Showing results by narrator "Michael Todd" in All Categories

Vance Brewster is a hardworking young cowboy. Stovepipe and Wilbur are two new ranch hands working at his side. And all three are caught up in a brewing, trigger-happy Montana range war between the Rafter M and Three Rivers. Then the fury suddenly explodes - in a hail of gunfire, the three men must show their hands: they're all hiding their true identities. With Vance falling in love with the daughter of the Three Rivers manager, and Stovepipe and Wilbur paid by a tycoon who needs the violence to stop, all three are in mortal danger.

After crossing the dry Arizona desert — and missing six meals in a row — Sam Flintlock is flat-out desperate. For food. For work. For lodgings. Luckily, he finds all three in the high timber country east of the Mogollon River. A very young and pretty heiress, Lucy Cullen, has an unusual proposition for the bounty hunter. She will pay him cold, hard cash to spend one full week in the gothic mansion of her murdered uncle. What’s the catch? The place is haunted....

Sure, I hate how everyone was over the moon about her TikTok fame. And I suppose I got a little bit carried away with vengeance when she tried to ruin my life. But seriously, when my friend gave me that leather journal, I’d never had so much power in my life. It was intoxicating. Who wouldn’t have done what I did to Eva? Now everyone thinks that just because she vanished in the forest after a party, that I killed her. That the blood on the jackets is proof. Or the text messages. The slightly weird thing I had with Eva's dad. The fire.

1983: Three students from a small college embark on a week-long road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. The project starts out as a fun adventure with long stretches of empty road and nightly campfires where they begin to open up with one another. But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the atmosphere begins to darken. They notice more and more of the memorials feature a strange, unsettling symbol hinting at a sinister secret.

The terrorist organization ISIS is after a deadly toxin that could be the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. The same toxin holds the potential to eradicate cancer. There is a frantic race to see who can get to it first, even as Caitlin Strong begins to assemble the disparate pieces of a deadly puzzle. At the center of that puzzle is an Indian reservation where a vengeful tycoon is mining the toxin, disguising his effort as an oil-drilling operation.

Caprock, Texas is a sleepy cow town until oil is discovered in the 1920s. Suddenly thousands of people stream in to find their fortune. Some are honest folk like Elise and Victor Underwood, who pray for a little luck with their daily bread. But too many are two-bit swindlers. And then there’s frontier mobster Big Boy Daugherty. Sheriff Dave Buckalew faces a whole different set of circumstances as his town springs to life — in good and not-so-good ways.

Flintlock takes no pleasure in killing. But when his pal O’Hara gets bullwhipped by a trio of lowdown prairie rats, Flintlock finds sanctuary for his wounded friend at the cabin of a kindly miner and his lovely daughter. Flintlock heads out to hunt down some food. But there’s more than just deer lurking in these woods. A bloodthirsty band of eight savage raiders — led by a half-mad gunslinger called The Old Man of the Mountain — wage a full-scale attack on the miner’s cabin.

The accidental gunslinger Dooley Monahan has quit wandering and settled down to a farmer’s life. But when the itch for adventure gets too strong, he packs up and rides west. Along with his horse General Grant, and Blue, a dog who’s too smart for his own good, Dooley rides for the Black Hills to strike it rich in the gold fields of Colorado. But fate has other ideas.

In the annals of business trips gone horribly wrong, Evangeline Harker's journey to Romania on behalf of her employer, the popular television newsmagazine The Hour, deserves pride of place. Sent to Transylvania to scout out a possible story on a notorious Eastern European crime boss named Ion Torgu, she has found the true nature of Torgu's activities to be far more monstrous than anything her young journalist's mind could have imagined.

In a world where any act of magic could open a portal to hell, the Order insures that no wizard will live to summon devils, and will kill as many innocent people as they must to prevent that greater horror. After witnessing a horrendous slaughter, the village girl Heloise opposes the Order, and risks bringing their wrath down on herself, her family, and her village.

Heloise and her allies are marching on the Imperial Capital. The villagers, the Kipti, and the Red Lords are united only in their loyalty to Heloise, though dissenting voices are many and they are loud. The unstable alliance faces internal conflicts and external strife, yet they’re united in their common goal. But when the first of the devils start pouring through a rent in the veil between worlds, Heloise must strike a bargain with an unlikely ally, or doom her people to death and her world to ruin.

With Christmas approaching, Charley is happy to welcome his grandson Henry-Ellis for a visit to his West Texas ranch. The boy is old enough now to travel alone by rail - but nothing can prepare him for the bullets and bloodshed waiting for him along the way. First, he witnesses a double shooting on the train. Then, he sees his grandpa gun down a dangerous duo of jewel thieves in the streets. After that, they stumble onto a train robbery in the making. But the real trouble starts when they get home for the holidays....

John Henry Cole's life has quieted down from what it had always been, and he can now settle down and make improvements on his small ranch. But everything changes when an old rancher named Wilson rides in with his two sons. Wilson is willing to pay Cole $5,000 to help get back his wife Lenora who has been taken hostage by Lucky Jack Dancer, an outlaw who had robbed the train on which she was a passenger.

Contemporary master Paul Auster comes to Symphony Space for the paperback of his Booker-nominated tour de force, 4 3 2 1. With author and scholar Todd Gitlin (The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage) and a performance from the novel by Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me by Your Name).

"Brevity is the soul of wit." (Shakespeare) Within this book you will find 31 stories written with this quote in mind. For 2016 I decided to challenge myself to create a flash fiction story every day for the whole year. So far I've been on track. You will find these stories brief and, hopefully, some of them witty as well. This is a complete collection of the stories I wrote in January. Going forward I will publish each month's stories and then collect them all in an omnibus edition.

In this novelette, prisoners are used as lab rats in a ruthless series of temporal experiments. Physicists learn that it's possible to pillage and plunder the past without affecting the present, or so it seems. It seems as though there are no consequences to time travel. But one prisoner sees the fallacy of this, because nobody understands consequences like a con.

National Emergency Security Chief James Donovan finds himself knee-deep in a conspiracy to kill the sitting president of the United States and take over the democratically elected government by military force. More than 5000 American soldiers and right-wing mercenaries are involved in a plot that includes members of the Cabinet, and members of the US Senate.

South Beach Salsa is a fictional story of the normalization of relations between the governments of Cuba and the US, examining plots between Chinese Triad operatives, two US Senators, and Russian businessmen in an attempt to control the telecommunications and cell-phone industry of Cuba. Supported by a Latin beauty, Magdalena Gonzales, Colonel James Donovan and his team of Special NESO (National Security) Agents rescue a kidnapped US Senator, take down foreign operatives, and uncover a diabolical plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States.

This action-packed dystopian novel by the best-selling author of The 1929 Series takes you far into the future, where freedom and truth no longer exist. After a worldwide pandemic decimates the population, those left alive fall for the promises of a tyrannical regime.

Decades later, no one knows that the world was ever free, save a small group of men and women brave enough to escape.