Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war, and she and her family flee. Years later her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present-day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners but a gay man in an unaccepting society.

Bridge and Nicole are hired by a woman who's lost her gold coins. They follow the man that took them down to South America, where he intends to sell them to the highest bidder. Things don't quite go according to plan, though, as they run into the con man before he's able to rid himself of the coins. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Bridge and the con man, who acts more like a friend than a foe. Can Bridge and Nicole take the coins before the man can get rid of them? Or will they have to alter their plans if they're unable to stop him?

In a forgotten Cold War bunker, a cold-blooded arms dealer counts his cash and watches from a distance as cities collapse into violence. Pledged to stop him is a man without a past, guided by a teenage boy through the tunnels under the corrupted port city. With each stealthy move toward their target, the path ahead grows ever darker.

The first issue in the second century of Weird Tales features a new HELLBOY story by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Editor Jonathan Maberry has built a collection of cosmic horror that will destabilize your worldview.

Eighty-year-old Mieke Geborn’s life is one of quiet routine. Widowed for many years, she enjoys the view from her home on the New Jersey shore, visits with friends, and tai chi at the local retirement community. But when her beloved grandson, Will, and his wife, Teru, show up for a visit, things are soon upended. Their marriage is threatening to unravel, and Will has questions for his grandmother—questions about family secrets that have been lost for decades and are now finally rising to the surface.

These 12 stories - published over the last five years in Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, Playboy, and other publications - veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

When the FBI comes to Lincoln Rhyme with the news that a mysterious assassin is targeting him, the detective is not particularly concerned. With his long career putting away criminals, he is accustomed to threats on his life, and has designed his Upper West Side townhome to be secure against nearly any threat. But when the assassin gets too close for comfort, Rhyme determines to find out why this person is after him. He must put himself inside the mind of a killer in order to save his own life, and possibly the lives of those he loves most.

It's 1949. When war veteran Aloysius Archer is released from Carderock Prison, he is sent to Poca City on parole with a short list of dos and a much longer list of don'ts: do report regularly to his parole officer, don't go to bars, certainly don't drink alcohol, do get a job - and don't ever associate with loose women. The small town quickly proves more complicated and dangerous than Archer's years serving in the war or his time in jail.

A series of suspicious deaths in a retirement home draws Nameless into the confidence of a terrified former resident - and into the dark heart of a shocking conspiracy. In part five of the Nameless series, it’s time to hunt. Oakshore Park is Michigan’s most exclusive assisted-living community. Presided over by two killer angels of mercy, it’s also THE go-to facility in assisted dying. For a cut, they make impatient heirs happy. Nameless must concoct a scheme just as cunning.

New Pittsburgh, 1898 - a crucible of invention and intrigue. Born from the ashes of devastating fire, flood, and earthquake, the city is ruled by the shadow government of The Oligarchy. Jake Desmet and Rick Brand travel the world to secure treasures and unusual items for the collections of wealthy patrons, accompanied by Jake's cousin, Veronique Le Clerque. But when their latest commission leads to Jake's father's murder, the three friends are drawn into a conspiracy where dark magic, industrial sabotage, and monsters that prey on the night will ultimately threaten not just New Pittsburgh, but the whole world.

The epitome of intelligence, high-powered energy, and grace, Blaise McCarthy is an icon in the world of television news, asking the tough questions and taking on the emotionally charged issues of world affairs and politics with courage and insight. A single mother, she manages her well-ordered career meticulously, always prepared on the air or interviewing world-renowned figures and heads of state. To her audience, Blaise seems to have it all. But privately, and off the set, there is another untold story she has kept hidden for years.

Even decades after their arrival, Corrine and Russell Calloway still feel as if they're living the dream that drew them to New York City in the first place: book parties or art openings one night and high-society events the next; jobs they care about (and in fact love); twin children whose birth was truly miraculous; a loft in TriBeCa and summers in the Hamptons. But all of this comes at a fiendish cost.

In Ostia, a depressed coastal settlement 20 miles from the powerful and corrupt city of Rome, a mighty local crime family, the Mafia, corrupt politicians, and new rabid criminal elements battle each other for a billion-dollar payoff. During the final days of Silvio Berlusconi's reign, a massive development proposal that will turn Ostia into a gambling paradise, a Las Vegas on the Mediterranean, is winding its way through the Italian legislature thanks to the sponsorship of politicians in the pay of crime syndicates with vested interests.

Set in three cities in three eras, The Mirror Thief calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado. The core story is set in Venice in the 16th century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror.

Bridge and Nicole are given a job by Eric Happ. And like most jobs that are assigned by the government, there is more than meets the eye with this one. Their assignment seems simple enough at first. They just have to take out a man in Venezuela, who’s trying to start his own criminal empire down there. But the simple assignment will quickly become more complicated as unfriendly faces recognize Bridge, which could throw the whole job into chaos.

When Sanger Rainsford falls off his yacht on his way to the Amazon forest for a hunting expedition, he washes up on a strange Caribbean island only to find that more danger lies ahead. When the owner of a palatial chateau and his henchman tell Rainsford that they are no longer interested in hunting animals and that men are the true test of a hunter, Rainsford goes from being the hunter to the hunted as he struggles to survive in a game of cat and mouse.

In Boston a young woman finds herself pregnant - even though she is still a virgin. In Ireland another young woman discovers she is in the same impossible condition. And in cities all around the world, medical authorities are overwhelmed by epidemics, droughts, famines, floods, and worse. It all feels like a sign that something awful is coming. Anne Fitzgerald, a former nun turned private investigator, is hired by the Archdiocese of Boston to investigate the immaculate conceptions.

Joseph, a literature student at Berkeley, is the son of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father. One day, a mysterious package arrives on his doorstep, pulling him into a mesmerizing adventure to uncover the tangled history that binds the two sides of his family. For generations, the men of the al-Raqb family have served as watchmen of the storied Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, built at the site where the infant Moses was taken from the Nile. Joseph learns of his ancestor Ali, a Muslim orphan who became enchanted by the legendary - perhaps magical - Ezra Scroll.

A businessman snatched from an Upper East Side street in broad daylight. A miniature hangman's noose left at the scene. A nine-year-old girl, the only witness to the crime. With a crime scene this puzzling, forensic expertise of the highest order is absolutely essential. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are called in to investigate. Soon, the case takes a stranger turn: A recording surfaces of the victim being slowly hanged, his desperate gasps the backdrop to an eerie piece of music. The video is marked as the work of "The Composer"....

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings, now alongside four previously uncollected stories.