Showing results by narrator "Steve Marvel" in All Categories

Jonathan Bland is a Decider, empowered by the emperor himself to deal with the inevitable crises of an empire. In the service of the empire, he has killed more people than anyone in the history of humanity, to save a hundred times as many. He died centuries ago, but they reactivate his recorded personality whenever a new threat appears. When the crisis is over, they expect he will meekly return to oblivion. He has other ideas.

Two ghostwriters walk into a Key West bar and decide to swap gigs....

Adam Plantinga, author of the acclaimed 400 Things Cops Know and a 17-year veteran sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department, gives an inside view of the police officer's job, from handling evidence and conducting interrogations to coping with danger, violence, and death. Not hesitating to confront controversial issues, Plantinga presents the police officer's views on police shootings, racial profiling, and relationships between police and the community.

Artificial intelligence surrounds us. More and more of the systems and services you interact with every day are based on AI technology. Most AI is narrowly specific; that is, it can only do a single thing, in a single context. Human intelligence is different. We can solve a variety of tasks, including those we have not seen before. In Artificial General Intelligence, Julian Togelius explores technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence and asks what general AI would mean for human civilization.

Ten-year-old Nem has just witnessed her mother's brutal murder and her life appears destined for tragedy. Until, that is, she finds her mother‘s old green journal which holds an incredible secret. This innocent looking book seems to contain the power over luck. As she uses it, Nem discovers the diary keeps a strange kind of karmic balance, that in gifting someone good fortune she must steal another's first. All it takes is a simple entry. There's dangers though, and not just for others but also for Nem.

Over 90 percent of customers buy on trust, but only 3 percent of salespersons are trusted. Start with Who takes science-based storytelling for sales, marketing, and talent acquisition to a new level by showing you how to blend Aristotle's Persuasion Model, business neuromarketing, the educational 4MAT system, and a new approach to the Three-Act Play to build customer and candidate trust with only twelve bullet points and a story.

Chris Grant had taken the close protection gig for a finance guy as a break from the last two decades spent in war zones around the world. When a coordinated attempt is made on the client’s life, however, he finds that this job isn’t as simple as it seemed. Things only get more complicated from there. The Pallas Group Solutions contractors haven’t been selected because they’ll sit on their hands. As they begin to gather more intelligence, and as the bodies stack up, they discover that there’s more to both the client and their own company than meets the eye.

Actions have consequences, and Chris Grant and the men of Pallas Group Solutions know it. After the fight on the border, the cartels are going to be out for blood. The only way forward is to hit them before they can hit PGS.

Dakota Bombay prided himself on his Bond-like image-bad-guy killer by day, lady-killer by night. But his life gets both shaken and stirred by an irate grandmother demanding a marketing plan for the family assassination business, a precocious six-year-old son he never knew he had, and a mysterious redheaded funeral director who's got him intrigued in more ways than one.

I'm not the bad guy. I'm just tired of being the low-status nobody everyone treats like shit, and I've finally found a way to even the score. But bonding with an ancient, powerful demon is just the first step. After centuries of inactivity, that demon is at a low ebb. Turns out, my demon is an Incubus. Guess how he powers back up? That's right. By seducing women, as many as he can get.

An urgent plea from a former flame brings CIA agent Scott Stiletto to San Francisco. Ali Lewis was once a capable spy herself before striking out on her own, creating a fashion empire that stretches around the world. Now her father has been murdered, and Stiletto is the only man Ali can trust to learn the truth behind the killing. Evidence points to a growing international conspiracy orchestrated by Iran involving the smuggling of nuclear bomb parts, kidnapped scientists, and a decades-old mafia/Silicon Valley alliance the government has been powerless to stop.

The Pallas Group Solutions Contractors have put the hurt on Chinese operations in Mexico. In the aftermath, alliances shift and powers that hadn’t appeared to be involved before start to take a hand. In a world of unrestricted warfare, PGS has to adapt.

The Aikido-Ka is the second book in The Parker Mystery Series featuring Aikido Sensei Parker, a sometimes Private Eye. Parker's old friend Derek Gunner comes to Parker with a request to find the long lost son of his former army Captain who is dying. Barely excaping that meeting with his life Parker figures his job is done, only to find that instead of going back home and teaching aikido he now has to head to the Chicago suburbs and get the young man out of big time trouble.

What can Jane Austen teach us about health? Prepare to have your bonnet blown.... From the food secrets of Pride and Prejudice to the fitness strategies of Sense and Sensibility, there's a modern health code hidden in the world's most popular romances. Join Bryan Kozlowski as he unlocks this "health and happiness" manifesto straight from Jane Austen's pen, revealing why her prescriptions for achieving total body "bloom" still matter in the 21st century.

Jaxon Jennings. Cop. Homicide detective. Partner. He always had your back and rarely made mistakes. Until the death of his son. Until the night he couldn't save him. Until everything he held dear was taken away from him. Now, a shell of a man, his reckless actions mark him as a burn-out. A Loner. A dangerous man whom many in the Fairfax County Police Department cannot trust.

Harney County, Oregon, 1968: Nick Drake has a chest full of medals and enough demons to fill a duffel bag. He's been trained to kill but was never retrained to rejoin society. Drake flees to the lonesome high desert in search of redemption and takes a job patrolling wildlife refuges where the only conflicts are keeping out stray cows and ticketing poachers. But then he stumbles across a girl's body ritually placed in a gully. Her murder is only the beginning, and Drake must face humanity's heart of darkness once again if he's to stop a killer from turning even more gullies into graves.

South Korea's extraordinary economic and technological transformation after the Korean War (1950-1953) is often referred to by observers and historians as the "Miracle on the Han River." The nation underwent an astonishing makeover from being one of the poorest countries to become the 12th largest economy in the world and 4th in Asia. South Korea also became one of the most technologically advanced countries in a short span. As in other capitalist economies, some people have benefited from the economic and technological attainments, while others have been left out....

President of an organization fighting for the right of shifters and humans to marry each other, Claire Davis needs the support of a local shifter clan or her cause is doomed. Even though she's human, she finds a way to reach out to the Clan DarkStalker cougar-shifters. Once she arrives on their land, she learns what it will take to garner their support and her life will never be the same.

With humanity facing its greatest series of simultaneous crises, Ervin Laszlo offers a scientifically based perspective on what is called for at this critical juncture of our existence: a phase of upshift to higher levels of order and coherence to keep us on our evolutionary path. This book lays out why this upshift is needed, what resources we possess to draw upon, and what the action steps are that will move us all toward this achievable vision of well-being and wholeness.

In the aftermath of what appears to be a targeted killing, a mysterious billionaire approaches Pallas Group Solutions with a new job. He seems to be more interested in their intelligence gathering capability than security. None of them are prepared for what they find. In a whirlwind of violence and intrigue, the contractors of Pallas Group plunge into a world of human trafficking and elite capture.