Showing titles in Technothrillers

'Earthquake country,' said the Professor. 'San Francisco is geologically and seismologically a city that waits to die. Los Angeles is ringed by earthquake centres – seven massive quakes so far. We have no idea where the next, the monster, will hit…' …until a criminal fanatic kidnaps a nuclear scientist and builds his own atomic bombs. If exploded on California's fault lines they could trigger off the mightiest earthquake of them all – killing half its population and dumping the entire city of San Francisco into the sea.

Computational biologist and serial-killer hunter Dr. Theo Cray receives an off-the-record request from the FBI to investigate an inexplicable double homicide. It happened at the excavation site where a murderer had buried his victims’ remains. In custody is a forensic technician in shock, with no history of aggression. He doesn’t remember a thing. His colleagues don’t even recognize the man they thought they knew. But an MRI reveals something peculiar. And abnormal.

Conn Maxwell returns from Terra to his poverty-stricken home planet of Poictesme, “The Junkyard Planet”, with news of the possible location of Merlin, a military super-computer rumored to have been abandoned there after the last war. The inhabitants hope to find Merlin, which they think will be their ticket to wealth and prosperity. But is Merlin real or just an old rumor? And if they find it, will it save them - or tear them apart?

James Bascule is adrift. College beckons—but not quite strongly enough to actually get him to campus. A trip to Europe showed him a world bigger than his Northern California upbringing—and yet, one broken heart later, Northern California is where he’s returned. Back to his old bedroom, paying his bemused parents rent with his new hobby, baking bread with the sourdough starter that is his only souvenir of what was apparently just a summer fling.

When expert Navy linguist and cryptographer Charlie Cutter is recruited into a shadowy wing of the NCIS, she's tasked with unraveling a mysterious ancient text that has puzzled researchers for centuries. Charlie isn't eager to revisit her previous failures... but when she discovers the same strange language in top-secret photographs, she finds herself roped into a job that could make or break her young career.

With the power gone, the UK falls into a state of panic. The ensuing anarchy is simply the warm-up act. Shaun Taylor is stranded far from home, far from a broken family he needs to make whole again, and he will do whatever it takes to get back to them. What would you do to get home? What would you do if the lights went out?

Every word a president utters is weighed and examined, but none more so than when he is talking about Taiwan. That's why it's shocking that President Jack Ryan seems to imply that the US has no appetite for a war to protect Taiwan from the communist Chinese on the mainland. President Ryan is determined to protect the independence of the island nation, but he is determined that one slip of the tongue should not cost thousands of young soldiers, sailors and Marines their lives.

Russia's new ballistic missile submarine, Yuriy Dolgorukiy, is being deployed on its first patrol while America's newest fast-attack submarine, North Dakota, is assigned to trail it and collect intel. As the Russian submarine heads under the polar ice cap, its sonar readings reveal the trailing American sub and cause the Russians to begin a radical evasive maneuver. This, however, fails, and the submarines collide, resulting in damage that sends both to the bottom.

Harmony House is more than a “special place for special people.” It’s a think tank where high-functioning autistic savants harness their unique abilities for the benefit of society. Resident Eddie Parks’s contribution: an “echo box” that can re-create never-recorded sounds using acoustic archeology. All Eddie wants is to hear his late mother’s voice. But what he’s created is inadvertently posing a threat to national security. To Harmony House’s shadowy government backers and radical extremists, the echo box is the ultimate intelligence asset - an end to the very concept of secrecy.

Dark State ups the ante on the already volatile situations laid out in the sleek techno-thriller Empire Games, the start to Stross' new story-line and a perfect entry point for new listeners, in The Merchant Princes series . In the near-future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers across timelines, one in the midst of a technological revolution and the other a hyper-police state, is imminent. In Commissioner Miriam Burgeson's timeline, her top level agents run a high risk extraction of a major political player.

