F Paul Wilson

Repairman Jack #13 - Ground Zero

From Publishers Weekly

Wilson's less than satisfying 13th Repairman Jack novel (after By the Sword) blends 9/11 conspiracy theories with a threat to all life on Earth from otherworldly beings. In the author's alternative history, a shadowy figure floating in a boat in New York harbor causes the collapse of the Twin Towers independently of the suicidal al-Qaeda hijackers by detonating explosives in both buildings. Several years later, Eddie Connell seeks out Repairman Jack, heir to the role of point man in the war against the Otherness. Eddie needs Jack's help in finding his forensic scientist sister, Weezy, whom they trace to a New York City hospital ward. Because Weezy had uncovered suspicious stock trading in advance of the World Trade Center attack as well as the editing out of a man from photos of bin Laden and his top deputies, her life is in peril. The apocalyptic plot and frenetic action fail to add up to a chilling read. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Serves up the occult thrills fans of Wilson’s series have come to expect and tantalizes with the promise of more surprises to come.”
--_Publishers Weekly_ on _By the Sword

“A canny mix of sci-fi paranoia and criminal mayhem…Bloodline_ starts fast, keeps the accelerator down, and defies you to stop reading.”
--_Entertainment Weekly_

F Paul Wilson

Repairman Jack #14 - Fatal Error

SUMMARY:
The End of the World is at hand!Munir Habib's life has become a nightmare. His tormentor has warned Munir not to report the kidnapping of his family, or else they will pay a terrible price. A friend realizes something is terribly wrong and tells Munir he doesn't have to go to the cops. There's a guy who fixes situations like this-Repairman Jack. Jack is backed into helping Munir despite his ongoing involvement in the cosmic shadow war between the Ally and the Otherness. Or perhaps because of it. He's chafing at being forced into the defensive role of protecting the Lady, the physical embodiment of the consciousness of the planet Earth.Meanwhile, the Septimus Order and the Kickers are seemingly working in concert on a plot to extinguish the Lady and open the way for the Otherness to take over our reality. To top it all off, Dawn Pickering finally goes into labor and delivers a baby she only glimpses as it's whisked away, and is terrified by what she sees. Later she's told the baby died, but she doesn't believe it. Neither does Weezy. Neither does Jack. All these interlocking plots mean doom for humanity. But Jack never gives up or gives in.

F Paul Wilson

Repairman Jack #15 - The Dark at the End

Review

"Repairman Jack is one of the most original and intriguing characters to arise out of contemporary fiction in ages. His adventures are hugely entertaining.”

--Dean Koontz on the Repairman Jack novels

"Jack stand[s] out from the supernatural pack. The books are about an ordinary guy doing whatever it takes to protect the innocent, and that's a story that always has resonance.”

--_The Chicago Sun-Times_ on By the Sword

“A canny mix of sci-fi paranoia and criminal mayhem. Bloodline starts fast, keeps the accelerator down, and defies you to stop reading.”

--_Entertainment Weekly_

Product Description

Bound by his promise to Glaeken, Jack has refrained from making any direct moves against Rasalom.  But things have changed so there's nothing holding Jack in check any longer.  Other changes are occurring as well.  Jack is healing at an accelerated rate--much like Glaeken did when he was immortal. This can only mean that Glaeken's time is almost up and when he dies, Jack takes his place.

Rasalom continues to plot against the Lady.  Twice she has died and returned; a third time and she will be gone, leaving a clear path for the Otherness to infiltrate this reality.  But Ernst Drexler, formerly Rasalom's go-to guy for logistical support, fears he will be left out in the cold when the Change comes. He forms an uneasy alliance with Jack, who is preparing to face their old enemy.  

Meanwhile, Dawn Pickering is searching for her supposedly dead baby.  The trail leads her to a mansion in a remote Long Island coastal town, where she discovers a truth she could have never imagined.

Now the stage is set for Jack's massive assault on Rasalom.  Jack knows he's got just one shot.  But it's not just a matter of taking out Rasalom: he also must safely retrieve Dawn's child and minimize collateral damage.  So, he comes up with a foolproof plan.

But fools are always with us….

Wrath James White

The Resurrectionist

Product Description

Dale has the miraculous ability to heal and raise the recent dead. But he’s also insane. When he uses his power to brutally kill the woman next door, night after night, no one will believe her impossible story, so it’s up to her to find a way to end the living nightmare.

