Janine R Wedel

Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

A groundbreaking book that challenges Americans to reevaluate our views on how corruption and private interest have infiltrated every level of society.

From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, however divergentt heir political views, these groups seem united by one thing: outrage over a system of power and influence that they feel has stolen their livelihoods and liberties. Increasingly, protesters on both ends of the political spectrum and the media are using the word corrupt to describe an elusory system of power that has shed any accountability to those it was meant to help and govern.

But what does corruption and unaccountability mean in today's world? It is far more toxic and deeply rooted than bribery. From superPACs pouring secret money into our election system to companies buying better ratings from Standard & Poor's or the extreme influence of lobbyists in Congress, all embody a "new corruption" and remain unaccountable to our society's supposed watchdogs, which sit idly alongside the same groups that have brought the government, business, and much of the military into their pocket.

David Walton

Superposition

Superposition

A QUANTUM PHYSICS MURDER MYSTERY. A Mind-Bending, Near-Future, Science Fiction Technothriller. Jacob Kelley’s family is turned upside down when an old friend turns up, waving a gun and babbling about an alien quantum intelligence. The mystery deepens when the friend is found dead in an underground bunker… apparently murdered the night he appeared at Jacob’s house. Jacob is arrested for the murder and put on trial. As the details of the crime slowly come to light, the weave of reality becomes ever more tangled, twisted by a miraculous new technology and a quantum creature unconstrained by the normal limits of space and matter. With the help of his daughter, Alessandra, Jacob must find the true murderer before the creature destroys his family and everything he loves.

David Walton

Supersymmetry

Superposition

Ryan Oronzi is a paranoid, neurotic, and brilliant physicist who has developed a quantum military technology that could make soldiers nearly invincible in the field. The technology, however, gives power to the quantum creature known as the varcolac, which slowly begins to manipulate Dr. Oronzi and take over his mind. Oronzi eventually becomes the unwilling pawn of the varcolac in its bid to control the world. The creature immediately starts attacking those responsible for defeating it fifteen years earlier, including Sandra and Alex Kelley—the two versions of Alessandra Kelley who are still living as separate people. The two young women must fight the varcolac, despite the fact that defeating it may mean resolving once again into a single person.

David Walton

The Genius Plague

THE CONTAGION IS IN YOUR MIND In this science fiction thriller, brothers are pitted against each other as a pandemic threatens to destabilize world governments by exerting a subtle mind control over survivors. Neil Johns has just started his dream job as a code breaker in the NSA when his brother, Paul, a mycologist, goes missing on a trip to collect samples in the Amazon jungle. Paul returns with a gap in his memory and a fungal infection that almost kills him. But once he recuperates, he has enhanced communication, memory, and pattern recognition. Meanwhile, something is happening in South America; others, like Paul, have also fallen ill and recovered with abilities they didn’t have before. But that’s not the only pattern—the survivors, from entire remote Brazilian tribes to American tourists, all seem to be working toward a common, and deadly, goal. Neil soon uncovers a secret and unexplained alliance between governments that have traditionally been enemies. Meanwhile Paul becomes increasingly secretive and erratic. Paul sees the fungus as the next stage of human evolution, while Neil is convinced that it is driving its human hosts to destruction. Brother must oppose brother on an increasingly fraught international stage, with the stakes: the free will of every human on earth. Can humanity use this force for good, or are we becoming the pawns of an utterly alien intelligence?

Tony Wood

Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War

How the West’s obsession with Vladimir Putin prevents it from understanding Russia It is impossible to think of Russia today without thinking of Vladimir Putin. More than any other major national leader, he personifies his country in the eyes of the outside world, and dominates Western media coverage of it to an extraordinary extent. In Russia itself, he is likewise the centre of attention for detractors and supporters alike. But as Tony Wood argues, this overwhelming focus on the president and his personality means that we understand Russia less than we ever did before. Too much attention is paid to the man, and not enough to the country outside the Kremlin’s walls. In this timely and provocative analysis, Wood looks beyond Putin to explore the profound changes Russia has undergone since 1991. In the process, he challenges many of the common assumptions made about contemporary Russia. Though commonly viewed as an ominous return to Soviet authoritarianism, Putin’s rule should instead be seen as a direct continuation of Yeltsin’s in the 1990s. And though many of Russia’s problems today are blamed on legacies of the Soviet past, Wood argues that the core features of Putinism – a predatory, authoritarian elite presiding over a vastly unequal society – are integral to the system set in place after the fall of Communism. What kind of country has emerged from Russia’s post-Soviet transformations, and where might it go in future? Russia Without Putin culminates in an arresting analysis of the country’s foreign policy – identifying the real power dynamics behind its escalating clashes with the West – and with reflections on the paths Russia might take in the 21st century.

