Showing results by narrator "Tom Fria" in All Categories

Are you struggling with fatigue, brain fog, or depression? Is there something wrong with your stomach or gut? It may be your vagus nerve! The vagus nerve is a large, branching nerve that begins in your brain and sends signals to your body’s major organs such as your heart, your lungs, and your digestive system. It’s responsible for your heart rate, your digestion, your reaction to stress, and many other things. That’s why a lot can go wrong in your body if the vagus nerve doesn’t function perfectly.

A small collection of six short stories, each with its own darkness, born of a desire of one kind or another. For some, it is the desire of the unknown; for others, it is desire through obsession. Each short story is its own volume in the twisted library of desire. Each story a gateway to their new reality.

A baby rat freed from the bottom of a dumpster becomes a white ibis wandering the wet driveway after a storm. Goodbye, hello, goodbye. It was the garbage times; it was time for something else. A tale of two tales, connected by a mysterious sunlit portal.

In 1939, Warsaw, Poland, is invaded on their east and west borders by German and Russian forces, and the small Polish army is easily overwhelmed. The people of Warsaw, among them Dr. Otto Steiner and his great love Ariel, are rounded up and put on trains and shipped to secret Nazi prison camps.

Amid the gristly serial killings of a deranged psychopath, a father stands accused of filicide—the murder of his own daughter... His alleged crime is strikingly similar to the ones causing terror in the Bradford community by the predator known as The Ripper. The lead investigator of the Bradford Murder Squad, DI Turnbull, is back—his task to distinguish fact from fiction and untangle evidence that points in alarming directions. Did this man murder his own daughter? And if he did, is he indeed Ripper2?

After their latest successful Vegas Gone Girls trafficking case is solved, Mick Finnegan and Joe Lawler are looking for a spot of calm and R&R. They think they’ve found it, when their new Chief of Police insists that they travel to Provo, Utah for a pleasant fishing trip. But it’s a ruse to rope them into adding support for the local Native American authorities and branch FBI on a case of missing and murdered Native women around the Mohawken reservation area.

One day seven-year-old Ruby was walking in the woods and saw a glow. The glow was three eggs. After one of the eggs hatched, Ruby found himself with a pet Christmas dragon, which he named Reindeer. Can Ruby, his sister, and their five cousins take care of Reindeer and entertain him? What kind of magic does a Christmas dragon have during the holidays?

It is London in the early 1960s and Teddy Bean is making a name for himself as a private detective. However, his personal problems are taking over, with his brother, John, only slowly recovering from a heart attack and his wife, Pearl, dying in a car accident. Added to this, he takes on a difficult case involving a woman presumably drowned at sea by her husband. Teddy needs help while his brother is incapacitated and finds it in his friend, ex-Detective Inspector Tony Halliday. With the added support of their secretary Muriel, the Bean Detective Agency is open for business once more!

Tens of thousands are flocking to a bustling wind-swept metropolis in the middle of America for the great Exposition of 1893—to see the future and to ride Mr. Ferris' remarkable wheel. A city of hope and hardship has caught the attention of the world—and a maniacal killer has made it his hunting ground. Inspector Alastair Ransom carries the burden of the dead on his shoulders. But a demon far worse than Ransom's own is loose—a bloodthirsty killer who preys on Chicago's most vulnerable citizens.

Hani doesn’t know what to make of it when the king starts honoring him, but he must still find the man who killed a foreign ambassador right under the roof of the Egyptian commissioner in Kumidi—a man whose past intersects bizarrely with Hani’s. And then, the queen of the new coregent has a special task for him which may involve dragging Hani’s 19-year-old daughter into court politics. He must find a way to see justice done and yet protect his family…and his conscience.

The body parts were first discovered in the bellies of sharks. Marine scientists in the Florida Keys insist sharks rarely dine on live humans, so there can be only one explanation: They were dead before they hit the water. Dr. Jessica Coran knows why. They call him the "Night Crawler". And he's out there, riding the tides with his victims, feeding the waves after his own perverse hungers are satisfied. But when similar murders surface in London on the Thames River, Jessica faces double jeopardy. One killer? Or two....

