Showing results by author "John DeSain" in All Categories

Rael Armstrong is an apprentice to a hunter of the Order. Hunters have one mission in life: to vanquish evil beings from other planes of reality. Normally, it’s very exciting work, but Rael’s current mission feels a little on the dull side. She’s been tasked with watching a suspect, and that’s it—just watching. It is a dull task until an unlikely visitor shows up to talk with her suspect. It couldn’t hurt to do a little less watching and a lot more following of this visitor to see what he’s up to, right? Well, it wouldn’t hurt unless this visitor was something really ...

Rael wakes to find herself at an unexpected crossroads in her young life. She has come on vacation to Europe in hopes of forgetting about the past, including failing at the most critical thing in her life: skiing. Of course, at sixteen nearly everything can feel like the most important thing in your life at any moment. Still, Rael is pretty sure training for six years and losing her big race by a tenth of a second is the lowest possible point her life can reach. Well, she was sure of that—until she wakes up in a stone room, alone, bound by rope, and in the care of a vampire. A situation ...

Gus somehow won the church raffle. It was a miraculous feat given that he’d never entered it-the church or the raffle. He suddenly finds himself with two tickets to paradise and one of them premade out for Father Xavier. Paradise in this case being the Caribbean Island of Saint Hubbins. They’re joined at the hotel by two couples that appear to be engaged in a tangled web of extra-marital affairs with each other. Gus isn’t too interested in the affairs of others until one of them ends up dead. Another person is arrested by the local police for the crime. It’s not that Gus feels he ...

All Gus wanted to do was take a day trip up to the big city to get away from his constituents. However, some constituents are harder to avoid than others. He inadvertently bumps into Father Xavier while at an antique show. Neither this chance meeting or Gus’s appraisal are the worst thing to happen to the sheriff while out of town, because the other thing that’s hard for him to avoid is getting involved in a murder case. When one of the big winners at the antique show turns up dead it’s up to Gus to figure out who the murderer is. With the Father’s help, can Gus sort out the clues ...

Sheriff Gus gets exactly what he wants for his birthday: to be left alone. Sadly, this perfect gift doesn’t last for very long when his daughter surprises him with the rather odd present of twenty sessions with a sex therapist. After all, it’s not like he needs it or anything. But Gus decides to humor his daughter and pays a token visit to the doctor. The visits take on much greater meaning, however, when a sex maniac starts preying on the lonely residents in Gus’s rural county. Problems continue to multiply for the sheriff when he gets a call to jury duty, faces down the horrors of a...

Some people say that it’s a demon-haunted world. That certainly is true in Gus’s county around Halloween, mostly due to the digital demons plaguing Gus this year that live inside the new Pakiman game. There’s also a fancy Halloween party to deal with, to which everyone who is someone is invited—and that includes Gus. If getting a costume for a party he doesn’t want to go to was his worst problem, it would be a fun holiday season. Unfortunately, someone keels over dead in the free-cheese section of Fit Foods, and that opens the door to murder. That open door leads Gus right into ...

Rael is an apprentice to a hunter of the Order. Hunters have one mission in life, and that’s to vanquish evil beings from other planes of reality that want to conquer our plane—demons, devils, and the like. However, Rael’s current mission isn’t as difficult as all that. Rael and her mentor are in New York City with the goal of finding a few missing children. With not even a hint of demons around, how hard could that task be? It gets a touch more difficult when Rael herself is kidnapped. Her kidnappers don’t even desire a ransom in return for her; instead they want her to find ...

Sheriff Gus has a problem. Maximillian Sagan—robot owner and space entrepreneur—just informed the good officer a murderer is among the guests of his latest garden party. This poses a small problem—as far as Gus can tell, no one’s actually been murdered. Fortified with a stiff drink, a lesson on space economics, and the world’s most boring treatise on Greek philosophy, Gus sets out to uncover the killer. Or at least find a body. The situation becomes more urgent when Sagan perishes in an apparent collision with a chunk of falling space debris. Was Maximillian Sagan just incredibly ...

Spring is in the air. Gus is feeling pretty good about the change in seasons until an unknown man decides he would rather change from being alive to being dead. He clearly drank something toxic, and it didn’t agree with him. The question is, did he really decide to do that, or did someone make that decision for him. Only that question is buried under a lot of other layers of questions. Why did the man visit Gus a few days before his death proclaiming the end times were near? Why didn’t he take enough poison to kill him near instantly instead of lingering around for days slowly dying? ...

Gus returned from vacation to his small rural county wanting nothing else but to return to the dull routine of his everyday life as local sheriff. Unfortunately he returned home to find there is nothing dull or routine about the current situation of the county or his life; his daughter has returned from the West Coast with her lesbian fiancée in tow, a couple of rich environmentalist hipsters from the Make A Difference Foundation have moved into the county to annoy him with the idea of causes, a dandy state representative from up north has decided now is the best time to enact gun control ...

