In the Year of our Lord 1633, Mary Margret Russo graduates from Grantville High School at the top of her class. The beautiful and strong willed up-timer, as the people from the future are called, is mysteriously hired by a branch of the wealthiest family in the world. Mary finds herself far from her family, living in a beautiful castle in the Inn Valley of Tyrol. There she meets Counts, Countesses, the handsome and distant Count Johann Franz, and works hard as a teacher and consultant amon...

1632 & Beyond Issue #002PrefaceIntroductionGrantville's Secret SantaThe GiftAt Christmas TimeChristmas at the SchickelmansNo Proper CarolSanta's LappNatalaA Christmas StollenOne Night OnlySad Spectacles of Deceitful Iniquity at ChristmastimeThe View From Nakatomi TowerConnect with Eric Flint's 1632 & BeyondThis is a reissue of the second half of A 1632 Christmas, one of t...

Who are we? Why are we here? How should we spend our few precious years on Earth? Throughout history, we've looked to religion for answers to our deepest, abiding questions. One of the foremost scholars of religion in the world, Huston Smith, discusses the contemporary role of religion, the value religion continues to provide for those who choose to listen, the difference between religion and spirituality, and the commonalities of various religions.

Every day, more and more people have been found to have contracted the illness. It reveals itself gradually, inhibiting sleep, eating away at one’s mind, birthing panic and confusion, until the final few months before death known as the suffering. The epidemic has swept the globe, and now infects one in ten people.Straight-arrow cop Parker T. Haas is working undercover as a dealer in the black-market trade of Dreamer, the only known drug that offers relief for the sleepless. The dr...

The first stand-alone thriller by critically acclaimed author Charlie Huston, The Shotgun Rule is a raw tale of four teenage friends who go looking for a little trouble—and find it.Blood spilled on the asphalt of this town long years gone has left a stain, and it's spreading.Not that a thing like that matters to teenagers like George, Hector, Paul, and Andy. It's summer 1983 in a northern California suburb, and these working-class kids have been killing ti...

After exposing the secret source of blood for half of Manhattan’s Vampyres, private eye Joe Pitt is definitely a dead man walking. For a year, he’s sloshed around the subway tunnels and sewers, tapping the veins of the lost, while above ground, a Vampyre civil war threatens to drag the Clans into the sunlight once and for all. What’s it gonna take to dig him up? Just the search for a missing girl who’s carrying a baby that just might be the destiny of Vampyre-kind.Not that Joe care...

Webster Fillmore Goodhue has found temporary work as one of the mop-up crew for the Los Angeles County crime division. In other words, he cleans up grisly crime scenes for the cops. When the daughter of a recent Malibu suicide victim asks for his help cleaning up after her brother has gotten into a little trouble, every cell in Web’s brain is telling him to turn her down. But she’s very attractive, and before he knows it, he’s well on his way to getting his face kicked in, facing down some...

It’s like this: a series of bullet-riddled bad breaks has seen rogue Vampyre and terminal tough guy Joe Pitt go from PI for hire to Clan-connected enforcer to dead man walking in a New York minute. And after burning all his bridges, the only one left to cross leads to the Bronx, where Joe’s brass knuckles and straight razor can’t keep him from running afoul of a sadistic old bloodsucker with a bad bark and a worse bite. Even if every Clan in Manhattan is hollering for Joe’s head on a stick...

There’s only so much room on the Island—only so much blood—and Manhattan’s Vampyre Clans aren’t interested in sharing. So when the Vyrus-infected dregs of New York’s outer boroughs start creeping across the bridges, the Clans want to know why. Bad luck for PI Joe Pitt. Joe used to be a Rogue, working off his own dime, picking his own gigs, but tight times and a terminally ill girlfriend pushed him to the renegade Society Clan. Now he has all the cash and blood he needs, but at a steep pric...

Joe Pitt’s life sucks. He hasn’t had a case or a job in God knows how long, and his stashes are running on empty. What stashes? The only ones that count to a guy like Joe: blood and money. The money he uses to buy blood; the blood, he drinks. Hey, it’s that or your neck, buddy.The only way for him to lay his hands on both is to take a gig with the local Vampyre Clan. See, something new is on the streets, a new high, a high so strong it can send a Vampyre spazzing through Joe’s loca...

Those stories you hear? The ones about things that only come out at night? Things that feed on blood, feed on us? Got news for you: they’re true. Only it’s not like the movies or old man Stoker’s storybook. It’s worse. Especially if you happen to be one of them. Just ask Joe Pitt.There’s a shambler on the loose. Some fool who got himself infected with a flesh-eating bacteria is lurching around, trying to munch on folks’ brains. Joe hates shamblers, but he’s still the one who has to...

Skinner founded his career in "asset protection" on fear. To touch anyone under his protection was to invite destruction. A savagely effective methodology, until Skinner's CIA handlers began to fear him as much as his enemies did and banished him to the hinterlands of the intelligence community.Now, an ornate and evolving cyber-terrorist attack is about to end that long exile. His asset is Jae, a roboticist with a gift for seeing the underlying systems violently shaping a new era o...