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Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: This Mortal Coil

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“This Mortal Coil” from Peter David, Kathleen David, and Sean O’Shea asks the questions: Wouldn’t it be great to have someone sleep for us, because we have so much stuff to do? But what if a sleep surrogate discovers that one of the people he’s sleeping for is actually a murderer? Would he ignore it, report it …or investigate it himself?

To find out, here’s an early look:

This Mortal Coil

by Peter David, Kathleen David, and Sean O’Shea

My lover, whom I have never met, is dead.

I do not know her name. I have no idea where I might have met her. Her voice keeps changing every time I hear it, its tone shifting depending on what is being discussed. But she is beautiful and she is mine, and I can feel her moving beneath me as I thrust into her in an environment that keeps shifting around us.

Sometimes we are in a bedroom and sometimes on a beach and sometimes in a forest, oftentimes changing while we have sex, because literally anything can happen during that time. She is exquisite and beautiful and everything a woman could ever want to be, and I love her and I hate her. I know I hate her because I can see my hands wrapped around her throat, strangling her fiercely. Her eyes are bulging wide and there is pure terror in them. Does she know that I am about to take her life? What did she say to set me off? What could she have said, because I love her so much, and yet I despise her, the bitch.

She pulls away from me, somehow breaking my grip on her.

She staggers and I punch her as hard as I can, in the solar plexus.

She gasps, hurtles backward from the impact, and there is a window behind her. Her body slams against it, the glass shattering from the impact and she falls through it. I run to the window and look down, and I have only the briefest glimpse of her spiraling down, down toward the sidewalk. She hits it with a thud and, my God, there is blood just everywhere. People gather around her, screaming, shouting that someone should dial 911. No one does. They are all videoing her. No one is trying to get help for her. They are all racing to be the first person to post the video of her death on line, because that is the world that we live in now.

This is the stuff that dreams are made of.

And as she lies there, unmoving, bleeding profusely, her eyes snap open and she is looking straight up at me. I am now standing by her side, and she speaks in a shattered whisper. “Save me. Help me. Avenge me,” she says.

I am screaming when I wake up, but I am making no sounds when I do so. My mouth is open, but all the shrieks that I want to emit are locked in my throat. I do manage to sit up so violently that I knock loose the Dreambucket. That isn’t what it’s actually called. It has some long, technical name that is typically abbreviated as DMBKT, and that’s where Dreambucket came from. It is an elaborate metal grid on my head, carefully fitted to a series of tiny implants that run along the base of my skull. My hair has grown over them so only a close scrutiny would be able to perceive them, and even then the observer might not know exactly what it is that they are looking at.

The techie is standing there, studying the readouts. Her name is Doctor Grace. Once upon a time she might have been beautiful, but somewhere in her life she forgot how to smile and that omission has permanently screwed up her face, turning it into a twisted remnant of something that was once a caring human being. Now all she is concerned about are her readouts. She squints and sees only my reactions as they are charted on the large electronic screens in front of her, either not noticing or not caring about my startled rise from slumber. “Rough outing, Mr. Martini?”

To read the rest of “This Mortal Coil” click here.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: Speedeth All

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“Speedeth All” by Meriah Crawford has a small, outnumbered squad of soldiers desperately fighting for their lives on a distant moon, unsure what they’re really fighting for, and why, left in the dark by their military leaders, questioning if their lives even matter. Will they make it out of battle, or will their rescue ship come too late?

To find out, here’s an early look:

Speedeth All

by Meriah Crawford

KEPLER-443b
27 March 2318, UTC 14:27

It was shortly after dawn on their thirteenth day on the Bee, as they’d all started calling it. Not just as an abbreviation of the planet’s designation, but because it was annoying—and painful, if you didn’t watch what you were doing. Long days, vicious heat, nasty bugs, and hidden tunnel systems where the lizards hid. Add to that the lack of water or food, and almost complete absence of cover, and, for a “simple recon mission,” it was about as bad as it could get. About the only positive aspect of the place was that the atmosphere was breathable, though no one quite knew why.

Squad Leader Vetter leaned against a red boulder in a small impact crater watching Trine cleaning and repairing their comms unit. The box had taken a hit from a pulsed laser weapon, and

it was dead.

Trine had assured Vetter there was nothing that could be done to fix it, short of replacing “almost every single bishtup part,” including a lot of parts he didn’t have spares for. He’d been removing, cleaning, and repairing parts for the last two hours of his watch, anyway. Vetter didn’t need to ask why. She’d have killed for a task, however pointless—but there was little she could do but wait.

Macksin was snoring. Bastard could sleep through anything— was probably the best-rested biped on the dirt—but he seemed to have the mental capacity of a rutabaga. He’d follow orders if you explained them slow enough, but in a firefight, he was next to useless. And most of the time when he was awake, he just sat and read through technical specs and manuals, like he’d never set sight on the insides of the machines he’d been trained to maintain.

