Maneater by Jack Warner

Most hunts end in a death. This hunt begins with one–Lanelle Jackson’s. A wild tiger has escaped its cargo truck and now roams the dense forests of the Appalachian Mountains. When deer and wild boar run out, the tiger turns its growing hunger towards man. Now it has a taste for easy prey. With a body-count on the rise and the media coming in, Sheriff Grady Brickhouse calls upon Jim Graham, a tiger hunter trained in India to end the maneater’s killing spree.

However, Graham is retired, and at 73 his body isn’t as fast as it used to be. The only edge Graham holds now is a nine-year-old boy who has somehow bonded with the tiger. But, it’s a bond that makes him protective of the beast, even as it circles ever closer to hurting the ones he loves. This hunt will probably be Graham’s last. The question is, will it end with the tiger’s death or his own?

In Maneater, author Jack Warner crafts a tightly suspenseful adventure novel where death hides in the shadows of small town life. It will have you straining to hear the low growl of the wild before it’s too late…

In Survivor, the coda to William W. Johnstone’s bestselling “Ashes” series, Jim LaDoux, the grandson of the legendary General Ben Raines, has seen his grandfather and the last of his family die in the beginnings of the plague that sweeps the world, leaving many millions dead and a civilization struggling to survive and re-build after yet another in a what seems like an endless series of crippling blows.

LaDoux, having stayed alone for six months in the isolated Idaho cabin built by his ancestors, realizes that he must get out and find life and hope or he will surrender to despair and death. As he starts traveling, he finds a young woman, Bev, who had been on a Believer mission and who has barely survived an attack by Rejects. The Rejects are a chaotic and violent movement of outcasts who have seen all the destruction and horror of the last few years and have formed a single belief: that there can be no God in a world such as they’ve lived in.

As they travel together, they find love for each other and they have to deal with members of both sides of the struggle and then encounter yet a third faction, the Rebels, who believe that Ben Raines’s set of beliefs is still alive and that faith, courage and firepower combined can beat back the evil that threatens to end the world.

New York Times bestselling author Michael Prescott has published ten suspense thrillers, and E-Reads is happy to bring three of them to you in e-book format: Next Victim, which introduces FBI agent Tess McCallum; Dangerous Games, a second Tess McCallum; and In Dark Places, a single title thriller.  You can also purchase paperback editions if you prefer.

Next Victim introduces Tess, a  blond, gray-eyed, single and totally dedicated FBI agent whose work and personal life have been stuck in neutral since the traumatic night she came home to find her fellow FBI agent, and secret lover, ritually murdered by the slippery sex-killer she had been pursuing. Her target, Mobius is a crafty, complex and completely insane serial killer. His unique scariness is because he’s so ordinary, an everyman who could be just about anyone…or anywhere.

Now, two unnervingly inactive years later, Tess gets a summons from her former boss bringing her to L.A. to investigate a suspect who seems frighteningly similar to Mobius. He’s back, with a new identity and, as a result of his latest opportunistic killing, a new weapon of mass destruction (a canister of VX nerve agent) and a nasty plan to kill thousands all at once. Tess must unravel the puzzle and figure out the secret of Mobius before he kills her, along with a big chunk of Los Angeles. The suspense starts early and doesn’t quit.

In Dangerous Games Tess is back and she’s got a new partner, one she doesn’t want and doesn’t trust. She’s chasing a vicious kidnapper known as the “Rain Man,” who leaves his victims chained up in vast storm drain system underneath Los Angeles and doomed to drown unless their ransom is paid on time.

Freelance security agent Abby Sinclair, who specializes in putting stalkers behind bars, often by extra-legal means, has her hooks in the case and is working for a woman who may have been targeted—but who doesn’t trust the authorities to protect her.

In In Dark Places Psychiatrist Robin Cameron seems on the verge of success with an experimental program that uses a magnetic helmet to trigger, then modify, old angers that cause criminal behavior.She has been working with a promising candidate for behavior modification, an atypical serial killer Justin Gray.

Another, very reluctant, subject of her experimental treatment is LAPD Sergeant Alan Brand, who unwittingly admits to a cold-blooded killing while under Robin’s care.

When Gray escapes and Robin’s teenaged daughter, Megan, is kidnapped, Robin doesn’t know who to accuse – or whether there’s something even darker, nastier and more complicated afoot.

Do you believe in reincarnation?  How would you prove  it?  After all, if you’re dead, how do you know if it actually happened?

Lucas Brokaw is an incredibly wealthy man. But though he has amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world, he is without an heir. Looking death in the face, he decides to leave his money to whoever can prove to be his reincarnated self.

He has set up a foundation to oversee his assets until someone steps forward as the reincarnation of Lucas Brokaw — and can prove it. Hundreds of candidates emerge, each claiming to be the millionaire returned to collect his fortune. But all of them fail to provide significant knowledge of the life of Brokaw to back up their petition. Only one candidate is able to pass all of the tests. Now he must prove himself by traversing the final and most difficult obstacle: a chamber of secrets rife with deadly traps that can only be defused by intimate knowledge of Brokaw’s codes. If there truly is such a thing as a human soul, the world is about to find out.