Max and Liz have escaped the mysterious time phenomenon by traveling to the Mars colony, which promises a whole new, exciting, and secure life. But they've left behind someone important to them. Should they embark on a journey from which no one has ever returned? And why does everyone seem to put obstacles in their way even as they try? The physicist and the mathematician must contend with forces that cannot be swayed by logical arguments while time, at an accelerating pace, is running out for their friend on Earth.

Eighteen-year-old Jason Rogers’ life is turned upside-down when he finds himself in the custody of an unnamed government agency that is falsely accusing him of being responsible for the explosion that caused the death of his parents. Anya is 17 - a teenager who wishes she could be normal for once - but she’s not. A secret government agency, headed by none other than her father, knows how to leverage the dangerous capability she was born with. All goes well for her until one of the agents turns on her.

A one-man team of experts, Stephen Leeds is a genius of unparalleled mental capabilities who can learn new skills or master entire scholarly disciplines in mere hours. However, these skills come at a price. Stephen must compartmentalize his brain, with each of his new skill sets being held by an “aspect”—a hallucination his mind creates with their own fully-developed personality, life, and limitations. Without these aspects, and the delicate construct of reality they provide for him, Stephen is unable to control his mind and engage with the real world.

It's the year 2277. For 50 years, Earth has received mysterious data transmissions from random locations in deep space. The streams include advanced technology, allowing humans to achieve faster-than-light travel virtually overnight. As we prepare to take our first tentative steps into interstellar space, we know almost nothing about our alien benefactors, and their motivations remain unexplained.

When a huge alien spacecraft crashes on the island of Cuba, the world scrambles to investigate. Secretive organizations have waited for generations for this opportunity, and they do not hesitate to send in recovery teams. Cooperation between nations breaks down as every government wants the newly discovered technology for themselves. Naturally, the Cubans have beaten everyone else, and the island is beginning to change. Aircraft flying reconnaissance are swatted from the skies.

In their battle to save Earth from becoming another conquest of the alien Kasari Collective, Mark and Heather Smythe have struck crucial blows against the enemy. But their best efforts have still failed to derail the completion of the wormhole gateway that would give the insidious extraterrestrial invaders access to the planet - and doom humankind as helpless slaves of the Kasari hive mind.

When authorities in Alaska receive a disturbing call from a teenage girl, their investigation leads them to discover an entire family of researchers dead. Joe Rush is called to help examine the bodies. On the surface, it looks like a brutal murder/suicide. But the situation is nowhere near that simple - nor is it over. Upon closer investigation, Rush discovers the terrifying truth. The research team has fallen victim to something that seems impossible at first, yet the evidence looks undeniable in the lab. Now the danger may threaten thousands more.

Smuggled to the Middle East as a child. Trained as one of the most elite insurgents of his generation. Forced to do things no one should, for a cause he couldn't believe in. But as his brothers were preparing to kill, he was looking for a way out. Now, on the eve of the deadliest coordinated attacks the world has ever seen, he'll finally get his chance. He will break free and hunt down those who made him a monster. He must draw on all his training to survive. He is Sleeper 13.

As a child Rose Franklin made an astonishing discovery: a giant metallic hand buried deep within the earth. As an adult she's dedicated her brilliant scientific career to solving the mystery that began that fateful day: Why was a titanic robot of unknown origin buried in pieces around the world? Years of investigation have produced intriguing answers - and even more perplexing questions. But the truth is closer now than ever before when a second robot, more massive than the first, materializes and lashes out with deadly force.

Angela's graduate school days at MIT come to an abrupt end when she uses her hacking skills on another student's computer. Yet her mentor, Eve Abajian, arranges a new beginning for her - as an intern in FBI's Boston field office. Her new supervisor, Assistant Special Agent in Charge William Keats, one of only two agents in the Northeast to make his rank before the age of 30, sees in Angela a fellow prodigy. But Angela's skills come with a natural curiosity, which is also a dangerous liability.