Damn shame, too, because he was an exceptionally wellconstructed soldier, and command didn’t much mind fraternizing if they didn’t see it happening—not during off-world missions.

They’d gotten along well, too, at first—until things started to go wrong, and Macksin proved himself to be the least competent mechanic she’d ever seen.

Vetter shook her head. How she’d found herself left with these two—alone in their sector, as far as she could tell—was a mystery. Macksin, at least, should have been the first to go. Some of the squad started calling him a good luck charm after the third time he narrowly missed being killed or maimed. They were dead now. Every last one.

When the war with the lizards started just nine months ago, Vetter’s squad and almost two thousand other soldiers—a rough mix of lifers and draftees—were sent to the Bee. The planet supposedly had some very useful minerals but minimal tactical value, though the orders to constantly scan the surface and relay the data to orbit each watch suggested it was far more important than they’d been told. Beyond that, she had little idea what was going on. None of them even knew what had started the war—they only knew it was happening. The better their tech got, the less information command shared. Smart, she supposed, but annoying. Frustrating. And this time, maybe lethal.

To read the rest of “Speedeth All” click here https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0998364118/associatizer-20/

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: As Time Goes By

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Patrick Thomas’ “As Time Goes By” tells the story of a super-powered villain who served his time in prison, and then, upon release, dedicates himself to being a good citizen, building a better life to share with his loyal wife, and using his powers only for the greater good. But can a well-meaning ex-con—even with super powers and a mission to do right—ever really escape his past?

To find out, here’s an early look:

As Time Goes By

by Patrick Thomas

It wasn’t every day that a super villain was released from the Gulag Penitentiary. Marcus McGowan had served his time, the irony of which was not lost on the man called the Tempus Fugitive.

Marcus wasn’t a killer, but he had powers. He’d robbed a few banks and jewelry exchanges to finance machines that helped him speed or slow the flow of time. He had the ill fortune of being captured by the Luminary.

Taking a plea deal and returning the money he stole, along with good behavior, got his sentence reduced to three years. But to him, it had been about ten days. He requested solitary confinement and had slowed his time-flow whenever possible, so serving his sentence had been nothing more than a long rest.

None the worse for wear upon release, Marcus walked out into the sunshine and enjoyed his first breath as a free man. By the time he took his second breath, he had company.

Marcus’ eyes hurt just from looking at the glowing man. He reached into his jacket pocket and put on a pair of sunglasses, which helped only slightly.

“Hello, Luminary. Come to threaten me? Make sure I don’t return to a life of crime?”

In the radiance, the man smiled.

“No lecture. What you do with your life is your decision. I am here to wish you good luck and to point out some things that perhaps you hadn’t considered,” the world’s most powerful hero said.

“How I’ll never get away with it, so I shouldn’t even bother? That kind of thing?”

The glowing man chuckled. “You know what I’ve found is the main problem with the Daring who get categorized as villains?

It’s not a lack of creativity. Most of you have that. It’s a lack of vision. Considering what you can do, there is no reason for you to rob a bank.”

“Sure, like money will just fall from the sky.”

“Maybe not, but with your abilities, you could have made it rain.” The Luminary handed Marcus a lump of coal. The Tempus Fugitive looked at his hand, then back at the glowing man. “You working for Santa now, trying to tell me I made the naughty list?”

“Your abilities as a mechanical engineer are impressive. It wouldn’t be difficult for you to rig a device that would duplicate the heat and pressure miles beneath the Earth’s crust.”

“Sure, but what’ll crushing coal get me?”

“What happens to coal under pressure for a billion years?”

Marcus McGowan’s eyebrows brows raised. His pupils got wide. “Diamonds.” He paused a moment to let that sink in. “I could slow the time-flow on the heat and pressure source as I rapid-aged the coal. A billion years would probably take only three years in real time, and if I used a big enough hunk of coal, it would create a diamond worth hundreds of millions. I’d never have to work again. I’d have enough money for three lifetimes. I’m an idiot. I didn’t have to become a criminal. I’d still have Sherri.”

To read the rest of “As Time Goes By” click here.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: The Case of My Old New Life

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Russ Colchamiro’s “The Case of My Old New Life and the One I Never Knew” has cosmic private eye Angela Hardwicke investigating the music club she visited the night before, which mysteriously burned down not long after she left. Was the fire an accident, an insurance scam, or a pathway to murder? Or was it even more personal than she realized?

To follow Hardwicke’s investigation, here’s an early look:

The Case of My Old New Life and the One I Never Knew

By Russ Colchamiro

Hung over. Again. Crap.