That’s the plot of The Second Coming of Lucas Brokaw, the first contemporary suspense novel by Western Writers of America award-winner Matt Braun.

In Greg Bear’s new futuristic FBI thriller Mariposa, the world just keeps getting tougher and more complicated. America teeters on the edge of bankruptcy because of crushing foreign debt and an apparent savior, The Talos Corporation, delivers training for soldiers and security forces around the world, logistical support and badly-needed troops economically. But there’s a sinister hidden cost. The three rookie FBI agents who survived the challenges portrayed in Quantico are drawn back together in an alliance against a deadly challenge for which no one seems prepared. The code name is “Mariposa”, and only a desperate combination of misfits and survivors can combat a threat spelling nothing less than the collapse of American democracy.

E-Reads is happy to bring you the e-book edition of Mariposa. For those who prefer to read the print edition, click here. If you want to read the novel that launched this futuristic FBI thriller series, you can buy the e-book of Quantico here or the print edition here.

And for a menu of eighteen unforgettable novels by this award-winning master of science fiction, visit Greg Bear’s page on E-Reads.

RC

About Greg Bear

Greg Bear, author of over 25 books, which have been translated into 17 languages, has won science fiction’s highest honors and is considered the natural heir to Arthur C. Clarke. The recipient of two Hugos and four Nebulas for his fiction, he has been called “the best working writer of hard science fiction” by The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Many of his novels, such as Darwin’s Radio, are considered to be this generations’ classics. He is married to Astrid Anderson, daughter of science fiction great Poul Anderson, and they are the parents of two children, Erik and Alexandria. His most recent thriller novel, Quantico, was published in 2007. He has since published a new, epic SF novel, City at the End of Time.

Amazon has just posted its list of best science fiction and fantasy books of 2007 and Dan Simmons’s The Terror is the top-rated book in the category. If you haven’t read this masterpiece I can’t imagine what you’re waiting for. Simmons’s recounting of the doomed Franklin expedition in search of the Northwest passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific will freeze your blood. Bad enough that two ships lay icebound for several years, but the lurking presence of a malevolent and unnameable predator takes the book into the territory of Melville and Conrad.

E-Reads is proud to carry two earlier novels by Dan Simmons, Song of Kali and Phases of Gravity.

- Richard Curtis

We’ve got a legitimate ebook bestseller here at E-Reads with Quantico by Greg Bear. The trade hardcover was published in April 2007 and we finally caught up to things with the ebook edition released about two weeks ago. Since we released Quantico, we’ve sold in those two weeks about fifteen times the number of copies that the average ebook title sells in a month. It’s not quite to the point yet where we need to bug the New York Times about starting a new bestseller list for ebooks but we’ve clearly tapped into some pent-up demand so we thought we should tell the world and try to keep those sales numbers moving up.

Greg Bear is the author of more than thirty books of science fiction and fantasy, including Blood Music, The Forge of God, and Darwin’s Radio. He has won two Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards for his fiction, and is one of two authors to win a Nebula in every fiction category. Bear has been called the “best working writer of hard science fiction” by The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Bear has served on political and scientific action committees and has advised Microsoft Corporation, the U.S. Army, the CIA, Sandia National Laboratories, Callison Architecture, Inc., and other groups and agencies. His last few books, while continuing to use the technological extrapolation and imagination that Bear has always demonstrated, have moved in the story and setting direction toward a more thriller-oriented feel and presentation and Quantico has demonstrated that Bear is taking giant steps in developing a more mainstream, popular audience for his work and this latest examination of bioterrorism in a near-future world gone mad with ever-escalating acts of terror, is a gripping read, a tour-de-force of imagination and a thrill-ride of a story.

Quantico has garnered enthusiastic praise from a broad spectrum of sources:

Entertainment Weekly said: “Far from the typical FBI procedural, Bear’s latest is a dark look at the near future. Quantico confidently delivers a mix of forensic handiwork, bureaucratic insight, and futuristic speculation.”

Bestselling author (The Watchman) Robert Crais said: “Quantico is a terrifying glimpse into the nightmare of global bio-terror. Greg Bear combines real-world science, headline news, and five-minutes-from-now extrapolation into an adrenaline-amped thriller that will scare the hell out of you.”

Publishers Weekly said: “Bear’s near-future science is, as always, eerily plausible…”

Bear’s hardcover publisher, Vanguard Press, has launched a special website just for the book and it’s worth checking out since, among other things, Bear has compiled an interesting timeline history of terrorism through the centuries, an extensive bibliography, a Q&A about his work in conceiving and writing the book and numerous related articles. And, while you’re checking out websites, you should look at Bear’s own website which has information on all of his titles, a number of which are also available as E-Reads ebooks.

Save a tree, buy an ebook. All the excitement of this thriller is available at a price that beats that hardcover edition by a considerable margin (Amazon lists the book, cover price $24.95, for $16.47 but the ebook price is only $8.99. Buy it today!