Gus is having one of the best things a man that works in law enforcement can have, a very slow day. His slow day only gets better when he discovers that an ice cream shop is opening near the law enforcement complex. Even though the ice cream shop only serves gelato, that’s not enough to spoil his good mood on this slow day. The only real way his slow day could get ruined was if someone mysteriously dropped dead in the yoga studio across the street from the ice cream shop while at nearly the same time Father Xavier volunteered him to speak at the weekly Tuesday prayer breakfast at town ...

Gus suspected Father Xavier asked him out for Thanksgiving dinner for more than just the friendly company. When you’re the sheriff of a small county you learn quickly that people only put on airs of wanting to be with you out of friendship. Typically instead these people think they’ve spotted a crime that they want you to deal with. The father suspects something rotten is in the air concerning a holiday family reunion involving the daughter of a once rich rancher, her famous author older brother, and her less than famous younger brother, the loan writer from Santa Fe. Gus isn’t one to...

It’s the hottest heat wave of the summer and Gus’s air conditioner has decided to give up the ghost. It’s not the heat keeping Gus awake at night, though, but a nighttime visit from Father Xavier. He couldn’t sleep either due to the heat and decided it would be best that they didn’t sleep together. While the father was bothering Gus by telling him all about his recent visit to Italy, a welcome phone call came. Someone is going to be murdered at Deimos Technology. It doesn’t matter that the someone that is about to die is only an AI computer infected with a fatal computer virus. ...

Gus has traveled out of state and up to the city of Seattle to visit his daughter. She’s sharing an apartment with two criminology majors. Naturally their thoughts turn toward talking about crime and they ask Gus to talk about one of his cases. Since he doesn’t want to discuss anything too recent or else his daughter might know the people involved, he digs down deep into his memory banks for the perfect case from his first year as a sheriff. It also just so happens to be the first case he crossed path with Father Xavier. As he remembers it, Gus was called in to investigate an apparent ...

Sheriff Gus knows it’s going to be a bad week when he sees Sedric Hedgecock’s breathalyzer score. With a blood alcohol level of 0.62 percent, Hedgecock should be dead. If the breathalyzer’s isn’t on the fritz, Hedgecock’s superhuman. Either way, he’s blind drunk, so off to the county jail he goes. Joining the wannabe Bacchus in Gus’s cells is Jennifer Louis Bachman, awaiting extradition to Kansas on a murder charge. The victim in question is Jennifer’s unborn child, and the murder weapon is an illegal Mexican abortion. With the governor vacillating on whether to extradite, ...

Gus has the unfortunate task of judging the local art show at the Tannehill Ranch. The only thing Gus knows about art is you shouldn’t eat the macaroni after your child has glued to their artwork. Given the art show is displaying art from the daughters of most of the wealthier members of society in his state, Gus could hardly have said no to the request to be a judge. Things heat up at the art show when one of the teenage contestants ends up missing. It is the sort of news that isn’t exactly easy to tell parents with large bank accounts. Worse, it turns out she’s likely run away with ...

Gus’s wakes up to discover that he’s been kidnapped by a Mexican mobster. He’s not the only one who has been kidnapped, however. Apparently, someone’s pinched the crime lord’s kid and the head thug of the gang wants Gus to find the missing kid before the crime lord finds out about it. By kid, it turns out that they meant young goat. If the goat doesn’t turn up in time then the ire of the crime lord will surely fall on one of them. Gus needs to figure out which suspect is the correct one. Luckily, Gus has Father Xavier around to help him sort out this tricky situation. Can Gus ...

It’s just another morning on the fifth of July. The country is another year older; Gus is a touch hungover, the coffee in his office is stale, and all Gus wants to do is go home and start over again on July sixth. Unfortunately Father Xavier visits the sheriff’s office and he’s brought along a gift. He has a green jacket that should have been put in the church’s lost and found. The father suspects it belongs to a missing girl named Erica Torres which is odd given the jacket is marked as belonging to E. Rossi. Erica went to school one day and never came home. She was picked up by a ...

It’s closing in on July Fourth and everyone seems ready to celebrate the birth of the nation. Everyone, that is, except Sheriff Gus. Sure, things are born, but everything must pass away as well. Sheriff Gus was hoping on a more financially stable time before he experienced his truck’s untimely death. Motor vehicles aren’t the only thing passing before their time in Gus’s humble county because in addition to Gus’s truck a professor from the fancy George Taylor University happens to die under mysterious circumstances. The professor’s main passion in life was paleontology or to be ...

Princess Xithanese has a problem in the shape of her father. Long before she was born, her father made a pact with a dragon in order to gain the throne. Her father was crowned king in return for handing over the first husband of his then unborn daughter. The price at the time seemed such a low one to pay that one could hardly blame him for paying it. Unless you were Xithanese! Since it is not he, but Xithanese, that is paying this price. Xithanese has lived with this curse on her head her whole life. Though her mother has prepared her for marriage, what eligible prince would marry her ...