An Exaltation of Larks by Suanne Laqueur

September 11, 1973: Eleven-year-old Alejandro Penda watches from his apartment window as Santiago, Chile falls to a military coup, destroying his family and his childhood. Arriving alone in America, he’s taken in by the Larks: a prominent family in the town of Guelisten. Though burdened by unresolved grief for his disappeared parents, he becomes fiercely loyal to the Larks, eventually marrying one of their daughters, Valerie.

September 11, 2001: Javier Landes watches from his apartment window as New York City falls to terrorism. As one of Manhattan’s top-paid male escorts, this professional lover has never lacked for company and is loyal only to himself. But in the wake of 9/11, Jav is named guardian for an orphaned nephew in Guelisten and must open his carefully-guarded heart to pain he’s long suppressed.

Alex, Valerie and Jav meet first in their twenties, with a sudden attraction each finds strange and compelling. When they meet again in their forties, they discover not only is their bond still strong, but their life experiences are strangely similar. All have been shaped by separate 9/11’s, and their unfinished business from the past will change everything they know about love, loyalty and friendship.

Across three decades and two continents, Suanne Laqueur’s award-winning novel explores the unpredictability of sexual attraction, how family ties are forged, torn and mended, and how love’s downfall can turn to exaltation.

All Is Fair by Michael Kenneth Smith

As the Germans blitz Poland in 1939, a young fighter pilot finds his way to France and ultimately England where he distinguishes himself in the Battle of Britain. He meets a woman and falls in love and so does she over time. He crashes in the English Channel and ultimately is captured. 

After escaping he seeks to return to his love and tries to cross the Pyrenees but is captured again where he is imprisoned until the end of the war nears. He then learns his love was a spy working for her father and had given the Germans secrets that caused the death of his best friend. The same secrets he had inadvertently told her. When they finally meet, they still love each other but he feels he could never trust her again but he then learns he is the father of her young daughter.

Bit Flip: A Novel by Mike Trigg

Combining the corporate intrigue of Joseph Finder, the satirical cultural critique of Dave Eggers, and the domestic drama of Laura Dave, Bit Flip is a fast-paced contemporary thriller that delivers an authentic insider’s view of the corrupting influences of greed, entitlement, and vanity in technology start-ups.

Tech executive Sam Hughes came to Silicon Valley to “make the world a better place”. He’s just not sure he’s doing that anymore. And when an onstage meltdown sends him into a professional tailspin, he suddenly sees the culture of the Bay Area’s tech bubble in a new light.

Just as Sam’s wondering if his start-up career and marriage might both be over at 40-something, an inadvertent discovery pulls him back into his former company, where he begins to unravel the insidious schemes of the founder and venture investors.

Driven by his desire for redemption, Sam discovers a conspiracy of fraud, blackmail, and manipulation that leads to tragic outcomes—threatening to destroy not only the company but also his own moral compass. Entangled in a web of complicity, how far will Sam go to achieve his dreams of entrepreneurial success?

White House Usher: Who Killed the President? by Christopher Beauregard Emery

The world is rocked by the sudden death of the president of the United States. Almost as shocking, details soon emerge implicating a member of the White House Ushers Office. The evidence seems overwhelming, and the case is soon considered as open and shut. If only the rest of the world knew how much more was going on behind the scenes. Read how Chief Usher Bartholomew Winston, a fifty-year veteran of the White House, works with investigators to uncover the truth, even if that means diving headfirst into dangerous political waters to find it.

Harbinger in the Night by John Warner & Bill Woods

In the near future a new space race is in full swing to be the first to colonize Mars. The United States and allied European governments working alongside private industry are competing against the RSAC, a new Russian-Chinese alliance, to build working spacecraft to make the long journey.

In preparations for the mission, an engineering team from an aerospace/tech conglomerate is building out the interplanetary communications network, when a mysterious object emerges from the depths of interstellar space. As the nations of Earth scramble to investigate this strange comet, they must overcome plots from within and the machinations of a malignant AI in order to be the first to meet the menace, or the promise, that the intruder foretells.

Major Koda Cheveyo, a special operations soldier is tasked to lead his team to face this possible threat while Michael Thompson, a quantum computer engineer, works with his homebrewed AI to counter the emerging peril from within. Together with the help of a billionaire tech tycoon and a government security agent, their mission could reshape the future of humanity.

Private Eye, Secret Spy by Ian D. Withers

Ian Withers rewrote the book on what it means to be a Private Investigator. He traversed the world recovering abducted children, gathered intelligence for left and right-wing regimes, and was jailed over a British prime minister’s bad bet. Across 60 years, he chased down fraudsters, bugged leaders of international coups, and cracked open assassination plots. He tracked the IRA’s Hyde Park bomber with a bluffed phone call, located Jeremy Thorpe’s illicit lover, and put his life on the line to return snatched tug-of-love kids to desperate parents.