He felt most alive when he watched them die - writing, breathless, gasping for oxygen that wasn't there. But, he could only draw out the pleasure for so long before his victims expired. And, then it was time to choose another. Death by asphyxiation. That's what Chicago medical examiner Dr. Dean Grant was forced to conclude by the gruesome evidence before him. Recognizing the work of a serial killer, Grant knew he'd have to move fast.

Fabian Carlson wants nothing to do with Christmas. Having lost his fiancée two Christmases ago, his only wish is to skip the holidays altogether. Until he wakes up to his black Labrador’s loud, persistent barking. When he lets Felix out, he’s astonished to discover a reindeer on his front lawn, eating his neighbor’s prize-winning yews. Carlson’s Christmas Wish is a light-hearted and entertaining story about a man, a neighborhood, and a town whose lives are touched by the magic of Christmas. A truly heartwarming story about renewal and hope.

In this rousing 1852 romp through the eerie woods surrounding Hannibal, Missouri, and up and down the Mississippi River, 14-year-old Daniel Webster Jackson runs into a counterfeit Underground Railroad when he decides to run away from his foster home. At every turn, he musters courage to survive in a land where the law is at odds with the heart and soul of a people, where the Missouri Compromise forces everyone into a disguise or a secret identity.

This fast-moving and sometimes disturbing book starts at the point where Brian is about to be arrested for smuggling a kilogram of cocaine into the UK in 1995, earning him a prison sentence of 12 years. The book explores his disadvantaged life growing up in Wales in impoverished circumstances with a number of brothers and sisters, all with the same mother but several different fathers. He tells of his first experience with drugs at the tender age of 16 and continues to chart his descent into drugs and drug dealing.

Just when Archeologist and Vampire Slayer, Dr. Abraham Stroud thinks he can take it easy, take a second seat on a dig in West Texas, he is wrong from the outset. Plagued by warnings he does not at first recognize, Abe soon finds himself in the thick of an attack on humankind by a pod of prehistoric, giant centipedes that have cultivated a taste beyond livestock to a taste for humans. The creatures are known to local Native Americans as "Burrowers" as they have seen them before, but for Abe and those around him, there is a brewing war anticipated and soon engaged.

During the Great Jubilee of the Aten, a mysterious series of tomb robberies takes place, and witnesses begin to die. With plague ravaging the palace, where Hani’s daughter is a physician, and Egypt’s ally, Naharin, collapsing into the hands of a usurper, Hani must make sense of what is happening - and who in high places is his real enemy.

When the Louisiana Bayou folks calling themselves members of the Bayou Wulf’s Clan turn out to be real werewolves, it’s a bit late in the day for archeologist Abraham Stroud, whose bayou dig puts him and his people directly in harm’s way. In fact, this wulf coven has created a safe haven for their kind - Oasis, Louisiana, an entire town filled with Bayou Wulves, many fathered by Bayou Wulf itself - their disputable and dubious leader.

When FBI psychic Dr. Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa is asked in on a case in New Orleans, she soon learns that the missing Gone Girls may as yet be alive and that their abductor is a "collector" rather than a typical serial abductor/killer. With three missing and as yet no clue as to where they may be, the only saving grace is that no bodies have shown up. There is little about this case that resembles anything that "Rae" Hiyakawa has faced before in PSI Blue and DEJA Blue. But the case takes on a new wrinkle that no one could have predicted.

A spy working for religious organizations, Jere Wakely is summoned to Salem Village Parish, where it has become obvious to church authorities that there is serious trouble. He is reluctant to return to his hometown for many reasons, not the least being that his heart is broken, and he's worried about running into his former lover, Serena Nurse. During his investigation, he has no expectation that their love will be rekindled. But their renewed passion parallels a greater fire - one of terror amid the infamous Salem Witch Trials.