Evelyn Weiss

Murder and Revolution

Murder

Murder at the Tsar’s private palace… and sinister monk Rasputin is a suspect. The Russian Revolution draws Professor Axelson and his assistant Agnes into a terrifying web of intrigue and violence. Fleeing for their lives amid the death throes of two vast, ancient empires, they face horrors beyond imagination. And in a far-flung corner of the world, they find the answer to their mystery. Copyright © Evelyn Weiss 2018

Sarai Walker

Dietland

The diet revolution is here. And it’s armed. Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you’re fat, to be noticed is to be judged. Or mocked. Or worse. With her job answering fan mail for a popular teen girls’ magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. Only then can her true life as a thin person finally begin. Then, when a mysterious woman starts following her, Plum finds herself falling down a rabbit hole and into an underground community of women who live life on their own terms. There Plum agrees to a series of challenges that force her to deal with her past, her doubts, and the real costs of becoming “beautiful.” At the same time, a dangerous guerrilla group called “Jennifer” begins to terrorize a world that mistreats women, and as Plum grapples with her personal struggles, she becomes entangled in a sinister plot. The consequences are explosive. Dietland is a bold, original, and funny debut novel that takes on the beauty industry, gender inequality, and our weight loss obsession—from the inside out, and with fists flying.

Rook Winters

Weight of Ashes

Court didn’t plan on becoming a revolutionary. Fifty years after first contact, the Qyntarak dominate the planet politically and economically. Now things are about to get much worse. When Elle’s adoptive father is killed for smuggling alien secrets, she and Court are thrust into a desperate mission to save humankind. Grieving and ill-equipped, they need to stay alive long enough to get those secrets into the hands of people who can use them. But how much more will they have to sacrifice to see it through to the end? And by then, will it be too late?

Tim Washburn

Powerless

NOTHING CAN PREPARE YOU… It strikes without warning. A massive geomagnetic solar storm that destroys every power grid in the northern hemisphere. North America is without lights, electricity, phones, and navigation systems. In one week, the human race is flung back to the Dark Ages. NOTHING CAN SAVE YOU… In Boulder, Colorado, weather technicians watch in horror as civilization collapses around them. Planes are falling out of the skies. Cars are dead. Pandemonium and terror grip the Northern Hemisphere. As nuclear reactors across North America face inevitable meltdowns, the U.S. President remains powerless in a heavily guarded White House. From London to Boston to Anchorage, there is no food, no water, no hope. It's every man for himself… and it will only get worse. SURVIVAL IS EVERYTHING. Only one man—army veteran Zeke Marshall—is prepared to handle a nightmare like this. But when he tries to reunite with his family in Dallas—across a lawless terrain as deadly as any battlefield—he discovers there are worse things in life than war. And there are terrible and unthinkable things he'll have to do to survive…

Ben H Winters

Golden State

Lazlo Ratesic is 54, a 19-year veteran of the Speculative Service, from a family of law enforcement and in a strange alternate society that values law and truth above all else. This is how Laz must, by law, introduce himself, lest he fail to disclose his true purpose or nature, and by doing so, be guilty of a lie.

Laz is a resident of The Golden State, a nation resembling California, where like-minded Americans retreated after the erosion of truth and the spread of lies made public life, and governance, increasingly impossible. There, surrounded by the high walls of compulsory truth-telling, knowingly contradicting the truth—the Objectively So—is the greatest possible crime. Stopping those crimes, punishing them, is Laz’s job. In its service, he is one of the few individuals permitted to harbor untruths—to “speculate” on what might have happened in the commission of a crime.

But the Golden State is far less a paradise than its name might suggest. To monitor, verify, and enforce the Objectively So requires a veritable panopticon of surveillance, recording, and record-keeping. And when those in control of the truth twist it for nefarious means, the Speculators may be the only ones with the power to fight back.

Gertrude Chandler Warner

Great Shark Mystery

The Boxcar Children

The Alden Children are on vacation at an aquarium in Florida, where they feed the penguins, swim with dolphins, and come face-to-face with a great white shark! The shark draws crowds and thrills the park's visitors. But the Aldens soon discover that the shark is in danger—someone at the park wants it gone. How will the Boxcar Children fish out the crook before it's too late for the shark?

Donald E Westlake

Cops and Robbers

Tom Garrity and Joe Loomis are cops in New York — commuters to a job in a city where people often feel like animals. As cops, they’re at the center of it. The brutalizers and the brutalized. Unable to take much more of it, they invent a romantic dream for getting the hell out. The cops decide to become robbers.

Joe discovers that a blue uniform will get you in anywhere; allow you, for instance, to hold up a liquor store without even being suspected. He and Tom decide to pull one big caper that will net them each a million. Then they’ll wait around a year, and after that pull out for good. They offer their services to the Mafia, because on their own they don’t know what crime to commit for that kind of money. A Mafia boss named Vigano points them in the right direction. After that there is no turning back, and no guarantee that they’ll make it.

What happens to Tom and Joe and their families as they make their breakaway move is what COPS AND ROBBERS is all about. Here is a major novel on a major theme by Donald E. Westlake who, in telling a brand new kind of story, makes use of his proven ability to create suspense and entertainment.