Gene Wolfe

Return to the Whorl

EDITORIAL REVIEW: Gene Wolfe''s "Return to the Whorl" is the third volume, after"On Blue's Waters" and "In Green's Jungles", of his ambitious SF trilogy The Book of the Short Sun . . . It is again narrated by Horn, who has embarked on a quest in search of the heroic leader Patera Silk. Horn has traveled from his home on the planet Blue, reached the mysterious planet Green, and visited the great starship, the Whorl and even, somehow, the distant planet Urth. But Horn's identity has become ambiguous, a complex question embedded in the story, whose telling is itself complex, shifting from place to place, present to past. Perhaps Horn and Silk are now one being. *Return to the Whorl* brings Wolfe's major new fiction, The Book of the Short Sun, to a strange and seductive climax.

Peter Watts

Rifters 1 - Starfish

C
ivilization rests on the backs of its outcasts.

So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometers below the surface of the Pacific, it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program.  It recruits those whose histories have preadapted them to dangerous environments, people so used to broken bodies and chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up.  Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you haven't spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back, you wouldn't be a rifter in the first place.  It's a small price to keep the lights going, back on shore.

But there are things among the cliffs and trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find, and enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made of iron.  At first, not even the rifters know what they have in them—and by the time anyone else finds out,  the outcast and the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet...

Peter Watts

Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

An enormous tidal wave on the west coast of North America has just killed thousands. Lenie Clarke, in a black wetsuit, walks out of the ocean onto a Pacific Northwest beach filled with the oppressed and drugged homeless of the Asian world who have gotten only this far in their attempt to reach America. Is she a monster, or a goddess? One thing is for sure: all hell is breaking loose.

This dark, fast-paced, hard SF novel returns to the story begun in Starfish: all human life is threatened by a disease (actually a primeval form of life) from the distant prehuman past. It survived only in the deep ocean rift where Clarke and her companions were stationed before the corporation that employed them tried to sterilize the threat with a secret underwater nuclear strike. But Clarke was far enough away that she was able to survive and tough enough to walk home, 300 miles across the ocean floor. She arrives carrying with her the potential death of the human race, and possessed by a desire for revenge. Maelstrom is a terrifying explosion of cyberpunk noir by a writer whose narrative, says Robert Sheckley, "drives like a futuristic locomotive." 

Peter Watts

Rifters 3 - Behemoth

Behemoth: B-Max

Star
fishlit the fuse. Maelstrom was the explosion. But five years into the aftermath, things aren't quite so simple as they once seemed...

Lenie Clarke-rifter, avenger, amphibious deep-sea cyborg-has destroyed the world. Once exploited for her psychological addiction to dangerous environments, she emerged in the wake of a nuclear blast to serve up vendetta from the ocean floor. The horror she unleashed-an ancient, apocalyptic microbe called ßehemoth- has been free in the world for half a decade now, devouring the biosphere from the bottom up. North America lies in ruins beneath the thumb of an omnipotent psychopath. Digital monsters have taken Clarke's name, wreaking havoc throughout the decimated remnants of something that was once called Internet. Governments have fallen across the globe; warlords and suicide cults rise from the ashes, pledging fealty to the Meltdown Madonna. All because five years ago, Lenie Clarke had a score to settle.

But she has learned something in the meantime: she destroyed the world for a fallacy.

Now, cowering at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, rifters and the technoindustrial "corpses" who created them hide from a world in its death throes. But they cannot hide forever: something is tracking them, down amongst the lightless cliffs and trenches of the Midatlantic Ridge. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably towards the very bottom of the world, and Lenie Clarke must finally confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds...

Behemoth: Seppuku

Lenie Clarke-amphibious cyborg, Meltdown Madonna, agent of the Apocalypse-has grown sick to death of her own cowardice.

For five years (since the events recounted in Maelstrom0, she and her bionic brethren (modified to work in the rift valleys of the ocean floor) have hidden in the mountains of the deep Atlantic. The facility they commandeered was more than a secret station on the ocean floor. Atlantis was an exit strategy for the corporate elite, a place where the world's Movers and Shakers had hidden from the doomsday microbe ßehemoth-and from the hordes of the moved and the shaken left behind. For five years "rifters" and "corpses" have lived in a state of uneasy truce, united by fear of the outside world.

But now that world closes in. An unknown enemy hunts them through the crushing darkness of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ßehemoth- twisted, mutated, more virulent than ever-has found them already. The fragile armistice between the rifters and their one-time masters has exploded into all-out war, and not even the legendary Lenie Clarke can take back the body count.

