Showing results by narrator "Chelsea Stephens" in All Categories

If you can’t play nice, play hockey. Canadian goalie Maisy Goode is wary of American Jen Donato and her dirty playing. She’s been on the receiving end of Jen’s aggressive style and doesn’t like it one bit. Now that they’re on the same women’s pro team, keeping her eyes off Jen is a struggle.

When their hopes for ending Moquoia's brutal system of bondage are crushed, unlikely allies Lark and Veran are forced to flee into the harsh desert. With no weapons or horses, they must make their way to safety across the 50-mile expanse of waterless plains known as the water scrape. It is an odyssey filled with unexpected dangers that challenge even a skilled outlaw like Lark - though the farther they travel, the more she wonders if she even fits the fearsome title of the Sunshield Bandit anymore.

Since freeing our elemental powers, my siblings and I have been attacked, threatened, heckled, and told our entire life has been a massive magical cover-up. We are orphans of the decimated elemental kingdoms of the Fae Realm. The learning curve of our new lives has been butt-kickingly steep and all the things I thought I knew for sure . . . I didn't. Seelie warriors, amorous trolls, hellhounds, and a hunky fire guy with too many secrets. How's a girl to find her footing?

When Bakkali insisted I take a month off to rest and regroup before joining The Guild of the Laurentians, I had my doubts. Being away from police work has been tough, so when an end of summer celebration takes a disastrous turn, I'm eager to unravel the mystery. One thing is for certain—something is in the water. With multiple fatalities, injuries, and missing persons, my siblings and I set out to uncover what happened at Clock Tower Beach.

In the wake of a deadly attack, veteran demon hunter Karian Vanador faces a daunting task: Sending her friends and family into danger without being at their side. With her pregnancy progressing, she must uncover a spy within her own Order, expose servants of the demon kings living right in her home city, and match wits with enemies that she knows little, if anything, about. And in all of this, she must act as a general, putting the lives of her friends and family at risk to see to an end she can't accomplish herself.

Paramedic Maya Talbot assumes her children to be safe at Grandma's. However, nothing could have prepared her for the chaos created when a strange obelisk rises from the ground and generates an impenetrable dome over the city. Riots, looting, and violence run rampant. The situation in Nashville deteriorates, and then they arrive, thrusting Maya into a desperate race to escape the dome and save her children from the dangers on the ground and from above. When darkness falls, the intergalactic visitors manifest our worst fears and threaten the future of humankind.

Art-history student Zelda Richardson is working at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam on an exhibition of bis poles from the Asmat region of Papua - the same area where a famous American anthropologist disappeared in 1962. When his journal is found inside one of the bis poles, Zelda is tasked with finding out more about the man's last days and his connection to these ritual objects. Join Zelda as she grapples with the anthropologist's mysterious disappearance 50 years earlier and a present-day murderer who will do anything to prevent her from discovering the truth.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.

To Charles Fort, with Love is award-winning fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan’s third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe. A deceptively even dozen, this collection includes Kiernan’s celebrated stories “Onion” and “Andromeda Among the Stones”, as well as a number of more obscure pieces.

Forest, North Carolina. Under the instruction of enigmatic Professor Joe Lyons, five graduate students are studying the tedious science behind the acts of lying. But discovering the secrets of deception isn't making any of the students more honest though. Instead, it's making it easier for them to guard their own secrets—and they all have something to hide. When a test goes awry and one of them is found dead, the students find themselves trapped by a snowstorm on an abandoned campus with a local detective on the case.

Time has run out for Maya and her children. The alien invasion has created hell on earth, and the creatures are determined to destroy humankind. But a chance discovery leads to a glimmer of hope. Maya must mobilize before it’s too late, risking a daring move that could end her life and life on the planet as we know it. Encounter is the new post-apocalyptic thriller from best-selling authors, J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon, the third book in the War for Earth trilogy.

These seventeen tales take listeners into the uniquely twisted mind of “one of Canada’s most promising new horror writers” (Publishers Weekly). From a live necrophilia show starring reanimated corpses to a confrontation between a security guard and inhuman squatters, from who can be found at an all-night laundromat to what lies in wait at the bottom of the sea, from undead addictions to all-consuming obsessions, Kissing Carrion is “a journey through some of the most beautifully rendered visions of darkness and death to be published this past year."

As a child, Angela Mathers was the victim of a top-secret experimental program that implanted neural chips in children to correct disorders and enhance intelligence. Shunned by society, she, and others like her were locked away in camps. Now an adult Luman, she is both brilliant and calculating. Her quest for redemption brings her to DC, where she works to get a government bill that would free the Lumans passed into law.

As the web of deceit and lies widens, Karian Vanador must try to find allies - however unlikely - to combat the enemies of the Demonhunter Order. Effectively forced into a visit to the volatile King S'Bakthra, Kari must try to match wits with a being over 12,000 years old. Can she turn an enemy into an unwitting ally, without having the same done to her? This is to say nothing of Kari's testing to become her deity's avatar. An age-old enemy comes back into Kari's life, forcing her to walk away from an ailing husband and young children to see to her god's wishes.

Kidnapped from their honeymoon resort, nothing is as it seems. Betrayal, intrigue, and secrets abound as Sadie works to free the captive women. Will she end up the savior or the next captive? With Patrick the only solid ground in a sea of uncertainty, the two of them must work to come together, or they'll fall apart. Pressure builds from all sides, and they must choose—to assume the royal mantle or the path of freedom and anonymity. Old friends and temporary allies abound, but only one thing is certain: someone's lying.

With the world in chaos and the aliens swarming the domed city of Nashville, Maya Talbot continues on her quest to find her children while destruction rains down from above - the aliens have arrived and the invasion has begun. With a crew of unlikely allies and a mother's incredible determination, she must find her kids and get to safety before it's too late. But what if Maya can't outrun the alien invaders, and what if there isn't anywhere left for the survivors to hide? The race is on and the clock is ticking because the aliens seem bent on annihilating the human race and destroying the planet.

Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These "ugly freedoms" legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations, often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual, but that provide sources of emancipatory potential.

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan’s 14th collection of short fiction, comprising 28 uncollected and impossible-to-find stories. Here are 28 tales of apocalypse and rebirth, of miraculous transformation and utter annihilation. Here is the place where professing your undying devotion might be precisely the same thing as signing your own death warrant or worse.

In The Dinosaur Tourist, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s 15th collection of short fiction, 19 tales of the unexpected and the uncanny explore that treacherous gulf between what we suppose the world to be and what might actually be waiting out beyond the edges of our day-to-day experience. A mirror may be a window into another time. A cat may be our salvation. Your lover may be a fabulous being. And a hitchhiker may turn out to be anyone at all.

Crystal was born of a bloodline both mortal and magical, raised to one day become a wizard and to defeat a long-hidden evil that threatened the realm of Ardhan. Through many dangerous adventures and lethal deceptions, she was finally victorious. And peace was at hand. Yet it was not so for Crystal. As the last living wizard, she soon found herself living a life without meaning. For while the people of Ardhan prospered in the world she had delivered, Crystal—with her still-growing powers—could find little solace. She was alone.