Karen Thompson Walker

The Dreamers

An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles.

Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles

With a voice as distinctive and original as that of The Lovely Bones, and for the fans of the speculative fiction of Margaret Atwood, Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles is a luminous, haunting, and unforgettable debut novel about coming of age set against the backdrop of an utterly altered world. “It still amazes me how little we really knew…. Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.” On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

Ryan Westfield

Final Chaos

Surviving

When society falls, how hard will you fight? They expected the solar flare, not the EMP. Now the lights are off and chaos is brewing. It’s only a matter of time before violence erupts. Jim owns a small electronics repair store in Rochester, NY. He quickly realizes the reality of the situation. He grabs his emergency kit, planning to get across town to his wife. But finding her among the chaos proves almost impossible. And if he does get to her, where will they find shelter? Rob’s been Jim’s friend since grade school. He’s the kind of guy who’s always between jobs but has a big heart. When the lights go out, he doesn’t know whether to believe Jim or not. After all, he’s got a job interview that he needs to get to. What will it take to convince him this is serious? Jessica’s an independent young woman. In the short term, she knows she can take care of herself. But as the chaos grows, will she be able to learn to work with others in order to survive? Final Chaos is book 1 of Surviving, a post-apocalyptic survival thriller series. It deals with real people fighting for their lives every inch of the way.

Ryan Westfield

Final Panic

Surviving

When society begins to unravel, there’s no putting it back together. Jim and the others have made it to the lake house. They have some supplies, and they’re still alive. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe. Rationing the food is necessary, and the meager portions are beginning to take their toll. Imagining hunger and fatigue is one thing, but living it is another. Can they survive like this long term? What happens now that the hoards are fleeing the cities, looking for shelter? The lake appealed to Jim, and that means it will appeal to others. How many will invade, and how hard will they fight? Jim knows they need to strengthen their defenses, to deal with the coming onslaught, but they’re getting weaker and more desperate by the day as it is. What will it take to save them? Final Panic is book 2 of Surviving, a post-apocalyptic survival thriller series. It deals with real people fighting for their lives every inch of the way.

Ryan Westfield

Getting Out

The EMP

Do you have what it takes to survive? The EMP hits. The lights go out and silence roars. Society is on the brink of violent chaos. The only way to survive is to get out, away from the cities and into the wilderness. Max is an office worker with some gear and a plan. He’s one of the first to realize the unspoken dangers. A few years ago, he inherited an old farmhouse. His plan is to get to it as fast as possible and bunker down. He thinks he’s ready, but he quickly discovers that there’s more to surviving than just having the right gear. Mandy is a waitress with the day off work. What seems like a normal power outage quickly turns terrifying. Her peaceful town is no longer the home she once knew. She’s offered a way out, but can she put her trust in a perfect stranger? Georgia is a single mother who just wants to keep her two teenage kids safe. She drives a pickup and loves hunting. She has skills that could keep her family alive, but is she ready to make life or death decisions in the blink of an eye? Do Max, Mandy, and Georgia have what it takes to overcome the unexpected? After all, even the best-laid plans can come up short. Getting Out is book 1 of The EMP, a post-apocalyptic survival thriller series. It deals with real people fighting for their survival every inch of the way.

Ryan Westfield

Staying Alive

The EMP

How long would you last? It’s been two weeks since the EMP. Getting out was just the beginning. Staying alive is proving harder than anyone could have imagined. Max knows people will come from the cities. He knows they’ll be ready to fight, to do whatever it takes to ensure their own survival. Will he be able to lead the others in the defense of the farmhouse, even when he’s still recovering from his injuries? Georgia is in charge of hunting. Each trip into the woods brings her closer to danger. It’s just a matter of time before she runs into people who will do anything to get her gun and her gear. How dangerous do things have to get before she stops trying to provide for her kids? John is Max’s estranged brother. He’d always made fun of Max for worrying about being prepared. Now, he’s trapped in his upscale apartment with no gear and no food. He’s wishing he was more like his brother. Does he want to have what it takes to try to get out of the city? Staying Alive is book 2 of The EMP, a post-apocalyptic survival thriller series. It deals with real people fighting for their survival every inch of the way.

Ryan Westfield

Pushing On

The EMP

What would you do to survive? Weeks after the EMP, society is collapsing. Food is scarce and violence prevails. Surviving has never been harder. Max’s group is heading west, trying to find a home away from the chaos. They’ll need more supplies for their trip, so they go scavenging in a seemingly-abandoned town. But is Albion really as safe as it seems? Chad thought he had it together. He’d been pulling his own weight. But the stress is getting to him. Does he have the strength to resist a path back to his old habits? One wrong move and he could put everyone’s life in danger. Holed up in the farmhouse, John and Cynthia try to figure out their next move. The militia is closing in. Each passing minute means more danger. But where else can they go? Pushing On is book 3 of The EMP, a post-apocalyptic survival thriller series. It deals with real people fighting for their survival every inch of the way.

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