Showing results by narrator "Bronson Pinchot" in All Categories

Like "Cloak of Anarchy", this story is peopled with fictional versions of several of Niven's friends. A discussion among friends about the theory of "Multiple Edens" suddenly becomes all too real, and the reason Tom Findlay has been asking such interesting questions over the years becomes clear.

Captain Favian Markham, USN, is a man surrounded by secrets. Secrets that will be revealed when he is court-martialed for losing his ship. Secrets held by his mistress Caroline. The secrets of enemy spies signaling to British ships over the horizon. And the greatest secret of the War of 1812, a secret which will be revealed once Favian breaks the enemy blockade in the Macedonian, a frigate stolen from his own government.

Nolan Garrett is at war...with his own ordnance! His cutting-edge combat suit: hacked. His high-tech weaponry: dismantled. His AI: inoperative. All he has left are his wits and the help of the drugged-out Silverguard he rescued from her addiction. His enemy is one he can’t see, can’t stab, can’t shoot. Hidden behind the technology that made Nolan the Nyzarian Empire’s deadliest assassin, the mysterious hacker known only as Ex-Umbra is a threat his elite soldier training could never prepare him for.

A stranded Rammer who finds himself transported from the depths of space to humanity's cradle on Earth tells his harrowing tale to a people-watcher. This short story was first printed in Galaxy in September 1969.

Alan Lightman's grandfather, M. A. Lightman, was the family's undisputed patriarch: it was his movie-theater empire that catapulted the family to prominence in the South, his fearless success that both galvanized and paralyzed his descendants, haunting them for a half century after his death. In this lyrical and impressionistic memoir, Lightman writes about returning to Memphis in an attempt to understand the people he so eagerly left behind forty years earlier.

The Expanse meets The Godfather in the third volume of The SynCorp Saga: Empire Earth, a series of space opera/noir thrillers about corporate greed, rebellion, and mankind’s survival among the stars. The final battle for SynCorp’s survival comes home to where it all began: Earth. SynCorp and the SSR prepare for a bloody engagement above Earth, mankind's birthplace and the seat of the largest corporate empire in history. Who will live? Who will die? What fate awaits humanity when the dust of battle clears?

One day Arthur Friedland piles his three sons into the car and drives them to see the Great Lindemann, Master of Hypnosis. Protesting that he doesn't believe in magic even as he is led onto the stage, Arthur nevertheless experiences something. Later that night, while his family sleeps, he takes his passport, empties all the money from his bank account, and vanishes. In time, still absent from his family, he begins to publish novels and becomes an internationally renowned author.

This early Niven story was the first of many to delve deeply into the legal and ethical implications of organ-transplant technology. It introduces Known Space's organ banks and the breed of criminals known as "organleggers".

A train ride home from a school field trip turns sinister when two kids spot a body on the tracks. A short story from Guys Read: Thriller, edited by Jon Scieszka.

Two families came together in the waiting room of a Denver hospital on May 11, 2004, to await kidney transplants for loved ones. In the first operation, Gregg Farber, 32, a real estate executive, donated a kidney to his father, Steve, a 60-year-old Denver lawyer and power broker. In the second, Guatemalan refugee and landscaper Ernesto Delaroca, also 32, donated a kidney to his sister Sandra, 19, a restaurant worker.

Brand-new stories from David Housewright, Steve Thayer, Judith Guest, Mary Logue, Bruce Rubenstein, K.J. Erickson, William Kent Krueger, Ellen Hart, Brad Zellar, Mary Sharratt, Pete Hautman, Larry Millett, Quinton Skinner, Gary Bush, and Chris Everheart.

Culling the vastness of experience--from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average--like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. A "black world" operative can't tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn't resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead brother, killed in an avalanche he believes he caused.

Back in the Eighties, Mickey DeFalco was America's teenage heartthrob with spiky gelled hair, slanted sideburns, and a number-one hit single - "Sweet Days" - a sappy love song he wrote after his high school sweetheart, Lynn Mahoney, broke his heart. Now approaching middle age, Mickey is lucky to land a singing gig at a bar mitzvah. So the one-hit wonder-boy is making a different kind of comeback - returning to his old stomping grounds in Queens, living with his parents, and sleeping in his childhood bed. Just like in high school.

On January 26, 1948, a public health official arrives at a branch of the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo. There has been an outbreak of dysentery in the neighborhood, he tells the manager, and he has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat all locals who might have been exposed.

The setting is Seattle's Lake City neighborhood during the 2001 holiday season. In the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and at the peak of Seattle's first wave of tech-boom gentrification - a wave that never quite made it to his neighborhood - Lane Bueche schemes how to win back his wife (and her trust fund). In his childhood bedroom in his mother's decrepit old house, the idealistic but self-serving striver Lane licks his wounds and hatches a plot.

In a frigate stolen from his own navy, Captain Favian Markham races to New Orleans with the dispatches he’s captured from a British warship—dispatches making it clear that the city will soon be the target of a British fleet and an invading army. But Favian finds New Orleans a city of intrigue, where Creoles conspire against the Americans, streetfighters cloak their murders under the Code Duello, the pirate Jean Laffite defies the Navy, and a cabal of elite soldiers conspire to hand the city to the enemy—and where two sensuous Creole women, Eugenie and Campaspe, vie for his favor.

"Pin", a story by Robert McCammon, was first published in his short fiction collection Blue World and was selected for inclusion in Best New Horror.

Martin Harris returns home after a short absence to find that his wife doesn’t know him, another man is living in his house under his name, and the neighbors think he’s a raving lunatic. Worse, not a single person - family, colleague, or doctor - can vouch for him. Worse still, the impostor shares all of Martin’s memories, experiences, and knowledge, down to the last detail. He is, in fact, a more convincing Martin than Martin himself.

A suspense novel concerning Lieutenant Frank Mooney's quest to find the killer who has robbed, raped and murdered several New York women. The killer, and his female accomplice, realize someone is copying them and track down a second murderer. Written by the author of City of the Dead.

What defines Boston? Its history? Its landmarks? Its sports teams and shrines? Perhaps the question should be, who defines Boston? From Henry David Thoreau to Dennis Lehane, Boston has been beloved by many of America's greatest writers, and there is no better group of men and women to capture the heart and soul of the Hub. In Our Boston, editor Andrew Blauner has collected both original and reprinted essays from Boston-area writers past and present, all celebrating the city they love.