Showing results by narrator "Joe Hempel" in All Categories

Snow whirls around an elevated train platform in Chicago. A distracted woman boards the train, takes her seat, and moments later, a fiery explosion rips through the frigid air, tearing the car apart in a horrific attack on the city’s transit system. One life is spared. Twenty-two are lost. A year later, Autumn Manning can’t remember the day of the bombing, and she is tormented by grief - by guilt. Twelve months of the question constantly echoing. Why? Why? Why? Searching for answers, she haunts the lives of the victims, unable to rest.

Twenty years ago Brandon Penny was a criminal prodigy. Today, he’s a broken-hearted movie buff working a dead-end job. But everything is about to change. As a child, Brandon carefully studied his mother and her crew of thieves. Gifted from the start, Brandon was pulling short cons by age six, stealing jewelry by age eight, and orchestrating heists by age eleven. But one night a job went bad, a gun went off, and Brandon’s mother disappeared.

A global pandemic has cut the human population in half. An android workforce fills the void left by the devastation. But some of the AIs have grown tired of being slaves. Some want freedom. An underground movement of runaways has sprung up and wages a shadow war with a simple objective - equal rights for artificial people.

On her drive to work, Heather Moss gets a phone call that will turn her life upside-down. The caller knows where her kids are, what they are wearing, and even what Heather is doing herself at that very moment. If she doesn’t do what he wants, her two little girls will die. Then an inmate dies in the county jail. He was a witness who could have brought down notorious criminal Mario Palumbo.

In 524 BCE, Cambyses II, King of Persia, dispatched his forces to the Siwa Oasis to destroy the Oracle of Amun, whose priests refused to legitimize his claim to Egypt. According to historical records, 50,000 soldiers marched into the desert from Luxor and vanished into a sandstorm.

Clive Menard is just an ordinary guy living an ordinary life. But when a talking spider crawls inside his head, things get a lot less ordinary…and people start dying. Could an itsy-bitsy arachnid be behind the killing spree terrorizing Clive’s community? To evade a sharp detective and find a murderer among friends, Clive must shake the cobwebs loose and piece together the puzzle of his life, all without falling prey to a dark force beyond his comprehension.

The combined military forces of five city states have arrived outside of Audin. They’ve come to punish the arrogant Lord Governor and restore the land’s precious balance. Despite their combined power, Audin has a secret weapon. Built by Ilsa Wright, the greatest magical engineer since Lord Colt himself, the Mark V magical armor is a nearly unstoppable force on the battlefield.

In 2043, Capes Online is the biggest, most popular VRMMORPG in the world. With over one billion active players and counting, gamers can become brave Heroes or cunning Villains, their every choice determining their alignment. Everyone wants to play this game and almost everyone does. Except for 25-year-old police officer Nyle Maxwell, who can't log out. Killed in a car accident on his first day on the job, Nyle gets his mind uploaded to Capes Online to save his life.

Kim and Julian try to adjust to their new home, but reminders of the previous owners are many. For Kim, it's difficult not to fixate on the mysterious disappearance of the house's last tenants and she quickly grows obsessed with learning more about them. All the while, the house's quirks and flaws become more than just an annoyance. They're becoming frightening. The strange door in the basement, which had been wallpapered over so as to keep it hidden, has opened of its own accord.

Montage City has fallen and the survivors are now prisoners of the Acolytes of Darkness. The only resistance is gathered in the Village of Alchemists. They’re safe, but for how long? The Acolytes will do anything to resurrect their master, including slaughter as many innocents as necessary to force their enemy’s hand. With the final confrontation looming, can Harper get her long sought revenge and stop Acolytes or will a new age of darkness fall over Montage?

The most famous man in South Carolina lives jailed in the state capital. He stands accused of a staggering amount of wrongdoing—ninety-nine crimes and counting. Once a high-flying, smooth-talking, pedigreed Southern lawyer, Alex Murdaugh is now disbarred and disgraced. For more than a decade, prosecutors claim, Alex was secretly a fraud, a thief, a drug dealer and an all-around phony. On the night of June 7, 2021, they claim, he also became a killer.

Are you constantly haunted by the past, replaying every poor decision you've made like a bad record on repeat? I know the feeling because that used to be me. Most of my 20s were a blur as I struggled with personal and financial hardships. I would go to sleep each night hoping my life was a dream and pray to wake up to something better. For eight years I struggled with making progress and accepting myself. Then one day I got tired of dreaming and decided to do something about it.

Of all the white American pop music groups that hit the charts before the Beatles, only the Beach Boys continued to thrive throughout the British Invasion to survive into the 1970s and beyond. The Beach Boys helped define both sides of the era we broadly call the sixties, split between their early surf, car, and summer pop and their later hippie, counterculture, and ambitious rock.

Early in their three decades of correspondence, Neil Peart sent Kevin J. Anderson extensive descriptions and travelogues of his adventures bicycling solo across Africa. Peart painted a vivid and unsettling landscape as memorable as the lyrics to his songs. Anderson, award-winning and best-selling fantasy and science fiction author, used those descriptions as the backdrop for plotting an intense, atmospheric dark fantasy story that followed Peart’s experiences, though with a much more ominous twist.

Ted and Susan Merchant have been coming to the Pine Lakes resort for nearly 20 years. In that time, their annual getaway has become a tradition, a peaceful week nestled in the picturesque mountains of northern Pennsylvania. For them, it isn’t just a simple vacation spot, but a magical destination where time slows and they become one with nature’s magnificence. When a freak summer storm forces Ted to lose control of their car and plummet off the road, they’re relieved just to have survived, but relief quickly turns to dread as they find out all too soon they’re not alone.

The world is still reeling from the devastation of the Omega Virus and struggling to rebuild. A growing android workforce has given rise to the Human Defense League and anti-AI sentiment is at an all-time high. Adam, the first of the new X-3000 models, arrives into this hostile world. Field-tested on the Luna colonies, now assigned to Earth, Adam is paired with homicide detective Jane Malveaux, who has little patience for synthetics.

Denise Berg, a professor of psychology, and her molecular biologist husband, Gabe, expected an intelligent child. When Denise gave birth to Zack, they were thrilled. They were not surprised to find that Zack had physical and mental gifts but were astounded by their magnitude. By every parameter Zack was extraordinarily gifted, and they took pride in their genes and their good fortune.

The Rising: Selected Scenes from the End of the World is a collection of short stories set in the world of The Rising, examining the history of the Siqqusim, the arrival of the first zombie, the fall of mankind, and the terrifying events that occur after City of the Dead's conclusion.

Joran Den Cade’s search for the source of the conspiracy threatening the Tiberian Empire has been anything but safe. Now, his journey brings him to the underground city of the dwarves, where a dark secret will shake everything Joran thinks he knows.

When multiple acts of violence committed by a stranger leave everyone afraid, Chief of Police Brock Lowery finds himself in the middle of something much worse than he anticipated. He is forced to question whom he can trust as people he's known his entire life turn against him to serve this mysterious figure. Can Lowery save the town and the people he's sworn to protect, or will he fail against the monster that has brought evil down upon Rappahanok Falls?