EDITORIAL REVIEW: It’s cold. The wells of power are weakening and the forces of Night grow strong. The gods are real, and still have some power, mostly to do harm. The Instrumentalities of the Night are the worst of these. Piper Hecht, born Else Tage, survived a battle with the Instrumentalities. Now he’s Captain-General of the armies fighting a crusade for Patriarch Sublime V. Intrigues swirl around the throne of the Grail Empire, as the imperial family’s enemy Anne of Menand raises money to help the perpetually indebted Patriarch finance his crusades. To reduce his own vulnerability, sickly young Emperor Lothar assigns his two half-sisters—his immediate heirs—to their own realms. Now Piper Hecht learns that the legendary sorcerer Cloven Februaren, referred to as the Ninth Unknown, is still alive, more than 100 years old, and on Piper’s side. As the dynastic politics of the Empire become even more convoluted, it’s clear that while the old gods may be fading, they’re determined to do everything they can to bend the doings of men to their own advantage. Sieges, explosions, betrayals, Anti-Patriarchs, and suspicious deaths will ensue as the great chess game plays itself out, with Piper Hecht at the center of it all…

Review

" Babes, bullets, & BIZARRO! Being a 3-foot tall plush teddy bear gumshoe in the crime-infested gloom of Nero City is no FUN unless you're the reader!" --Joe Pulver, author of SIN and Ashes and Blood Will Have Its Season

"A wonderfully ridiculous book by a very fine young writer, who delivers imagination balanced by genuinely caring and adept writing."- Kris Saknusemm, author of Zanesville, Private Midnight and Enigmatic Pilot

"If you grabbed the best elements of Raymond Chandler's literature, wrapped it all in bizarre alien, zombie and furry madness, threw in a few martial arts movies and sprinkled enough one liners on top of it to keep the late, great Rodney Dangerfield satisfied, you might end up with something as good as Garrett Cook's latest-" Austin Post

"Full of crazy situations that make David Lynch look sane"- J.R LeMar, fookyoutwit.com

"It's clever, insightful and bizarre as hell"- Marc Paoletti, author of SCORCH and THE VAMPIRE AGENT

When a body is discovered on a rocky little island in the middle of Nethergate Bay the media swoop on the seaside town. Soon an enquiring hack discovers that local resident Fran Castle, has previously aided the police using her psychic abilities. Brought into the investigation, Fran naturally asks her friend Libby Sarjeant to help, but they soon find themselves up to their knees in more mud and murder than they could possibly have anticipated.

'Floundering in the footsteps of a deliberately downplayed police enquiry, Libby manages to stir up more mud than the rotavator'. When television personality Lewis Osbourne-Walker buys Creekmarsh Place, near Steeple Martin in Kent, Libby Sarjeant's son Adam is employed to help with the renovation of the garden. What he doesn't expect is to uncover a long buried corpse. Libby, naturally, wants to know more about it, but the police aren't going to tell her, and with her friend Fran's mind on other things, she has to go it alone, with interesting and possibly catastrophic results.

The sixth in the Libby Sarjeant series sees Libby and her friend Fran involved in the strange rituals of the local Morris Men, when one of them is found dead on May Day and another seems to have vanished into thin air. Libby goes out of her comfort zone as far as Cornwall in search of the solution, which, in the end, is found much closer to home, turning out to be the most unpleasant case she has dealt with yet.

In all the years Xana Scorpio has hunted vampires with her brother, only vampire king Marius has eluded her. Then Marius captures her. He's convinced she has the antidote to a toxin killing his people. Desperate for information to save them, Marius will use every sensual power in his arsenal to get what he wants. Though Xana tries to resist him, Marius is as seductive as he is deadly. She is held helpless by his gaze—and by the surge of desire aroused with his bite....

SUMMARY: Orphaned at a tender age, Millie Forester is adopted by "Raggie Aggie" Winkowski, and she suffers misfortune and misplaced love as she grows to adulthood side by side with Aggie's son, Ben, whose love for Millie increases over the years.

Former undercover agents Drake and Melody are teamed to run a race along the California Coast for a prize of a million dollars--in 1969 when a million is worth something. The stakes increase when startling events produce fatalities and lead them to ask whether the Cold War with the USSR is about to heat up. Can they prevent the worst from happening while they keep running?