Showing results by author "Stephen" in All Categories

Stephen A. Smith has never been handed anything, nor was he an overnight success. Growing up poor in Queens, the son of Caribbean immigrants and the youngest of six children, he was a sports-obsessed kid who faced struggles, from undiagnosed dyslexia to getting enough cereal to fill his bowl. As a basketball player at Winston-Salem State University, he got a glimmer of his true calling when he wrote a newspaper column arguing for the retirement of his own Hall of Fame coach, Clarence Gaines.

A collection of tales to invade and paralyse the mind as the safe light of day is infiltrated by the shadows of the night. As you listen, the clutching fingers of terror brush lightly across the nape of the neck, reach round from behind to clutch and lock themselves, white-knuckled, around the throat.This is the horror of ordinary people and everyday objects that become strangely altered; a world where nothing is ever quite what it seems, where the familiar and the friendly lure and deceive.

The Earth lies shaken in the aftermath of a conspiracy. Some of the smartest minds on the planet have striven for and died in an effort to scour the skies of four vast alien satellites, but their success has brought a terrible vengeance down upon us. While alien agents stalk the Earth, a team of exhausted scientists and military outcasts struggle to fight them among a planet on the brink - the brink of plague, the brink of war, and the brink of an invasion larger than they can possibly imagine. But they have allies.

When a well-connected and wealthy banker is found dead in his luxury car in the middle of Cardiff, the motive for the crime seems clear. The killer even left a note telling the world the man deserved to die, simply for his greed. But despite the obvious clues, seasoned detective, John Marco has his doubts that this was just a disgruntled employee. Marco also has a gut feeling that the family of the victim are hiding something.

Piloted by a six-year-old girl, the godlike Skalm guards the Districts of TASC. Her family is long dead. Her adopted father is a synthetic copy of an alien, her nanny an artificial mind connected via subspace to every part of the globe, feeding the young girl information, finding prey to satiate her growing thirst. But the young girl is an innocent, a victim, one of millions the war has already claimed. Her innocence has been sacrificed by a man with singular purpose: a man who will stop at nothing in order to prepare Earth for the coming conflict.

Wentworth, Ohio: a small, friendly town where the Carver children bicker over sweets in the E-Z shop and writer Johnny Marinville is the only resident who minds his own business. On Poplar Street, apart from the impending storm, it's just a normal summer's day - with Frisbees flying, lawn mowers humming and barbeques grilling. As the paperboy makes his round, he is unaware of the chrome-red van idling up the hill....

Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories is a brilliant collection of short stories, personally chosen by Andrea Camilleri, following Inspector Montalbano from his very first case in Vigàta, in which he stumbles upon a young girl lurking outside a courthouse with a pistol in her handbag. When she is taken in for questioning and won't utter a single word, Montalbano must find another way to learn whom she is trying to kill and why.

Welsh Inspector Ian Drake is back on duty, but struggles as he comes to terms with his father’s death. When a fisherman is found impaled on the sand in a small island community, Drake comes up against a wall of silence. When a young girl is killed, Drake is stumped by the motive for her death. But with lots of money at stake with the development of a nearby nuclear power station, Drake believes there are powerful forces at work.

"You're a firestarter honey.... just one big zippo lighter." A year ago, he was an upstanding instructor of English at Harrison State College. Now Andy is on the run with his daughter, a pigtailed girl named Charlie. A girl with an unimaginably terrifying gift. A gift which could be useful to corrupt authorities. Soon Charlie will be caught up in the menace of a fateful drug experiment and a sinister government ploy….

'I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger....' writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up '1922', the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerising tales from Stephen King, linked by the theme of retribution. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife Arlette proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

Supernatural detective Jack Nightingale has always dealt with unusual - and dangerous - cases. When a serial killer starts killing victims using Witchfinder methods of execution, Nightingale is asked to help. As the body count mounts, Nightingale realises that the killer is on a mission of revenge for acts committed 400 years ago. And he and his assistant Jenny McLean are both on the killer's hit list.

When Galileo looked to the sky with his perspicillum, or spyglass, roughly 400 years ago, he could not have fathomed the amount of change his astonishing findings a seemingly flat moon magically transformed into a dynamic, crater-filled orb and a large, black sky suddenly held millions of galaxies would have on civilizations.

From the Audie-nominated narrator of The Martian. In eleven years time, a million members of an alien race will arrive at Earth. Years before they enter orbit, their approach will be announced by the flare of a thousand flames in the sky, their ships' huge engines burning hard to slow them from the vast speeds needed to cross interstellar space. These foreboding lights will shine in our night sky like new stars, getting ever brighter until they outshine even the sun, casting ominous shadows and banishing the night until they suddenly blink out.

The name on the covers was Bachman. But the imagination could only belong to one man: Stephen King. 'Thinner' - the old gypsy man barely whispers the word. Billy feels the touch of a withered hand on his cheek. Billy Halleck, prosperous if overweight citizen, happily married, shuddered then turned angrily away. The old woman's death had been none of his fault. The courts had cleared him. She'd just stumbled in front of his car.

By the time he was six years old, Stephen Matthews had been bombarded by the Luftwaffe and deported from occupied Guernsey along with his family to a prison camp in the heart of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. He had seen men die in front of him and walked with Jews straight off the cattle-trucks from Bergen-Belsen. He had nearly drowned, been menaced by Alsatian guard dogs, beaten by a member of the SS, stranded in a minefield and had his hand broken by a German guard for attempting to feed Russian prisoners.

When Kellan’s band gains stardom, Kiera and Kellan’s relationship is put to the ultimate test. Can their love for each other withstand the constant pressure of superstardom? The friendships they’ve formed, the new family they’ve found, and the history they’ve forged will all play a part in helping them navigate the turbulent waters of the band’s exploding popularity. A greedy executive hell-bent on success, a declining pop star looking for an edge, and a media circus that twists lies into truths are just some of the obstacles the lovers will have to overcome if they are going to remain together.

In the north, the collapsed section of the Wall is defended only by the decimated remains of 2 PARA. Even reinforced by Jameson and the exhausted Royal Marines of One Troop, it's a doomed delaying action at best - and the last choke point in the entire ZA faces an incoming tide of dead stretching to the ends of the Earth. Meanwhile, hunkered down at CentCom, the unified ranks of our heroes, led by Ali and Fick, work furiously to fortify and reinforce what will be humanity's final fallback position - forever.

Steve Regan is back, and this time, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Tasked with posing as a hitman to take down a liberal Australian politician, Regan quickly realizes his “last assignment” is just the beginning. What starts as a murder-for-hire case spirals into the discovery of a sinister white supremacist plot with global implications—one that could topple the UK government.

Based on the breakthrough understanding that virtually all headaches are forms of migraine—because migraine is not a specific type of headache, but the built-in mechanism that causes headaches of all kinds, along with neck stiffness, sinus congestion, dizziness, and other problems—Dr. Buchholz’s Heal Your Headache offers a simple, transforming program.

When high school senior Charlotte agrees to babysit the Wilbanks twins, she plans to put the six-year-olds to bed early and spend a quiet night studying: the SATs are tomorrow, and checking the Native American/Alaskan Native box on all the forms won't help if she chokes on test day. But tomorrow is also Halloween, and the twins are eager to show off their costumes.