Science Thriller

Grey has improved a ton with the help of his friends, and he's closing in on the top tier of players. But then his closest friend announces that he's been asked to join a new squad on the top tier and leaves them in hopes of making the top five with his new squad. Grey is devastated, and his team struggles. He falls back several ranks and begins to wonder if it's even possible to escape the game this season. Some players have been there for many seasons...some aren't even trying to leave because they like it so much. Maybe he should just accept it as his life.

For over three decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror listeners crave. Now, with the eighth volume of the series, Datlow is back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. Encompassed in the audio of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as: Neil Gaiman; Kelley Armstrong; Stephen King; Linda Nagata; Laird Barron; Margo Lanagan; and many others.

In 48 hours, the Earth will be hit by a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun, a "Carrington Event" that has the power to shut down and possibly destroy the world's electrical infrastructure. To try and prevent permanent damage, everything goes dark prior to the hit: Global communications are shut down; hospital emergency generators are disconnected; the entire internet, media broadcasting, and cell phone systems are turned off. Will the world's population successfully defend itself in the wake of the CME, or will mass panic lead to the breakdown of society as we know it?

Separated from her son and forced to create a neural implant that will mean the effective enslavement of her psychically gifted race, Ashaya Aleine is the perfect Psy: cool, calm, emotionless... at least on the surface. Inside, she’s fighting a desperate battle to save her son and escape the vicious cold of the PsyNet. Yet when escape comes, it leads not to safety but to the lethal danger of a sniper’s embrace.

A century from now, thanks to a technology allowing instantaneous travel across light-years, humanity has solved its energy shortages, cleaned up the environment, and created far-flung colony worlds. The keys to this empire belong to the powerful North family - composed of successive generations of clones. Yet these clones are not identical. For one thing, genetic errors have crept in with each generation. For another, the original three clone "brothers" have gone their separate ways, and the branches of the family are now friendly rivals more than allies. Or maybe not so friendly....

And so it begins.... In the United States, the Department of Defense and the NSA computer networks have been hacked. A nuclear-armed CIA drone has lost all flight control. North Korea...Iran...Russia...and soon the gates of Hell will open. Humanity's most terrifying nightmare has become reality. Bombs are detonated, missiles are launched, counterstrikes are ordered, and within minutes, untold thousands of megatons have left countless millions dead or dying. Devastation of biblical proportions has fallen over the land...and the USA has been hit the hardest.

Byron the Carpathian has traveled the globe for centuries, desperately seeking a mortal woman for his lifemate. And then, in an Italian villa, he hears the threads of enchanting music.

The year is 3326. Nigel Sheldon, one of the founders of the Commonwealth, receives a visit from the Raiel - self-appointed guardians of the Void, the enigmatic construct at the core of the galaxy that threatens the existence of all that lives. The Raiel convince Nigel to participate in a desperate scheme to infiltrate the Void. Once inside, Nigel discovers that humans are not the only life-forms to have been sucked into the Void. The humans trapped there are afflicted by an alien species of biological mimics.

Born blind, Kendra Michaels spent the first 20 years of her life living in the darkness. Then, thanks to a revolutionary medical procedure developed by England's Night Watch Project, she was given the gift of sight. Her highly-developed senses (honed during her years in the dark), combined with her newfound vision, have made her a remarkable investigator, sought after by law-enforcement agencies all over the country. But her newest case finds her uncovering a deadly truth about the shadowy organization that has given her so much.

When Steve's friends, Max, Lucy, and Henry, get their hands on a map with the location of the legendary Mine Mountain, Steve questions if the map is a fake. Going to this fabled mountain, rumored to contain an endless supply of diamonds, is every treasure hunter's dream. Many believe the mountain doesn't exist, and although Steve is doubtful about the map's authenticity, the gang convinces Steve and Kyra to embark on a journey to find this magical mountain.

