Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Beville" in Literature & Fiction

Brian Evenson's fifth story collection constructs a human landscape as unearthly as it is mundane. Replete with the brutality, primordial waste, and savage blankness familiar to listeners of his earlier works, Evenson's Kafkaesque allegories entice the mind while stubbornly disordering it.

USA Today best-selling author Ty Hutchinson and former detective and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Brian Shea deliver a fast-paced mystery series filled with twists, perfect for fans of James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

CIA operative Mark Pierce is a trained killer with a strict moral code—he only targets those who truly deserve to die. So he has no qualms about taking out Victor Vautrin, an international arms dealer supplying fanatical terrorists in West Africa who may soon trigger a brutal civil war. But when he is tasked with other objectives—rescue kidnapped tourists and recover eleven million dollars of stolen CIA money—it quickly becomes clear to Pierce that someone doesn't want him to succeed in his primary mission.

When CIA operator Mark Pierce suffers serious head injuries during a car crash in Rio De Janeiro his memory is wiped. He knows he works for the CIA, but the past year of his life is gone. There are two people with Pierce—a man and a woman, Amelia. The man claims he's Pierce's superior but then tries to stab Pierce and flees. Amelia seems terrified and says that Pierce kidnapped her. Is anyone telling the truth?

As US hegemony fails in the wake of an unprecedented economic crisis, wars erupt across the globe. Meanwhile, a small band of engineers and scientists work in secret on a mission to redirect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

Five men drive into an empty Kazakh desert. Four are professional killers. The fifth is their intended victim. This is not the first time someone has underestimated CIA paramilitary operator Mark Pierce. And it won't be the last. Pierce quickly dispatches the assassins, but soon realizes that his problems are only beginning. Someone has deliberately brought him to Kazakhstan so that he can be framed for the theft of Russian nuclear waste.

They set sail from Norway, two swift-moving longships and their handpicked crews, following the route navigated by the legendary Leif Ericson. But for young shipmaster Nils Thorsson and his fellow Norsemen, the real journey begins when they push on into the uncharted continent of Vinland. There the explorers revel in the chance to penetrate a virgin land—until they trespass on the grounds of a primitive people who have seen enough of the light-hairs' cruelty to believe they are too dangerous to ignore.

Though published second after Altmann's Tongue, The Din of Celestial Birds (1997) consists of the best of Evenson's early stories. They take place in a country (perhaps several countries) that seems at once everywhere and nowhere, haunted by birds, ghosts, poverty, tyranny, and the permeability of the line between the living and the dead. These stories offer a heady mix of absurdity and bleakness on the one hand and exuberant magic realism on the other.

When the deadly duo witnesses a catastrophic terrorist attack, they don't stand idly by. They run into the fray, engaging the enemy, and stumble upon a message the killers leave behind. Graypoole has been resurrected. It's an impossible development. Dane knows Graypoole, a terrorist who targeted capitalists, is dead - killed by a black ops team. But as he and Nina follow the evidence, they learn Graypoole's son has taken over. And Junior wants revenge. One incident of mass murder, and killing the men who murdered his father, isn't enough. He's planning a bigger attack for an encore.

Matt Kearns just needed to get away from it all - to grieve for his father and let the rugged wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula renew him, like it always had. But from the moment he arrives, nothing feels right. Strange happenings shake his confidence and have him questioning his sanity. Even the animals seem to know something is amiss. But each time he tries to leave, something - something truly malicious - violently pulls him back. What could it be? Why him? And what will he have to do to escape with his life?

Steve Dane faces a day of reckoning long overdue when he learns the truth about his father. But the truth is a bitter pill when he discovers his father's death ties to rogue agents within US intelligence who use Agency assets to further their own agenda. With battle lines drawn, Steve Dane and Nina Talikova do what they do best: Attack! From the shores of Maryland to the blistering heat of a South American jungle, Dane and Nina destroy each tentacle of the enemy before finally coming face-to-face with the top dog himself and a final crippling betrayal.

Monaco was a nice vacation - until Steve Dane and Nina Talikova witness a secret agent’s murder. Now loose ends in a Russian conspiracy to steal a direct-energy weapon from the U.S., the assassins pursuing them have made a grave miscalculation. Dane and Nina are former spies who know all the tricks. Their trail of vengeance leads from Monaco to Texas, to a showdown in the Gulf of Mexico, where Dane is taken prisoner by an opponent who intends to settle old hatreds long thought buried. Outgunned and alone, Steve Dane negotiates the only terms the enemy understands: certain death.

Dan Stone has a new assignment. In Africa. He's to cripple the Chinese incursions into the continent. The only problem is he might trigger World War III. This high-stakes thriller, set in the wild world of the DRC, pits Dan Stone against a complex array of forces, all vying for power and influence. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, holds some of the largest coltan deposits in the world. It is the source of two rare Earth metals, niobium and tantalum, vital to modern economies. Now the Chinese are trying to corner the market and hold the western world hostage.

Jim Hampton arrived in New Orleans, eager to escape the stress of quitting a lucrative law practice. Instead, he finds a city on edge as a tropical depression brews in the Gulf. The storm appears to be dredging up the odd and unusual like shells from the ocean floor. Shadowy figures appear in alleyways; mysterious voices seem to come from nowhere. Jim is skeptical of the locals' claims that these are warnings from victims of past storms. He had all but given up on belief in the supernatural. That is until he meets Myriam, who begins to restore the faith of his childhood.

He is deadly and acts without remorse. He inflicts pain and death in service to his master. Now he's killed someone close to Dan and those he loves. It's become more than a mission for Dan; it's personal now. The assassin may want to lure Dan into his trap to kill him, but Dan has other ideas. One assassin must track another to his lair in a desperate attempt to eliminate him before anyone else dies.

On Earth, Grover Baines (a NASA scientist) is murdered in 1979 when he stumbles upon a secret third Voyager flight. Unlike the two other probes, Voyager 3 was a small manned craft loaded with reproductive material in hopes of finding a suitable planet for habitation on Alpha Centauri. Years later, in 2001, a fourth Voyager is sent on the same mission. Though technology has advanced dramatically in the 24 years since the first three Voyagers were launched, this mission manages to remain secret amid the attacks on the Twin Towers.