Stories of falling, failing, and finding the strength to rise again.Fallen is a powerful collection of short fiction exploring the ways people stumble, endure, and rise again in the face of life’s snares. With stories rooted in character, humor, military service, personal relationships, and history, this volume spans settings as diverse as New York and Los Angeles, the Caribbean and the Far East, and eras from the early twentieth century to the pr...

In The Heart Of The Desert, Sin And Salvation CollideDive into the contemporary American Southwest with The Apostate and two additional short stories that walk the line between sin and redemption—or lack thereof.In the titular novella, a shocking carjacking in the parking lot of a bustling Tucson shopping mall sparks a frantic chase across the rugged landscape of Arizona and New Mexico. As a burnt-out college professor and his unwanted com...

Feel the tropical sun and the sultry breeze in two dramatic, tension-filled adventures that play out across the distant reaches of Old Mexico.Every six years, Mexico elects a new president, bringing hopes of internal change along with the possibility of upheaval and danger. Meridian Sun finds eccentric North American novelist Jack Dodge caught up in the furor when a voice from the past shows up in the person of young reporter Paige Warren. Their emotional ...

From Cuba to Maine, Korea to California – a wide-ranging mix of stories from less-traveled roads.Set in locales ranging from the United States to the Caribbean and from Mexico to the Far East, the stories of Bar Harbor feature tales of character, humor, military service, personal relationships, and history from the mid-twentieth century down to today and from the ultra-realistic to speculative works of science fiction and time travel.

When a white baseball player with a taste for hot women and shady deals is found murdered in Tin Hollow, the black side of town in segregated Jefferson, Arkansas, racial tensions rise to the boiling point. With no clues and no one talking, the authorities turn to an outsider to solve the crime—a young, Howard-educated black attorney named Carl Tatum.At first, the task seems small, the stakes benign. The more Carl discovers, though, the deeper he sinks into a morass of hatred and su...

“Most of us are living behind time: trapped in some phase of our past like an insect in amber.” So says Frank Mason, protagonist of Living Behind Time, a pre-9/11 on the road story with a big twist. Evoking echoes of the 1950s Beats, Frank Mason, the protagonist, reverses the standard east-west American journey by going west to east. Leaving his home in San Diego, California, he makes a solo cross-country trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Along the way, he revisits friends and...

American Graffiti meets The Last Picture ShowIn the summer of 1963, the country is poised at a historical threshold. The lingering, slower pace of the 1950s still prevails in much of the land, but is beginning to give way to the upscale rhythms of the new decade. On the surface, the small southern California farm town of Cotton seems like a community caught in amber. Life rolls on slowly here, as it has for decades. But in this critical, history-altering y...

An unlikely hero.Stephen White is a nerdy young software engineer in a little Midwest town where nothing ever happens. He’s more interested in plopping down on his couch and watching television than in seeking out anything even remotely adventurous. Adventure finds him, though, during a hiking trip with friends. He gets light-headed on the trail and passes out, only to awaken and find that he’s somehow travelled into the past.A journey ...

Theo Murray had no interest in being a bushwhacker, but the gang that took him off his family farm made him one, anyway. Now he's doing time in the Vernon County Jail, wishing for freedom and the chance to start his life anew. Some of the other boys locked up with Theo have the same idea—but wishing isn't all they plan on doing...

The Tucker boys had been at loggerheads with the authorities for the best part of a year – two of their clan had even been shot down by the law. Late one Saturday in the summer of 1881, just as Marshall Will Parsons and his deputy Ed Sharman crossed the town square in the near pitch blackness of night, shots suddenly broke the stillness of the air. Had the Tucker’s finally claimed their revenge?

Retired Deputy Marshal Sam Brennan is chasing devils. First, the three drunken miners who butchered his wife and stepdaughters. Second, the demon in the bottle that helps numb the pain.Doe is an Apache. All but enslaved by the gang of scalp hunters who killed her parents, she has become a stranger in a strange land, an outcast from her tribe. After being sold for the second time to a white man, she is beaten and abused on a daily basis. When Sam stumbles into her owner’s camp and w...

More than 70 very short stories in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror! Why are 18 million spoons disappearing from Melbourne, Australia each year? How good is the magic of a discount wizard? What if superheroes were afraid to use their powers? These and other flash fiction challenges were put to the writers in the forum at Aphelion Webzine, one of the internet’s oldest and finest sources for fiction. The 17 authors in this book responded to those challenges with amazing tales that will t...