The end of the world affords a restless everyman the chance to be a fearless warrior in this exciting apocalyptic adventure filled with magic and monsters.James Robard was a risk-taking con artist and thief before he turned over a new leaf as a loving husband and a dull suit in a law firm. He's never felt so unadventurous. That is, until the System descends upon Earth and he's initiated into a thrilling game world of magic and mayhem, training for exhilarating chal...

Julie Cromwell is a selfish, manipulative, insecure woman, and those are her best qualities. She sets up a fake kidnapping to see if her husband will pay a million dollars for her safe return. Something goes wrong and she winds up dead. This is the first plot twist, but certainly not the last. Enter lead detective Karl Larkin and his partner, Ted Cramer. They are a team who refuses to let sleeping dogs lie. They begin rattling the skeletons in the family's closets. Larkin finds himself bre...

What lengths would you go to avenge your fathers death?Would you take on a billion dollar empire?What if that empire was the music industry?In this new crime thriller fiction series, the vivid imagination of Phillip J Kriz brings the elusive backstage concert experience to life. The Roadie Cartel keeps you on the edge of your seat with a story that combines America's love of going to concerts with its odd obsession with the lavish...

The Orientation may be over, but on a postapocalyptic Earth, the beastly games and humanity's fight for survival are just beginning.James Robard returns to a System-integrated Earth a changed man in a world of ruin and disorder. A conquering hero of the Orientation, rewarded with the ruling title of Fisher King, he has a duty to rebuild civilization. It might look like Florida, but it's the Fisher Kingdom now.The good news is that James is reunited with his...

A hero and his family fight to survive and reunite in a strange and terrifying new reality in the propulsive second installment of this epic LitRPG series.A System apocalypse has ripped humanity away from its home planet, Earth-73, firing the starting pistol on a marathon race for survival against beastly odds. And in the violent magical worlds of the System's "Orientation," it's getting harder to tell the monsters from the savage humans.Mina and her younge...

There can be no peace as long as a single warlord remains alive…Elliot, Her Majesty's Warlord, has been riding high. The coup against Queen Helen has been foiled, the New Model Army is readying itself for the coming war, and his lover is pregnant. But the warlords have been preparing too and now, they're on the march, ready to crush the kingdom and put the uppity commoners to the sword. Facing a war on three fronts, Elliot embarks on a desperate gamble to win the w...

A deadlier sequel to 9/11—and the race inside the CIA, FBI, and pentagon to stop itIn 2003, United States intelligence uncovered evidence that al Qaeda had acquired nuclear materials, plotting to smuggle them into American ports. The "Second Wave" threat triggered one of the most urgent and secretive manhunts in United States history.With the cinematic intensity of Zero Dark Thirty and the investigative depth of The Looming Tower, Michael ...

American politics today can be defined by the intense and increasingly toxic divide between Democrats and Republicans. Matthew D. Luttig explores why so many Americans have endorsed this level of political conflict.Luttig illustrates how the psychological need for closure leads people, regardless of whether they identify as Democrat or Republican, to express more polarized political attitudes. This association between closed minds and partisan polarization is a new phenomenon and c...

On the night of August 6, 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a newly appointed judge and prominent figure in many circles of Manhattan, hailed a taxi in the heart of Broadway and vanished into thin air. Despite a decades-long international manhunt led by the New York Police Department's esteemed Missing Persons Bureau, the reason for Crater's disappearance remains a confounding mystery. In the early months of the investigation, evidence implicated and imperiled New York's top officials, including ...

The incredible wartime saga of the only American submarinersto survive the sinking of their ship and evade enemy capture in WWIIOn the night of August 13, 1944, the U.S. submarine Flier struck a mine in the Sulu Sea in the southern Philippines as it steamed along the surface. All but fifteen of the more than eighty-strong crew went down with the vessel. Of those left floating in the dark, eight survived by swimming for seventeen hours before washing...

Before the twentieth century ships when relied upon visual signaling, vessels beyond range of sight or a cannon shot, were blind, deaf, and dumb in the dark, making night battles at sea rare, and near always accidental. The introduction of certain technologies like the torpedo, the searchlight, radio, and then radar, transformed naval warfare by making night combat feasible and, in some cases, desirable. The process by which navies integrated these new tools of war and turned the dark into...

Having Seaman Jenna as the mascot on the USS Vandegrift was never meant to be a statement or symbolic act, or to put the crew on the radars of four-star admirals. Jenna came aboard unannounced, a Christmas gift that brought instant joy to the crew and transformed a gray ship into a home for 225 sailors. Her addition was not pre-approved by the chain of command—contrary to military protocol. Before long, Jenna became a phenomenon—the only dog on a Navy ship since World War II—despi...