In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to build and maintain successful partnerships is a crucial skill for any business leader. The Art of Collaboration: Building Effective Partnerships in Business provides a roadmap for creating powerful alliances that drive mutual growth and success.This book explores the key elements of effective collaboration, from identifying the right partners and establishing trust to aligning goals and navigating potential conflicts. With ins...

Win the lottery? Congrats! You get to fight the dragon—to the death!* * *Each summer, the kingdom of Dunbury holds a lottery. The prize? The right to face the Black Dragon in a fight to the death.Nobody ever returns.Widespread hunger. Banned Books. Harsh royal decrees to keep the citizens in line. After nearly fifty years, the poor, downtrodden people in the isolated country between the mountains and the sea have lo...

The geographical area of that history which alone deserves the name has more than once changed. The early home of human society was in Asia. Greece and Italy successively became the theatres of the world’s drama, and in modern times the real progress of society has moved within the limits of Western Christendom. So, too, with the material history. At one period the growth of the life of the world is in its literature, at another in its wars, at another in its institutions. Sometimes everyt...

He hunts. He kills. He walks among us. Nobody knows he exists … until now.Former FBI agent turned full-time drifter, Karen Pantelli pursues a promising lead on her long missing mother to Orcas Island, Washington. Toiling as a hotel maid, she reaches a dead end until an encounter with an eccentric math professor raises a gruesome possibility. Her mother may have been murdered by a serial killer, the work of a cunning monster who has claimed hundreds of lives and eva...

Never mess with a woman with nothing left to lose.Another state. Another city. Another dead-end job. A stellar FBI agent until tragedy set her adrift, Karen Pantelli finds herself working at a pizza joint in Billings, Montana, trying to ignore the increasing global unrest dominating the news, when three armed men walk through the door. Soon a shocking turn of events launches her on a cross-country quest for a former college classmate, an alluring but manip...

Seventeen-year-old Trevor can't catch a break. Just when he finds out that Janna, the girl of his dreams, is finally available, his mom tells him he's being shipped off to a boarding school because of his awful grades. A desperate call to his dad, who owns a rubber chicken factory in Las Vegas, gets him nowhere. His father is more interested in enlisting Trevor's aid writing what he sees as the perfect gag gift – a how-to manual about rubber chickens. That's Trevor's life for you. Everyone...

Even the dead can die . . . the second in the riveting series about the private investigator who bridges both sides of the great divide.Charles Manson. Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. Known for their cunning and savagery. In the late eighties, another infamous serial killer sent seventeen innocent people to early graves. Then, suddenly, the murders in the panicked city of Portland, Oregon, stopped—and the Goodbye Killer got away.Myron Vale remembers it well. Lon...

They meet on a rainy night, penniless and alone, both of them without a friend in the world. He's a disgraced, down-on-his luck giant, short for his kind, banished forever from his tribe. He just wants to be left alone – and pity the poor person who annoys him.She's a stubborn human girl whose mother has been kidnapped by an evil dictator – and she's determined to get her back. No matter how long it takes. No matter who gets in her way.Together they take on an empire.

In these six provocative tales, Scott William Carter takes the reader on a journey to places where love and loss intersect: a grieving tattoo artist makes a cross-country trip with a pregnant woman on the run from her disturbed husband . . . a mysterious artist finds a woman washed up on the beach and feels compelled to paint her . . . a young man who made a disastrous choice in wife is forced to crash weddings with his ghostly bride so she can remain on Earth . . .Reading these an...

From the award-winning author of the Garrison Gage series, comes a gripping new mystery that buckles you in from the first car ride and never lets go.After flaming out of MIT in a blaze of bad choices, Ashton Byrd reinvents himself in Los Angeles as a financial advisor to the rich and clueless (while taking a tidy cut for himself, of course). Got a huge monkey on your back? Rule one: don't take life seriously. Rule two: see rule one.But when the sun-kissed ...

*****"Carter's writing is on target." – Publishers WeeklyScott William Carter's first young adult novel was hailed by Publishers Weekly as a "touching and impressive debut," and called "compelling" and "a good choice for reluctant readers" by Library Journal. His short stories have appeared in dozens of popular magazines and anthologies, including Analog, Ellery Queen, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales. He lives in Oregon with his wife, two children, and thousands of imagi...

The dead do not dream . . .A week before Christmas, John and Laura Ray storm into Myron's office, desperate to find their missing daughter. Money? They don't have any. Clues? They have few. Plagued by mounting bills and a skull-crushing migraine, Portland's only ghost detective wants nothing more than to show them the door. But defying his conscience always proves tougher to Myron Vale than saying no, and he soon finds himself embroiled in one of the strangest case...