What makes the Motor City tick? People keep telling Shawn Dygert that "the whole place is run by five or six guys who live on the same street." And some guy who works for them wants everything Shawn has. There's no way, Shawn is told, that he can beat them in this rigged game. But the words he heard in a noisy, crowded factory tavern continue to fill his ears -- I'll go down swinging ...

Shawn Dygert's carefully calibrated life is going exactly nowhere, and he knows it. The family machine shop he inherited is circling the drain as his only customers, the Big Three car companies, bottom out in yet another late 1980s downturn. He can't get his old flame Irene, the only woman he has ever really been interested in, to give him the time of day – no matter how much he apologizes. Shawn's near term coping strategy is to carefully wind down the business while spending every spare ...

The inside joke was that they were hatchlings, genomic trash, chicks from the Pentagon henhouses. The black humor masked the hard reality that the super soldiers created at the Eau Claire Project and other black sites were now unexpectedly timing out. They faced certain -- and a grisly -- disintegration.Trevelyan Moss, an Eau Claire "graduate" and a veteran of the serial wars in the western Pacific, is sent to the Navy's Cyberwarfare outfit in Souda Bay where he meets Nepheli, the ...

Margarita Nights is a cozy with grit -- serving Jack Daniels instead of tea.In a small Florida beach town, Sherri Travis is a bartender with attitude and a woman with an inconveniently murdered husband who turns out to be as much trouble to her dead as he was alive.Sifting through the debris of Jimmy's life, Sherri finds more than a few people who wanted her lying, scheming, scam artist husband gone -- but which one actually did the deed?

Since his first feature in Motorcyclist magazine, contributing editor Jack Lewis has set a high bar in polarizing the readership. Letters to the editor may brim with love or sizzle with hatred, but are never indifferent. Castigated by his editor for routinely doubling his allotted space, this "rider's cut" provides a deeper glimpse into the mind behind "Stoned to the Bone" and "Dancing with the Devil."Published here for the first time at their original length, this six-pack of stories (inc...

There is a big old sledding hill not more than two or three good snowballs’ worth of distance from our home, just behind Hank Macabee’s house. That hill was waiting for me and my brand new toboggan. It’s one of those sneak-up kind of hills with a long slow ride down that picks up speed as it goes with a bump-hump at the end that you never see coming.I didn’t see what was coming next, either.The Christmas tree crashed through Hank Macabee’s bay window. The tree stand clatter...

"Get Smart" meets "Ghostbusters!"A humorous paranormal mystery collection. Five case files from Max Killian Investigations:Haunting Clues -- Max is hired to expel a ghost from a mansion. To deal with the dead, though, he must first uncover the secrets of those still alive.Curses! -- Some days you curse, some days the curse gets you.Dearly Departed -- Max investigates a graveyard, but when it comes up empty, it's his job to find the body--dead or alive.

A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending...At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A girl doesn't have a date for the school dance—until her dad makes one for her in his lab. "Lily—meet Stitchy." A family enjoys a nice Thanksgiving dinner—until they are interrupted by a torrent of turkeys out for revenge. A princess meets a pea-brained suitor. And the battle of two red hot pepper weenies ends in flames.Critically-acclaimed author and master of the macabre David Lubar returns from a journey into the darkest depths of his brain with thirty-five more warped and creep...

Even though Thom Creed's a basketball star, his high school classmates keep their distance. They've picked up on something different about Thom. Plus, his father, Hal Creed, was one of the greatest and most beloved superheroes of his time until a catastrophic event left him disfigured and an outcast. The last thing in the world Thom wants is to add to his father's pain, so he keeps secrets. Like that he has special powers. And he's been asked to join the League -- the very organization of ...

One man struggles to survive in a dystopian near-future New York City in this acclaimed novel that "performs feats of brilliance on so many levels" ( Entertainment Weekly).In a decaying and violent near-future New York, the remnants of civic order are maintained with brute force by the conglomerate Dryco. But even Dryco is falling apart from the inside. Seamus O'Malley is bodyguard and confidant to Mister Dryden, the CEO, and an admirer of Dryden's persona...

The story of Mac, Vince, and middle-school organized crime comes to its thrilling conclusion in the third book of Chris Rylander’s Fourth Stall saga, a series that combines a Godfather-like tale of crime and betrayal with hilarious school comedy à la Jack Gantos.Their business is finished, and Mac’s and Vince’s lives have become something they have never been before—simple. None of the fortune or the glory, none of the risk or the threat of juvenile prison. There’s even a new busin...