Showing results by narrator "Adam Grupper" in All Categories

The Russians have a special way of gambling. They take a revolver and they place one round the chambers and spin it. Then they take it in turns to put the gun to their heads and pull the trigger. It’s called Russian Roulette. Now they have a new, deadlier way of playing it.

In the wake of the Vietnam debacle, when the mighty USA was humiliated by Soviet-backed Vietcong, the CIA plotted to drag the USSR into a "Russian Vietnam" in Afghanistan. The plan was such a success it led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, 40 years on, as Russia limps, scarred and crippled, from the battlefields of Kherson, Donetsk, and Kharkiv, Colonel Alexandrina Vitsin swears to drag the USA into an American Ukraine.

These 18 darkly complex short stories and novellas touch upon human nature and perception, metaphysics and epistemology, and gender and sexuality, foreshadowing a world in which biological tendencies bring about the downfall of humankind. The Nebula Award-winning short story "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death", the Hugo Award-winning novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, and the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? are included.

A master assassin craves one thing above all else: a normal everyday life. Trained to be a killer from the age of 11, Peter has never known the things the average person takes for granted. He has always been an asset. Burned by the CIA and now occupying their secret hit list, he works overseas as a Ronin, living a solitary life in hiding. But someone knows where he is. A strange man arrives at his door offering Peter the chance of a real life. "Get this done and you can be free," he is told.

After the murder of a former colleague, Peter Black embarks on his most perilous mission yet—penetrating the fortified world of British billionaire Sir Mathew Jenrick, the man his colleague was working with before their death. Infiltrating Jenrick’s estate, Peter becomes bodyguard for the magnate’s nine-year-old daughter, Penelope, drawing him close to the innocent child and her tutor, Harriet Granger.

What began as a weekend fishing trip, turns into the fight of his life when lawyer Ben Carter finds a young boy alone on the side of a road in upstate New York. Quickly linking the boy to a murder scene more than a hundred miles away, the pair travel to nearby Pittsburgh, where a mystery thrusts them both into the fight of their lives.

Hardened ex-hit man Peter Black is back working the dark corridors of the CIA. It just so happens that fate has an ironic sense of timing. His first week back coincides with the unleashing of a cataclysmic virus that plunges the world into unparalleled turmoil. The sole antidote hides in a secret lab hidden beneath Sudan’s burning desert. But with the country on the verge of civil war, the CIA’s initial extraction mission fails, losing the vital cure in a maelstrom of savage violence.

Sebastian Acosta has been gunned down at three a.m. on a Saturday morning, sitting behind the wheel of a beaten-up Toyota. The passenger door is open, and a few paces away, his pal Luis Irizarry lies with his life ebbing away through two gunshot wounds in his chest. It should be a red-hot case, except that 15 years earlier, Rosario Rojas was raped and strangled in that same house, the house Luis was crawling toward, the house that belonged to Angela Rojas, Rosario’s daughter. Rosario, who was like a sister to Marta Flores, Detective Dehan’s mother.

Helen Troy is in the race to become the first Female President of the United States. She is pretty, feminine, assertive and a guy’s guy kind of girl, who smokes cigars and drinks whisky with the best of’em. Everybody loves her; but nobody has heard of her till now and she has an uphill fight against some experienced heavy hitters. But that’s not her biggest problem.

Because within ODIN there is General Operations, which speaks for itself; ODIN 5i, which deals with intelligence gathering, and then there is ODIN 1i which deals in operations so sensitive not even the CIA can touch them. All three are run with an iron first by The Chief, a giant with a gigantic IQ. His top agent is Alex Mason, hard and cool – he's a law unto himself.

ODIN is an organization which is above top secret. It coordinates intelligence from the so-called Five Eyes The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – and it acts on that intelligence. For that reason it’s level of security is the highest on the planet. Or so they thought, until top ODIN agent Mira Finn was murdered in Paris, her tortured body dragged from the Seine. A handful of people knew she was in France, fewer than that knew what her mission was.

Evil deeds that go unpunished only ever lead to more tragedy. A terrible atrocity kills hundreds of people, of which most are children. Twenty years later the men behind it are still unpunished. Not only that, they are now embroiled in new atrocities.

Raymond Carver called Anton Chekhov "the greatest short story writer who has ever lived". This unequivocal verdict on Chekhov's genius has been echoed many times by writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, John Cheever, and Tobias Wolf. While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed his achievements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes - alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence - have as much relevance today as when they were written.

Saul Epstein was used to trouble. When you’re the world’s most successful investigative journalist, and you devote your life to exposing the crimes of the great and the powerful, you learn to expect trouble. That’s why Saul was a recluse, that’s why he had no intimate circle, no close friends… So one question facing Alex Mason and Captain Aila Gallin was, who was it who entered Saul’s apartment like an old friend and shot him in the face at pointblank range without flinching – just like a pro?

When Peter Black is tasked with tracking down a mysterious terrorist collective known as The Wolf Pack he expects danger but nothing prepares him for the web of betrayal and deceit that awaits. At the same time, investigative journalist Kara Tate stumbles upon a shadowy world when a video from a source leads her to a deadly conspiracy that intertwines with Peters mission. From the tense confines of Syrian refugee camps to the bustling streets of New York, Peter uncovers a trail leading straight back to American soiland the hints of a cataclysmic event.

Charles Brandt, who handled over fifty-six homicides as the chief deputy attorney general of Delaware, in charge of all homicides and a private homicide defense attorney in the 1970s, has now used his hands-on professional experience in murder investigation and his analytic skills to conclusively solve every secret of the homicides of JFK, Officer Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963.

When a leading international financier is murdered in his Beverly Hills mansion, at first it looks like just another daemon at work in the City of Angels. But when the ritual nature of the killing emerges, the FBI takes an interest. And then the international connections start to emerge: the European Commission, high-ranking officials in Hong Kong...and Iran. That’s when the file gets passed to ODIN and Alex Mason.

A leak at GCHQ–the UK’s version of the NSA–means that sensitive Allied and Israeli intelligence is being fed to Iran and Israel’s wider enemies. ODIN, the Five Eyes’ ultra-secret Special Operations Office, has teamed up their best operative, Alex Mason, with the Mossad’s Captain Aila Gallin to investigate and plug the leak.

When the body of a tramp was found in a dumpster on Lafayette and Bryant in the Bronx, with no papers and no ID, the case was filed as unsolved–another victim nobody cared about, shot by some punk nobody cared about. That was 12 years ago. Then Detective Stone notices that the "tramp" had a $100 haircut and manicured nails. That makes him curious. He wants to know, who dresses a murder victim up as a tramp, then leaves them in full view in a dumpster? But the answers he gets are not the ones he expects.

Saul Epstein was used to trouble. When you’re the world’s most successful investigative journalist, and you devote your life to exposing the crimes of the great and the powerful, you learn to expect trouble. That’s why Saul was a recluse, that’s why he had no intimate circle, no close friends….