Showing results by author "Ian Thomas Healy" in All Categories

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse. Such is the credo of the modern mercenary in the economic downturn of the late 2040s. Three such antiheroes are brought together by a billionaire for a unique search-and-retrieval mission. If they succeed, they'll walk away free and clear with a big fat payday. But if they fail... Well, things will go badly for them.

Once, John Irish was a legend in the porn industry, partying with the likes of John Holmes, Peter North, Nina Hartley, and Seka, but now he's on the far side of 50, and Ron Jeremy won't even return his phone calls. Desperate for any kind of paying work, he's sunk to the level of bit roles in grade-Z porn and is even considering applying to work at Wal-Mart, when hot-blooded starlet Mindy Copperhead comes into his life. He quickly discovers she's far more than a simple blowjob artist, but is in fact an advance scout for a distant alien race, sent to Earth to find...him.

Vanitha is the world's greatest parahuman hacker and can physically enter computer systems to control them from the inside. To relax, she's created a Hindu-themed multiplayer online role-playing game called The Path. When a mystery presents itself, she goes to investigate the strange new Malevolence. It kills her. She awakens inside the game as a new character, unable to use her parahuman powers to return to the real world. With no other options, she embarks upon a desperate quest to locate her body, a corpse run that may present her only chance to escape.

You've seen Sharknado. You've watched Ghost Shark. Now, killer sharks take to their highest altitude ever in the audiobook that absolutely no one asked for, but everybody wants to listen to: Space Sharks. That's right. Sharks. In space. What more do you want?

As a new president takes the White House, Just Cause returns to New York City for the first time in eight years, under the command of its newest leader: Mustang Sally. But not everyone is excited about the expansion of Just Cause. Senator Christine Goodwin, slighted by the team's leadership years before, has made it her mission to put all para-humans on a very short leash while, at the same time, creating her own super-powered militia.

Hope was playing five-card draw with undead Elvis when the world ended. Before the world ended, Hope was a down-and-out virgin stripper. Now she's pregnant with a baby prophesied to be the world's salvation. Undead Elvis promises her that Graceland is the only safe place left even though the rest of the world has become sand and ash. Hope must undertake the perilous journey across a broken, unfamiliar landscape to reach it.

Mustang Sally has some speedy shoes to fill. This young superhero has waited her whole life to join Just Cause - the premiere team of American heroes. Now she's hoping her super-speed will earn a spot on the same team to which her parents and grandparents belonged. A chance encounter with the villain who killed her father changes everything. Even though she's only an intern, Sally devotes herself to finding the man known as Destroyer.

The would-be Archmage has slain nearly all the magic-users in the world, taking their power for himself. If he succeeds in killing the Lucky Seven's own mage Stratocaster, the Archmage's power will become absolute and plunge the world into darkness under his cruel reign. But not if Mustang Sally and the rest of the Just Cause superheroes have anything to say about it.

When Just Cause hero Orb is murdered using a new kind of nanotechnology, Mustang Sally will stop at nothing to find and bring to justice his killer. Not even her longtime mentor Juice's dismissal from his position as team leader can distract Sally from her mission. A sensational new parahuman named Champion brings old-fashioned morals back to the world, training others to follow in his footsteps and heralding the onset of a new age of heroism. But Champion isn't all that he seems, and there is a sinister side to his organization.

Orcs used to be a fearsome fighting force, and the unleashing of the Horde brought terror to humans, elves, and dwarves time and time again over the centuries. Nowadays, there aren't any more Ultimate Evils, necromancers, or dark wizards left to hire the Horde. Paug Blumpkin is smart for an orc (rather like saying he's smart for a box of hair). He's bored of training with the rest of the Horde for a war that will never come, and he's definitely tired of polishing his helmet. So he decides to set off in search of adventure, bringing along his cheerfully idiotic brother Milph, who has a regular habit of forgetting his pants.

Seventh-grade Superheroes! It's not easy being a 12-year-old superhero, but the five kids of the neighborhood watch are doing the best they can. La Capitána: super-strong flier. Wheels: brilliant inventor. Hothead: catches on fire. Breezy: controls wind. Rascal: super-skateboarding. From their headquarters built into a repurposed Winnebago, they patrol the streets and alleys of their small hometown and dream of being big time heroes like Mustang Sally and the rest of Just Cause.

Airship Lies is a steampunk/Western anthology containing five stories from the Age of Wonder, ranging from the Old West to the wilderness beyond the frontier to the very edge of space itself.

When criminals are convicted, they go to jail. When they have parahuman abilities, they go to Deep Six, the most secure prison facility in the world. Six thousand feet underground, nobody has ever escaped from the maximum security facility. Until now. A parahuman terrorist called Misrule engineers a mass breakout, and it falls to a pair of prison guards to stop the world's most dangerous criminals from reaching freedom.

A City in Darkness - Four Lost Souls Seeking a Light - July 13, 1977 - The lives of four super-powered people become irrevocably intertwined when the lights go out in New York City, plunging their world into chaos. The superheroes of Just Cause, grown soft and complacent without any supervillains to challenge them, must overcome their personal demons as well as uphold the law in a lawless land of rioters, arson, and murder.

1907: A world of steam and steel, of brass and bravery. Spaceships ply the lanes above the Earth, running on coke furnaces and a prayer, while the atomic-powered Circumferential Rail runs the route between Paris, France, and Houston, Texas. Where there is cargo, and passengers of means, pirates soon follow, and this is how Jonathan Orbital, heir to the Circumferential Rail finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy surrounding a kidnapped French woman with a valuable secret.

Jay is having a pretty bad day at school. His popular cheerleader girlfriend just dumped him and a jock spilled soda all over his brand new Nikes. So when the God of Rabbits recruits him to save the world from an invasion of interstellar cockroaches, it seems like it might be a pretty cool gig. Unfortunately, in the spectrum of god-like abilities, rabbits rank pretty low, and Jay receives the ability to make snarky wisecracks, jump real high, and...that’s about all.

Making the Cut is the flagship show on the FoodieTV network, giving recent high school graduates a chance to win a scholarship to a prestigious culinary school. Midori is from San Francisco, and grew up in a family that owns a restaurant. All she ever wanted to do was cook, but in Japanese culture, women are relegated to hostess and management roles. Nicole is from Denver, the child of a broken home who's been forced to grow up way too soon. She's been poor her entire life, and that prize package is impossibly valuable to her. These two girls become friends despite their cultural differences, and together with six more challengers, will be competing in front of the cameras.

A collection of eight tales ranging from horror to superhero, science fiction to postapocalyptic, that examine the darker aspects of the world.

Humanity has spent decades calling into the stars, seeking assurances that we are not alone in the galaxy. After many years of silence, someone has answered. The Hind came from afar, not to extend the hand of friendship, but the axe of conquest. The Hind drop an impenetrable force field over New York City, creating a cage where their shock troops will battle a handful of superheroes. In their desperate bid to save first their city and then the rest of the world, the heroes of Just Cause must do the unthinkable and ally with the greatest supervillain the world has ever seen.

La Capitana and the other teens of the neighborhood watch have spent their entire lives wondering why they have parahuman powers but not the genetic marker known to grant them. When their former rivals, the Arnold triplets, come to La Capitana with a lead on the source of their powers, she jumps at the chance to join Brittany, Brianna, and Brooklyn. Their investigation takes them across the country to New York City where the four girls discover their abilities have a more sinister origin than they could have imagined.