only to your plant, and you and your opponent are the most evenly matched living players."

Another Part of Me - An Extraordinary Tale of Twin Souls is a personal account of two people, two souls, who have crossed over countless planes of existence throughout time and join together in the present day to serve humanity together. Everyone has heard of their “other half” their soul mate, but few truly understand the spiritual significance of this other half of ourselves.

Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography is a memoir, told in vignettes, that captures the history of one dysfunctional American family. An extension of a 2003 "memory experiment" of the same name, A Common Pornography weaves recollections of small-town youth with darker threads from his family’s story, including incest, madness, betrayal, and death. A regular contributor to Dave Egger’s The Believer and McSweeney’s, Sampsell has written "the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive" (Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Double Life Is Twice as Good).

Could Jake ever trust Sara again? Sara Standish knew private investigator Jake Donovan didn't want children. He'd lost his wife and child and his anguish was obvious. With their wedding only days away, she discovered she was pregnant. Should she marry Jake and trap him with a child he might not want? She loved him too much to do that so she called off their wedding and left Los Angeles without telling him about her pregnancy.

Peter is 13 years old. He is also the only survivor in his hometown, Rockville, of the zombie apocalypse. With the streets overrun by undead residents, Peter has taken refuge in the town's water tower. Safe from the hungry zombies, he passes time playing video games and eating junkfood. But as the familiar citizens become more fixated on young Peter, he finds he will have to make a choice that could change his life, for better or worse.

The widow of a firefighter, Shara fears Nate will take unnecessary chances as he chases danger. She doesn't believe he can make a commitment to the stable life she and her child need. Nate teaches Shara how to grab the moment. But will a new assignment tear them apart or teach Nate that he needs more than the chase for danger? Maybe a life with Shara and little Danny is what he's actually searching for.