What happened to Dr. Jonathan Brandon, a dashing RAF flight surgeon, who disappeared from London in 1945? Kidnapping? Murder? Or did Brandon merely vanish of his own free will, seeking another life? American teacher Anne Howard is stunned by a different explanation - that her British grandmother's long-lost fiance was unwillingly wrenched back through time to Elizabethan England. Anne knows time travel is nonsense - until she is handed a fresh-cut thornless rose, a bloom extinct for over 400 years.

A father and his son. Two-thousand-five-hundred miles apart. A blue ribbon crosses the sky. The world starts to unravel. No one knows what is happening, but everyone is trying to find out. Buck is running his big rig from the west coast. Garth is trapped in New York City with his high school friend. With Marine training and an 18-wheeler, Buck heads east. With no training and no communication with his father, Garth fights just to escape New York City.

Police Chief Delaney Reed thinks she knows all of Ordinary, Oregon’s secrets. Gods on vacation, lovelorn ghosts, friendly neighborhood monsters? Check. But some secrets run deeper than even she knows. To take down an ancient vampire hell-bent on revenge, she will have to make the hardest decision of her life: give up the book of dark magic that can destroy them all, or surrender her mortal soul.

Life as Aileen knew it ended when she woke up in a morgue sporting a new set of fangs after a wild night out. Now, as a courier for the supernatural world, she balances figuring out this whole vampire thing with making enough to support her ice cream habit. When a job goes disastrously awry and ends with a body on the ground, Aileen finds herself in over her head as she draws the attention of a powerful creature intent on her death.

Ellis Rogers is an ordinary man who is about to embark on an extraordinary journey. All his life he has played it safe and done the right thing. But when he is faced with a terminal illness, Ellis is willing to take an insane gamble. He's built a time machine in his garage, and if it works, he'll face a world that challenges his understanding of what it means to be human, what it takes to love, and the cost of paradise. Ellis could find more than a cure for his disease; he might find what everyone has been searching for since time has begun.

It is 1890, and in the days before Christmas, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson are visited at Baker Street by a new client. Eve Allerthorpe, eldest daughter of a grand but somewhat eccentric Yorkshire-based dynasty, is greatly distressed, as she believes she is being haunted by a demonic Christmas spirit. Her late mother told her terrifying tales of the sinister Black Thurrick, and Eve is sure that she has seen the creature from her bedroom window. What is more, she has begun to receive mysterious parcels of birch twigs, the Black Thurrick’s calling card.

Brought together by fate - or phenomena - heiress Jennifer Quinn, journalist Timika Mars, pilot Alan Young, and ex-Marine Barry Regis are bonded by the incidents they've witnessed, hunted by agents of a wealthy corporate cabal desperate for unimaginable power, and possessed of extraordinary abilities they do not understand, much less control. Now, they're on a mission of their own. As Alan and Barry test the limits of their strange gifts inside the military complex known as Dreamland, Jennifer and Timika begin a quest to locate an ancient tablet that may hold the answers to humanity's greatest question.

When my magic manifested at puberty, my parents sold me to the Illuminati. The Order of the Illuminati trained me as an assassin, spy, and thief. But when they sent me to steal a magical artifact that reveals Truth in all things, I discovered that I was working for the Dark and not the Light. The Illuminati trained me well, and paid the ultimate price for their deception.

I thought I'd never see Julian Walker again. Never came much sooner than I expected. After killing the Hedge witches that wreaked havoc among covens for decades, I thought people were finally going to learn how to see past the physical. I thought they'd begin to trust me. I was wrong. I didn't expect things to go from bad to worse so fast, until I found Julian Walker on the floor of my office, barely even breathing. He tells me he needs me. He tells me that I'm the only one who can stop the fairy who had destroyed the fairy realm and its Courts.

Bob Howard is a special operative for the British agency called The Laundry, and his task is to stop a rogue billionaire from using an artifact, known as Gravedust, with the power to reanimate the dead. The U.S. Black Agency sends the lethal Ramona Random to aid Bob’s mission, but she seems to have a different agenda.