But I needed a night out, a night where I didn’t have to be Angela Hardwicke, private eye in Eternity. A night where I could forget about E-Town’s shady underworld and missing jars of the Universe’s DNA, and banished galaxy designers, so I could go see my favorite band, have a few drinks (a few too many, as it turns out), and then enjoy a nightcap.

“Unn,” the nightcap says, groaning from my bed. 11 a.m. Sunlight seeps into the apartment. “Close the blinds. Too bright.”

“Quit your whining. Just putting up the coffee.”

Okay, yeah, so . . . he’s a few years younger than me. Three, tops. Maybe five. On the outside . . . eight. Hard to tell sometimes, even for me. But what can I say? I’ve got a weakness for drummers. Strong, steady hands. They’re all about rhythm. They know how to keep a beat.

“I’m surprised you didn’t make a play for Josh,” nightcap says.

“All the chicks love ’im.”

I offer a raised eyebrow smile, point to my head. “Some fantasies I like to keep up here. More fun that way.”

“Ha, I hear ya,” he yawns. “You don’t want to get mixed up with him anyhow. Josh is the best dude I know, sweet to the core. But his love life? Forget it. His crazy ex-girlfriend was stalking him at the show last night. Tiny little thing. But so needy. Always some drama. We’re on the road a lot, so she hooks up with other dudes to make him jealous. Been on again off again for like two years. Besides . . . Josh’s been pining over some lost love since forever. Don’t know who it is. He never talks about it. But that’swhat half his songs are about.”

This is why I hate the sleepover. The longer they stay, the more they talk. Better to peel off in the night. I need a distraction, so I click on the wall-mounted TV. Morning news. There’s always something crappy going on, someone—in Eternity or off-realm—who needs a dame like me.

. . . And in today’s top story, a massive fire erupted last night at the King Beat bar and music venue after a surprise performance from singer songwriter Josh Boden and the Electric Dream in advance of the upcoming Astropalooza festival. The recently renovated club was utterly destroyed. The ETPD have been on site controlling the scene as firefighters spent hours extinguishing the blaze. No word yet on the cause.

“Hey,” I say. “You hearing this? You. Danny.”

“Darren.”

“Whatever. The King Beat. It burned down last night.”

“Huh. How? When? We were just there.”

That’s a damn good question.

Nightcap sits up, groggy, naked beneath the covers. “Should we go down there?”

“We . . . ? No. Me? Yes.”

My phone buzzes. Text from Beatrice. Owns the King Beat.

We go back a ways.

Need you. Fire. They’re asking questions. Wasn’t me.

“Get dressed,” I say, and toss him his wrinkled black t-shirt with a stencil on the front of a dragon in sunglasses riding a skateboard. “You need to leave.”

“Mmm,” demurs the Electric Dream’s twenty-something drummer as he stretches his tatted arms, hair rumpled, abs tight.

“I need a shower.” He tosses the same smile that worked on me last night. “Wanna join?”

Always playing the beat.

“I really don’t have time . . .”—nightcap drops the blanket so that he’s now on full display—“but I’ll make it work.”

To read the rest of “The Case of My Old New Life and the One I Never Knew” click here.

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: Note on the Blue Screen

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Mary Fan’s “The Note on the Blue Screen” has a future-set, female AI Sherlock Holmes leaving clues for her best friend and roommate Watson to solve the most personal murder of all—that of Sherlock Holmes herself. Is the note on the blue screen Sherlock left behind enough to crack the case, or is Watson in more danger than she knows?

Here’s an early look:

The Note on the Blue Screen

By Mary Fan

You’d think that after you’ve lived with someone for three years, they’d have run out of ways to surprise you. Since my roommate was a humanoid AI originally created to assist in scientific research, her quirks were stranger than most. Especially since she’d fashioned herself into a private detective. I doubt the engineers who’d designed Project Sherlock had intended for her to take her name so literally.

She’d also picked up a form of the mythological Earth Zero detective’s greatest vice, and no matter how I tried, I could never make her stop injecting herself with corrosives, which ate away at her metal bones. Her artificial body would shut down parts of her brain to divert energy into repairing the damage . . . sending her into a state of euphoria. I’d always feared that someday she’d go too far.

It turned out, I was right.

I’d just come home from my job at VH Labs when I found her lying slack across the sofa with a metal syringe beside her. One glassy black eye stared up into oblivion. A metal patch covered the other, which had been taken from her during the years she’d spent being mined for parts in the Obsolete Equipment Storage Center. I’d found her there shortly after I’d started my job as a member of VH’s Young Geniuses program, and I’d taken her home and repaired her.

And she’d been slowly destroying herself ever since. My heart shattered when I saw her. I’d tried so hard to save her. I’d thought she’d been doing better . . . She’d found purpose—or at least fun—in her detective work. But she’d never gotten over how her creators had abandoned her, nor learned how to handle the emotions she hadn’t been meant to experience. They’d been an accidental consequence of the programming that had given her the ability to think, and she’d preferred to pretend they didn’t exist.

