Raised as a prototype for the Georgian Bratva's obedience drug, 221 fails to think, act, or live for himself; he's his master's perfectly-crafted killing puppet. Standing at six-foot-six, weighing two-hundred-and-fifty pounds, and unrivaled in to-the-death combat, 221 successfully secures business for the Georgian Mafiya Boss of NYC, who rules the dark world of the criminal underground. Until his enemies capture him. Talia Tolstaia dreams to break from the heavy clutches of Bratva life. She dreams of another life--away from the stifling leash of her Russian Bratva Boss father and from the brutality of her work at The Dungeon, her criminal family's underground death-match enterprise. But when she stumbles upon her family's captive who is more monster than man, she starts to see the man underneath. A powerful, beautiful, damaged man whose heart calls to hers. But sacrifices must be made--blood for blood...life for life...souls for scarred souls...

The Collector Book Three Sam Thornton has had many run-ins with his celestial masters, but when he's tasked with dispatching the mythical Brethren - a group of former Collectors who have cast off their ties to Hell - is he still working on the side of right? File Under: Urban Fantasy [ Soul Solution Secret Origins Flaming Torches Double Dealing ]

A bold debut novel that combines a coming-of-age story with the gritty lives and desolate beauty of Vermont's Northeast KingdomJessup Burke, a lonely, naive sixteen-year-old, has grown up fatherless in an indifferent, hardscrabble logging town. Out of high school a year early, he now bikes the back roads and roams the woods, fishing and daydreaming of his sweetheart. When he encounters Reg Cumber, a marijuana grower fresh out of prison, and Reg's younger, married sister, Jessup is lured into a world of danger and violence.With sure and supple prose, Rickstad draws readers into the hot, still air of a summer backwoods to witness Jessup's abrupt awakening into adulthood. A bold, unflinching novel about fate, self-knowledge, and family secrets, Reap is charged with Rickstad's keen sense of place and character and is alive with his vividly conjured natural world.

very great player knows that success in poker is part luck, part math, and part subterfuge. While the math of poker has been refined over the past 20 years, the ability to read other players and keep your own "tells" in check has mostly been learned by trial and error. But now, Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence officer specializing in nonverbal communication and behavior analysis—or, to put it simply, a man who can tell when someone's lying—offers foolproof techniques, illustrated with amazing examples from poker pro Phil Hellmuth, that will help you decode and interpret your opponents' body language and other silent tip-offs while concealing your own. You'll become a human lie detector, ready to call every bluff—and the most feared player in the room.

The fascinating debut of the prequel series to The Trade Pact Universe This prequel to The Trade Pact Universe series begins in a time before the Clan had learned how to manipulate the M?hir to travel between worlds. Aliens have begun to explore the world of Cersi, upsetting the delicate balance between the Clan and the two other powerful races who coexist by set rules. And one young woman is on the verge of finding the forbidden secret of the M?hir? a discovery that could prove the salvation or ruin of her entire species.

Future nations, surviving a devastating pandemic, collaborate in the Repopulation, Expansion, and Annexation Program (REAP) designed to send one-way missions to twenty-five potentially habitable moons or planets within five thousand light-years from Earth. Four couples staff each mission with two critical goals: populating the new planet and sending a message back that the orb is habitable. REAP 23, the twenty-third and longest mission, takes eight months of gravitational acceleration to achieve 70 percent of the speed of light. Despite extensive psychological screening and years of training, the stress of pending hibernation ending in finding a planet that is unsuitable results in conflicts on many levels. Insanity, sabotage, mutiny, violence, adultery, and death mar the ideological journey before entering ultrahibernation under the care of robots for thousands of years. After awakening, the reduced crew faces a deteriorating ship and systems. After orbiting and analyzing the distant planet, they send a message that is instantly delivered, utilizing quantum mechanical entanglement theory regarding the suitability for sustaining human life. Hundreds of years after the REAP missions departed, geopolitical changes wrought by nature and war obscured the missions, overwritten by subsequent history and buried under a short ice age. Only a small number of people retained the memories that became legend and the basis of a religion based on heroes in rockets sent away in the dawn of space travel to save humanity. This cult, called Reapers, survived over the millennia. Thousands of years later, Porliche, a graduate student, pursues a faint trail left by the Reapers. She finds lost information of this long-forgotten program and evidence that the bunker built at its inception to receive the messages both exists and has messages from the stellar-bound saints stored within. What she finds changes her world.