Billions have died since she loosed ßehemoth upon the world. Billions more are bound to. The whole biosphere came apart at the seams while Lenie Clarke hid at the bottom of the sea and did nothing. But now there is no place left to hide. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably to the very floor of the world, and Lenie Clarke must return to confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in pitch-black purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds...

Peter Watts

Rifters 4 - Blindsight

Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.

But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...

Margaret Weis

Rose of the Prophet #01 - The Will of the Wanderer

Product Description

Since time began, twenty Gods have ruled the  universe. Though each god possessed different  abilities, each was all-powerful within his realm. Now  one of the Gods has upset the balance of power,  leaving the others scrambling for control in the new  order...

Here is the epic tale of  the Great War of the Gods--and the proud people  upon whom the fate of the world depends. When the  God of the desert, Akhran the Wanderer, declares  that two clans must band together despite their  centuries-old rivalry, their first response is  outrage. But they are a devout people and so reluctantly  bow to his bidding.

Enemies from  birth, the headstrong Prince Khardan and impetuous  Princess Zohra must unite in marriage to stop  Quar, the God of Reality, Greed, and Law, from  enslaving their people.

But can Khardan  and Zohra keep from betraying each other? Can  their two peoples maintain their fragile alliance  until the long-awaited flowering of the legendary Rose of the Prophet?

Against the powerful legions of the evil Amir, Khardan and Zohra  fight to save the desert people--a fight  unexpectedly joined by an exiled wizard named Matthew and  the mysterious powers of his alien land.

From the Publisher

Since time began, twenty Gods have ruled the universe. Though each god possessed different abilities, each was all-powerful within his realm. Now one of the Gods has upset the balance of power, leaving the others scrambling for control in the new order...

Here is the epic tale of the Great War of the Gods--and the proud people upon whom the fate of the world depends. When the God of the desert, Akhran the Wanderer, declares that two clans must band together despite their centuries-old rivalry, their first response is outrage. But they are a devout people and so reluctantly bow to his bidding.

Enemies from birth, the headstrong Prince Khardan and impetuous Princess Zohra must unite in marriage to stop Quar, the God of Reality, Greed, and Law, from enslaving their people.

But can Khardan and Zohra keep from betraying each other? Can their two peoples maintain their fragile alliance until the long-awaited flowering of the legendary Rose of the Prophet?

Against the powerful legions of the evil Amir, Khardan and Zohra fight to save the desert people--a fight unexpectedly joined by an exiled wizard named Matthew and the mysterious powers of his alien land.

Margaret Weis

Rose of the Prophet #02 - The Paladin of the Night

Product Description

The Great War of the Gods means nothing to the  proud people on the mortal planet--until Akhran the  Wandering God decrees the union of two mighty  feuding clans. Though the families are fierce  Warriors, they are few in number. Even the marriage of  Khardan and Zohra is not enough to over power the  strength of the invading army or prevent the  imprisonment of their peoples. Now, with Khardan and  Zohra mysteriously missing--seemingly cowards who  hid from certain defeat--the two clans have lost all  hope of ever again seeing their beloved open  skies. But Prince Khardan and Princess Zohra, aided by  the wizard Matthew, have been given another  mission...a mission that at first seems less useful  than counting the many grains of the desert sands,  but soon proves to be of far more lasting  importance.

From the Publisher

The Great War of the Gods means nothing to the proud people on the mortal planet--until Akhran the Wandering God decrees the union of two mighty feuding clans. Though the families are fierce Warriors, they are few in number. Even the marriage of Khardan and Zohra is not enough to over power the strength of the invading army or prevent the imprisonment of their peoples. Now, with Khardan and Zohra mysteriously missing--seemingly cowards who hid from certain defeat--the two clans have lost all hope of ever again seeing their beloved open skies. But Prince Khardan and Princess Zohra, aided by the wizard Matthew, have been given another mission. . . a mission that at first seems less useful than counting the many grains of the desert sands, but soon proves to be of far more lasting importance.

Margaret Weis

Rose of the Prophet #03 - The Prophet of Akhran

Product Description

/Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman The Great War of the Gods comes to a close in the last volume of this series. The epic fantasy saga finds Khardin, Zohra, and the wizard Mathew faced with crossing a vast desert. If they survive, the nomads must combat the fiercest of warriors--.

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