Now, for the first time, Britain’s most controversial agent-for-hire lifts the lid on an intense life in the darkest of shadows.

Gripping, illuminating, and unflinching, Private Eye, Secret Spy is the thrilling true story of a steely English gentleman’s rise to the top of his game.

“Ian Withers has walked the walk…a frank, honest, and brave confession.” (Gary Murray, author of Enemies of the State)

For Blood & Glory by Cassandra A. Hendricks

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Excerpt 1 – Retail Sample

Excerpt 2 – From Chapter 1 “Reel Me In”

Sefira Carrington is no stranger to tragedy. The death of her father as well as the curious mental decline and subsequent imprisonment of her mother, have left her truly and utterly alone. Despite her misfortune, she has managed to carve out a decent life for herself. She’s found a good family, friends and at sixteen, she’s finally realizing a semblance of normalcy. That is, until she moves to Southern California. Strange things begin to happen. Things that become increasingly difficult for her to ignore. Suddenly, she finds herself thrust into a supernatural underworld that defies human comprehension. In this new world, a war is raging and in a cruel twist of fate, Sefira is somehow at the center of it. Something’s coming, and it will force her to reevaluate everything she’s ever been told and unearth the demons she thought she’d left behind. Once she travels down this road, there’s no turning back….

Farewell, Bergerac by Fredrik Nath

Nazi-occupied Aquitaine, 1943: François Dufy, alcoholic and alone, is dragged into the war effort when he rescues a young Jewish girl from the Nazi Security Police. She breathes life into his world and gives him a reason to go on.

Dufy begins a path of revenge on the occupying Germans. A sniper in the Great War, he uses his skills to devastating effect, always posing as the town drunk. Then the British drop supplies and a beautiful SOE agent whom Dufy falls in love with. But as the invaders hunt down the partisans in the deep, crisp woodland, nothing works out as Dufy had hoped. Farewell Bergerac is an unforgettable wartime tale of fragile love, loss, and redemption.

The BiniSphere by Joseph W. Foster

On the eve of World War II, the most intelligent nuclear physicist in the world discovers a new sub-atomic particle, but before his secret could get out, he mysteriously disappears. The repercussions of the young physicist’s actions leave waves that, 80 years later, reach the rocky shores of Ocean Point, Maine. 

Perry Franklin, a US government researcher, is pulled from forced retirement to investigate a strange phenomenon that shut down one of the CIA’s most sophisticated spy satellites. Odd clues soon lead him to an isolated village on the northern coast of Sicily where he finds much more than he was looking for. To avoid disturbing the delicate balance of nuclear powers, Franklin must put his career and his life in the hands of a woman, a family, and a culture unlike any he’d experienced before. Join Perry Franklin and his Sicilian companion, Christina LaTorre, as they reluctantly battle rogue boat captains, black ops mercenaries, and high-level political appointees, to achieve an outcome that will change the world.

The Cyclist by Fred Nath

Nazi-occupied Aquitaine, 1943: A beautiful young woman is found murdered in the shadow of the Bergerac Prefecture. Auguste Ran, assistant chief of police, suspects Brunner, a German security police major, of the crime. The more Auguste investigates, the more obsessed he becomes with bringing down the seemingly untouchable Brunner. Auguste begins to realize he has been conveniently ignoring the Nazi atrocities going on around him and understands too late the human cost of his own participation in the internment of the local Jewish population. Driven by conscience and struggling with his Catholic religious beliefs, his actions start to put his own family at risk. Harboring the daughter of his lifelong Jewish friend Pierre, they are forced into a desperate trek toward neighboring Switzerland, pursued all the way by the German Sicherheitspolizei.

Beyond Brightside: A Dark Science Fiction Adventure Thriller by Mark Tullius

Joe Nolan and his Thought Thief friends managed to escape Brightside in the original novel, but now, they find themselves with a giant price on their heads and the entire country looking for them. Joe is badly injured and up against incredible odds, but he is willing to do whatever it takes to helps his friends and father.

Without Expiration by William R. Hincy

Are we bad people who sometimes do good things, or good people who do bad things?

As a society that struggles to reconcile the uncovering of past wrongs with simple human frailty, punishment, and personal redemption, the stories in Without Expiration challenge us to consider the humanity of characters who are flawed and heartbroken and who do and suffer terrible things.

Works from Without Expiration have been published in some of America’s best short fiction journals. From the tale of a devastated father hunting his daughter’s killer to that of a couple forced to confront the disintegration of their marriage anew each time the wife awakes from a persistent vegetative state, the short fictions in this anthology seek to obliterate any sense of righteous indignation and to question how any of us can make it unscathed through a life where our every mistake is without expiration.