Showing results by narrator "Richard Lewis" in All Categories

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Being a different breed of shapeshifter—a walker—Mercy can see ghosts, but the spirit of her long-gone father has never visited her. Until now. An evil is stirring in the depths of the Columbia River—and innocent people are dying. As other walkers make their presence known to Mercy, she must reconnect with her heritage to exorcise the world of the legend known as the river devil.

On his 13th birthday, foster child Alcatraz Smedry gets a bag of sand in the mail - his only inheritance from his father and mother. He soon learns that this is no ordinary bag of sand. It is quickly stolen by the cult of evil Librarians who are taking over the world by spreading misinformation and suppressing truth. Alcatraz must stop them, using the only weapon he has: an incredible talent for breaking things.

The passage of time hasn't healed the ravages of the nukecaust, but where once there was only the Deathlands, new centres of power loom above the domain of the unwanted, the hell zones of the Outlands. Though the outlanders distrust and hate the rulers of the fortified villes, even they wouldn't dare imagine the megalithic power guiding their destiny.

The city of the gods. Elantris once stood as the symbol of all that is beautiful. A sprawling metropolis of unrivaled grandeur, it was a symbol of power and strength, built to be as imposing as it was magnificent. The only thing more glorious than the city itself was its inhabitants, Godlike beings, with silvery skin and hair of the purest flowing white. Able to create powerful magics with a mere wave of their hands, the Elantrians were able to heal mortal wounds and create any object they desired. But Elantris fell...10 years ago.

The gold-mining town of Red Light, Montana is the kind of backwater hole less famous for the folks that live there than the ones who die there - like Janey Jensen, Smoke Jensen's sister. Smoke never would have gone there if it hadn't been for her estate. But that isn't the only thing the Mountain Man's got to settle. There's also the score between him and Major Cosgrove. The man who owns Red Light - lock, stock and barrel - is six feet of trouble looking for somebody like Smoke to bring out the worst in him.

For Smoke, it starts at a high-class auction for a pureblood Hereford bull. Smoke wins the bidding - and earns the hatred of Pogue Quentin, Santa Clara’s leading citizen and a man living on bloodshed and lies. Then Smoke’s friend Pearlie drifts to Santa Clara. And when Pearlie runs afoul of Quentin, all hell will break loose. Now Smoke Jensen is heading to Santa Clara to face a man who already wants him dead - but Pogue Quentin never met anything like the fire of a mountain man....

The Oklahoma Panhandle is 100 miles of lawlessness and danger: a no-man's-land designed to separate Texas from pro-Union Kansas. Through this desolate strip rides legendary gunslinger Falcon MacCallister with a 12-year-old Indian boy by his side. Behind them lies a scene of horror left by outlaws who've massacred the boy's parents, as well as the settlers in a small wagon train.

Trapped in a remote cabin, surrounded by ruthless gunmen, Matt Jensen and his adoptive father Smoke Jensen join forces with their old friend, Preacher, in the greatest fight of their lives. A ruthless cattle baron has waged an all-out war against the peaceful native tribesmen who have become Preacher's friends. In a bloodthirsty bid for land, power, and wealth, the baron's drafted an army of professional killers to destroy the homesteaders - among them the Jensens are the only men brave enough to stand in his way.

With The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and 27 of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2017.

When a mysterious man orchestrates an attack on archaeologist Annja Creed and then offers her an assignment, Annja is baffled. But the mission is too intriguing for her to refuse. She must find an object that possesses a sacred and powerful secret offering atonement to anyone who uncovers it — or wreaking havoc on the world.

Wayson Harris is not your ordinary clone. He is an outlawed model with a mind of his own, an unquenchable thirst for battle, and a huge chip on his shoulder. Harris quit the U.A. Marines once it became clear its officers didn't give a damn how many clones were lost. But now he's been recalled for duty under the Elite Conscription Act. An unstoppable alien force is advancing on Earth, wiping out the U.A.'s colonies one by one along the way. It's up to Harris and his men to make a last stand on the planet of New Copenhagen, where they must win the battle and the war - or lose all.

It's become the fastest - and surest - way to get from here to eternity. Somebody is playing the railroads like a giant train set, causing high-speed derailments that strew the rails with headless victims from coast to coast. And could the repeated sightings of a ghostly samurai swordsman be fact or mass hysteria? As the carnage continues unchecked and the body count mounts, Dr. Harold Smith suspects the train terror is merely a decoy for the real target.

Hunted across the southwestern desert, Ryan doesn't know who wants him dead badly enough to slaughter innocents as a way of luring him into the open. But the advanced tech his pursuers are using is unknown in Deathlands, created by the most brilliant minds of 20th-century America. Now evil is alive and stalking the warrior group. His name is Delphi and he's prepared to reclaim the one man who understands with brutal certainty how time can be controlled, manipulated, remapped.

Orphaned at the age of seven and adopted by Indians, Jami Ian MacCallister grew into a man more at ease in the wilderness than among men. But when the westward strike drove him across the Arkansas Territory into Texas, he finally found himself a home — in the middle of a bloody war. Texans like Jim Bowie and Sam Houston were waging a fierce struggle against Santa Ana’s Mexican army and Jami MacCallister made the perfect scout for the fledgling volunteer force.

Some people don't know when to leave bad enough alone. Just when it seemed that Smoke Jensen's life had settled down to something resembling normal, he'd all but forgotten the vicious young gunfighter who called himself Sundance. Smoke had hoped to teach that twisted kid a lesson by shooting off his ear. But the lesson didn't take. Now, after years on the run, Sundance's hunger for revenge has pushed him over the edge.

Wayson Harris was one of thousands of clones born and bred to be the ultimate soldiers. But as an outlawed model, he was different from the rest - possessing independent thoughts and an addiction to violence. Stranded on a frontier planet, Harris is desperate to get back to civilization - and back into the fight. But the rebel factions are warring among themselves, and Harris is contacted by a group that wants to return to the Unified Authority's command.

It didn't matter that the warrant was years old, or that Smoke Jensen had been cleared of all charges. A Texas bounty hunter named Bill Pike believed he could still collect a $10,000 reward for killing Jensen - and he intended to do just that. But when Pike and his men came calling, Jensen was nowhere to be found. So they took the next best thing - Smoke's woman - left behind a ransom note, and headed up into the Rocky Mountains.

Forensic evidence in a couple of assassinations reveals a curious link between the killers: identical fingerprints and genetic code. Could it be twins? But when the next killer's traces show the same result, law enforcement authorities are baffled. The bizarre problem is entrusted to CURE's Dr. Harold Smith and he puts Remo and Chiun on a trail leading back decades to a literal dead end.

When archaeologist Annja Creed is hired to find the lost city of Promise in Brazil, she is more than intrigued. Legends abound of a magical place where slaves were rumored to have discovered the secret to eternal youth and life. But strangers are not welcome in Promise. Annja soon learns that the residents have gone to extreme lengths to guard their precious secret. Making her way from the steamy port of Belém to the brutal slums of Northeast Brazil, Annja faces unexpected peril, from poisoned arrows to Amazonian anacondas.