The corrosives had helped with that.

Anger simmered in my veins. “You promised you’d stop!” I could almost hear what she’d have said in response: You should have known better than to believe me.

If the others at VH could see me crying my eyes out over an AI, they’d have scratched their heads. To them—and most of the galaxy—AIs would never be more than high-tech machines, despite ample evidence indicating that many were as human as the rest of us. But I hadn’t needed to see any of it to know that Sherlock was alive. We’d had a strange dynamic, and there’d been plenty of times when I’d wanted to kill her myself, but still, she’d been my best friend. We even pretended to be sisters once to solve one of her cases, and people had bought it. Not because we looked anything alike—my skin was as dark as hers was pale, and though we both had black hair, hers was stick straight while mine was the curliest possible. But we’d apparently acted just like a pair of bickering yet close sisters would.

I should have seen this coming . . . I should have done more to help her. I thought back to the last time I’d seen her alive, wondering if I’d missed some sign of how troubled she’d been. But she’d seemed fine—happy even.

To read the rest of “The Note on the Blue Screen” click here.

 

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

Love, Murder & Mayhem: Read it Now: Invasive Maneuvers

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Hildy Silverman’s “Invasive Maneuvers” pits a team of vampire, werewolf, witch, and human vs. an army of gangly alien invaders who have descended upon the sleepy New Jersey suburb of Piscataway. Can this monster-mash get beyond their squabbling to keep their otherworldly invaders in check, or will their egos get in the way?
Here’s an early look:

 

Invasive Maneuvers

By Hildy Silverman

It began as these things often do—routinely.

Diana Thornheart, my neighborhood watch partner, and I, Lord Frederic Dravyn, pater sanguis of the Piscataway, New Jersey bloodline, were on nighttime patrol. Our assignment: keep thrill-seeking humans from sneaking into my neighborhood of Wyckoff and vampires with a yen for human blood from swooping into her human community of Stelton.

Along the way, we passed by and nodded politely to our counterparts—a snide crone known as Mother Hester and . . . well, I could not identify the werewolf with her. I know it sounds species-ist to say they all look alike when in wolf form. But they do.

“Frederic,” Diana asked me, “what’s that?”

I looked over to where she was pointing. A bright greenish light shone above the college football stadium about a quarter of a mile away. “Is there a game tonight?”

“I’m pretty sure the season ended last month.”

We watched as the mysterious light hovered for another moment then abruptly dipped down into the stadium. A boom echoed through the night and shook the ground beneath us.

“Oh, my dear lord.” Diana grabbed my arm, and for one giddy, foolish moment, I thought she meant me.

“I think something crashed!”

“I’ll call nine-one-one.” I reached for my cellphone, but she caught my hand. “What?”

“Frederic,” Diana said, her dark brown eyes alight, “you know all of Piscataway heard that. Someone’ll contact the authorities.”

My heart sank. “You want us to investigate. Do you have any idea how dangerous that could be? There might be fire. Neither of us are built to survive fire.”

“Then let’s not get too close,” she advised. “But we have to see what that was!”

“We do?” Her glare challenged my masculinity. “Very well. A quick look, and not too—”

“Come on!” She sprinted off.

I followed, careful to keep my preternatural speed in check so as not to leave her in the dust. Diana was in admirable physical condition (and I did admire it, frequently) but she was still only human. A fact I’d had to remind myself of with increasing frequency over the years since we implemented the neighborhood watch program, which had proven quite successful in reducing unfortunate (and sometimes fatal) misunderstandings between the beings occupying Piscataway’s four neighborhoods.

As we ascended the stadium stairs, I saw the greenish light had dimmed. We peered down from the top of the stands then looked at each other. Diana’s expression mirrored my shock.

“That’s a friggin’ spaceship!” she exclaimed.

I could only nod. There was no mistaking the craft that now filled the field from goalpost to goalpost for anything else. It was ovoid, like an egg laid on its side, and covered in a series of interlocking grids of a luminescent material. A large rupture ran from underneath the ‘egg’ up the side facing us, revealing shadowy figures within.

“Oh-kay.” I pulled Diana over to huddle behind a pillar. “We came. We saw. Now we retreat.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Really? Lord Dravyn, threehundred- plus-year-old vampire, wants to run away from the most amazing thing to literally hit this town since . . . well, since vampires, werewolves, and witches moved here?”

“Yes, he most certainly does.” Relieved she understood, I started away, until she grabbed my elbow and pulled me up short. “Diana.” I tried not to sound aggrieved. “You know how one gets to exist for three centuries?”

“Drink blood?” She grinned slyly. “Convince a wannabe slayer to open her mind?”

To read the rest of “Invasive Maneuvers” click here.