Showing results by narrator "Stefan Rudnicki" in All Categories

The survivor of a plane crash wakes up in a hospital in Canada, his memory a blank. Then in walks Kitty, a gorgeous woman, who tells him that he is Paul Madden, a photographer and her fiancé. Not bad. Except that a man on the phone keeps calling him Matt Helm. Things don’t add up. This can only mean trouble....

Matt Helm is unexpectedly rich, and he doesn’t like it. Twenty thousand mysterious dollars appear in his bank account, but this is no time for celebration. Another secret agent with an unexplained surplus is murdered, and Helm figures he better work out who his “benefactor” is before he becomes the next target.

Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike!

In the cholera-ridden Naples of 1884, Fabio Romani is prematurely buried and awakes to find himself in a coffin. After managing to free himself, Fabio rushes home to reassure his wife and child. While he expected to find his family deep in mourning, he instead discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him and is having an affair with his best friend. Utilizing a disguise and adopting a new identity, Fabio slowly works his way back into the trust, and home, of those who betrayed him, culminating in a frightful finale of revenge.

Mike Hammer is summoned to a meeting with Jamie Winters, a US senator from New York, and Jamie's lovely, very smart wife, Nicole, considered by many to be the power behind the throne. Winters is being blackmailed, and Hammer is given a list of suspects who may be behind the threats to the senator's career. But when the suspects begin to drop like flies, Hammer realizes there is more to this case than just a salacious tape.

Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire is a sweeping critical analysis of Western colonialism, its foundational beliefs in militarism, patriarchy, Christianity, and white supremacy; and its destructive impact on the nations of Southeast Asia and, ultimately, America. Valentine focuses on the “dark arts” of empire: the black bag of CIA covert operations, including bribery, right-wing coups, assassinations, disinformation, and intimate relationships with drug, sex, and artifact traffickers.

Nolan was still alive; his wounds healed and his money was safe - all $800,000 of it. It was Nolan’s birthday, and he was sitting happy. Until Planner was killed. Planner was an eccentric antique dealer; Planner had the $800,000 in his safe. But now he was dead, and the money was gone. Caught up in the sizzling crossfire of double-dealing, danger, and death, Nolan was up against the “Family” again.

At a funeral of an old friend, Matt Helm takes a trip down memory lane and sparks a romance that he thought was safely locked in the past. But with old feelings resurfacing, other things Helm thought were buried are coming back to haunt him - a small-time hood in Mexico, a dirty drug deal, and a string of women that lead him into dangerous territory.

The Mindaru are dead, or so exiled Earthman John Bandicut and his alien companions believe, after their intervention to save the Orion Nebula and surrounding worlds. But now a part of this ancient and malicious AI colony is swarming toward the present from its birthplace deep in the past. Their opening: a temporal disturbance in the starstream, a hyperspatial thoroughfare used by myriad civilizations. The disturbance emanates from the planetary defenses of nearby Karellia, whose people know nothing of the starstream or the galaxy-threatening Mindaru.

Dr. Jake Ross, a university astronomer, wants nothing more than to teach a few classes each semester and continue his research. Instead, he finds himself aggressively recruited to be the science advisor to Frank Tomlinson, an ambitious politician with his eye on the US Senate. Tomlinson is in need of an edge that will allow him to defeat his opponent at the polls, and Dr. Ross can contribute just that: MHD. MHD, or magnetohydrodynamics, is a new innovation that will allow electricity to be generated efficiently and cheaply. But MHD is still in its infancy, and there are deadly risks.

Is it space travel that children dream of, or merely visiting other worlds? Todd had always set his heart on being an astronaut, but when he meets an alien and travels to another world, he doesn't use a spaceship; he just hangs out in his own back yard.

The story begun in The Reefs of Time continues. The time-tides caused by Karellia’s defenses have brought the malicious Mindaru AI out of the deep past into the present, threatening Bandicut and Li-Jared, who have arrived at the backwater planet - Li-Jared’s homeworld - to find it on the brink of interplanetary war. Somehow they must forge a peace between Karellia and its neighboring world if the Mindaru threat is to be broken.

Just when Nolan’s looking for a way out of his dead-end job, trouble comes knocking, and he’s back in business. Someone harboring an old grudge has just picked off Joey DiPreta, a crooked businessman with ties to the mob, and the guy’s family is out to get whoever’s responsible. So is Nolan’s family - in Chicago - and they offer him big bucks and a piece of a swank hotel if he’ll protect their interests.

Nolan is a pro, a veteran of mob vendettas and decades of high-tension heists. All he wants in his advancing middle age is his slice of the American pie - a way to make capitalism pay without having to drag guns into it. But a bullet-scarred life does not come without its bad karma, and Nolan - and his young cohort Jon, whose own dream is to confine the violence to the comics he draws - often find themselves facing old enemies and new temptations.

Crime fiction readers know Quarry - the ruthless killer for hire from Max Allan Collins' acclaimed novels - but where did Quarry's story start? For first time ever, the best-selling author of Road to Perdition takes us back to the beginning, revealing the never-before-told story of Quarry's first job: infiltrating a college campus and eliminating a professor whose affair with one of his beautiful young students is the least of his sins.

As Chief Medical Officer aboard the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship Ragnarok, Andrej Koscuisko's duty is to care for his shipmates; as Inquisitor, he must extract confessions and administer punishment. But while the doctor takes pride in his healing skills, the torturer knows only self-loathing. As the planet Burkhayden prepares for the arrival of its new governor, a brutal attack on a Nurail slave woman by a ship's officer sets in motion a chain of events that culminates in murder.

A stand-alone novel set in Susan R. Matthews's critically acclaimed "Judiciary" universe, Angel of Destruction focuses on Bench officer Garol Vogel and his attempts to make peace with the Langsarik people-the people his own Judiciary drove into a life of piracy.

We all know Shakespeare’s classic ghost story—the young prince Hamlet’s dead father appears to him, demanding vengeance upon Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who has usurped the throne and, to add insult to injury, married Hamlet’s mother.

Set in the critically-acclaimed "Judiciary" universe, The Devil and Deep Space features listener favorite hero Andrej Koscuisko caught up in a conspiracy between political backstabbing and military corruption....

Stalin’s Scribe is the first biography of a man who was once one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political figures. Thanks to the opening of Russia’s archives, Brian Boeck discovers that Sholokhov’s official Soviet biography is actually a tangled web of legends, half-truths, and contradictions. Boeck examines the complex connection between an author and a dictator, revealing how a Stalinist courtier became an ideological acrobat and consummate politician in order to stay in favor and remain relevant after the dictator’s death.