Showing results by narrator "Johnathan McClain" in All Categories

The time is 1902. The setting, eastern Oregon. Magic Child, a 15-year-old Native American girl, wanders into the wrong whorehouse looking for the right men. She finds Cameron and Greer, two gunmen taking a timeout from the game after an aborted job in Hawaii. Their violent past doesn't concern Magic Child. She wants them to kill a monster for her, one she says lives in the ice caves under the basement of Miss Hawkline's yellow house, and one she says has killed before. But the more she tells them about the monster, the more her story unravels.

Future war is almost here: battles fought in cyberspace, biologically enhanced soldiers, autonomous systems that can process information and strike violently before a human being can blink. A leading expert on the place of technology in war and intelligence, Robert H. Latiff, now teaching at the University of Notre Dame, has spent a career in the military researching and developing new combat technologies, observing the cost of our unquestioning embrace of innovation.

New York Times best-selling author Jennifer A. Nielsen joins the race for survival! The survivors have made it out of the jungle, but they may be sorry they ever left when they stumble upon a whole new ecosystem, populated with entirely new threats. And the greatest threat of all may come from within. Because one of the kids is changing....

National Book Award winner M.T. Anderson takes the wheel of this thrilling chapter in the race for survival. The journey through the rift becomes even rockier as the survivors are forced to take to the water, crossing a vast deepwater basin on improvised boats. To make it, Molly and the others must work together, but a rift of a different kind is forming among the survivors. If they aren't careful, it could eat them alive.

National Book Award winner Jude Watson joins the race for survival! The harrowing tale of survival and suspicion takes its most dramatic turn yet when Molly, Yoshi, and the rest discover that there are more than just monsters in the rift. There are other kids, too....

When a training mission goes wrong, Sublieutenant Tom Thrush finds his brand-new career hanging by a thread. Desperate to redeem himself, he makes a rash wager - he’ll lead a squad in a mock attack, boarding and capturing the visiting gunboat Diana in record time. He hasn’t got a chance, and to make matters worse, there’s a visiting admiral watching the attack from her yacht. Tom, desperate, sneaks aboard the Diana through a gun port - and stumbles into the middle of something much worse than a training exercise.

Liam Flynn crawls through the wreckage of a dead colony ship on the hunt for a piece of rare tech, but he is not alone in that darkness. If he can find the World Engine and make it off the ship alive, then the payout will be everything he needs to finance his last mission. The Federation took his wife, and he's going to get her back or die trying. Tassiana Forsyth was just a little girl when the Federation burned her home world for its rebellion against their god-king, the Immortal Absolute. She's not a little girl anymore, and she's had a lifetime to plan her vengeance.

During his years as a wheelman for the Armenian mob in Los Angeles, Shake Bouchon didn’t think of himself as the settling-down type. But now he’s happily married to Gina, the love of his life—and former adversary—in Indiana, of all places. The great thing about Bloomington, for two people with checkered pasts, is that everyone is nice and no one knows them. Until the day a brutal Armenian thug who has always hated Shake shows up in his backyard. He demands that Shake help him find his missing mob boss, the pakhan—the dangerous and beautiful Alexandra “Lexy” Ilandryan.

By day, AWOL Navy SEAL Finn is hiding out on Vieques, a tiny island paradise off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, living in a spare room behind a seafood restaurant owned by a blind local. By night he scours the dark web, hunting for the rogue officer responsible for the crimes he is accused of committing.

Bjorn’s Berserkers was a respected and flourishing mercenary company. Founded by Bjorn Tovesson I, it was now commanded by his son, Bjorn Tovesson II. Commander Tovesson wanted nothing more than to eventually pass on the Berserkers to his son, Bjorn Tovesson III. But young Bjorn had a different destiny in mind. He didn’t want a future of fighting aliens and risking death on some distant planet. One fateful afternoon in the Alaska wilderness changed everything, though, when a bear attack left Bjorn maimed.

Entire cities disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but dust and rubble. When an alien race came to make Earth theirs, they brought with them a weapon we had no way to fight, a universe-altering force known as thelemity. It seemed nothing could stop it - until we discovered we could wield the power, too. Five hundred years later, the Earth is locked in a grinding war of attrition. The talented few capable of bending thelemity to their will are trained in elite military academies, destined for the front lines.

Why are some cats cuddly and others standoffish? Why are some dogs adventuresome, others homebodies? As any pet owner can attest, we feel that the animals we've formed bonds with are unique, as particular (and peculiar) as any human friend or loved one. Recent years have brought an increased understanding of animal intelligence and emotion. But is there a scientific basis for animal personality and individuality, or is this notion purely sentimental?

When thirteen-year-old Max Tilt happens upon his great-great-great-grandfather Jules Verne’s unfinished, unpublished manuscript, The Lost Treasures, he doesn’t realize that he’s found the answers to all his problems. And Max has a lot of problems—his mother is sick, his father is out of work, and his home is about to be foreclosed on. But when Max and his cousin Alex discover that Verne’s last work reveals everything he wrote was fact, not fiction, they realize that the book holds the key to something incredibly valuable. A treasure that can save his house—and maybe his entire family.

When a plane crash-lands in the Arctic, eight young survivors step from the wreckage expecting to see nothing but ice and snow. Instead they find themselves lost in a strange jungle with no way to get home and little hope of rescue. Food is running out. Water is scarce. And the jungle is full of threats unlike anything the survivors have ever seen before - from razor-beaked shredder birds to carnivorous vines and much, much worse.

Ellie Larrabee’s life is perfect. She’s thriving at work, living in a fabulous apartment, and engaged to the man of her dreams. To all appearances, Ellie and Rob Beauman are a golden couple—blessed with good looks, success, and romantic chemistry that’s off the charts.

Seventeen-year-old honors student Coretta White's Tumblr, Little White Lies - her witty thoughts on pretty much...everything - has gone viral. She's got hundreds of thousands of followers; she's even been offered a TV deal. But Coretta has a secret. She hasn't been writing all her own posts. Stressed from the demands of the sudden attention, she hired an expert ghostwriter, 41-year-old Karl Ristoff, to keep the Tumblr going.

This story begins after King Uhla'ar kidnapped Aly and dragged her back through a rift in time. A giant, merciless behemoth guards the opening, and so Jack McKinley and his friends realize that rescuing Aly will be harder than they thought. Their only hope is to rush to the last of the Ancient Wonders and find the rest of the lost Loculi.

Elaine's was a world-famous New York restaurant that became home to writers and celebrities. Owner Elaine Kaufman was known to be "New York feisty", controversial, often rude, always blunt, with the flare of Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker. Elaine was highly respected and frequently feared, and Elaine's the restaurant received the public's love and praise time and time again. Woody Allen held a regular table there, and Elaine's was even featured in Allen's Manhattan and Billy Joel's song "Big Shot".

Josh and Tony aren’t any great shakes on the basketball court—but with the fate of the planet on the line, they’re going to have to step up. A short story from Guys Read: Other Worlds, edited by Jon Scieszka...

An artist takes us through his day, from his own particular perspective. A short story from Guys Read: Other Worlds, edited by Jon Scieszka.