Special Agent Patrick Bowers had only met one man who made him truly afraid. Until now. When he's called to North Carolina to consult on the case of an area serial killer, he finds himself in a deadly game. Cunning and lethal, the killer is always one step ahead of the law, and he's about to strike again. It will take all of Bowers's instincts and training to stop this man who calls himself the Illusionist. And just when the pieces start to come together, Bowers realizes they're not quite adding up. Can he unravel the pattern and save the next victim? Or will the Illusionist win the game by taking one of his opponent's pieces? Thrilling, chilling, and impossible to put down, The Pawn will hold suspense lovers in its iron grip until the very last page.

Before establishing himself as the "master of disaster" with the 1970s films The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, Irwin Allen created four of television's most exciting and enduring science-fiction series: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. These 1960s series were full of Allen's favorite tricks, techniques and characteristic touches, and influenced other productions from the original Star Trek forward. Every science-fiction show owes something to Allen, yet none has equaled his series' pace, excitement, or originality. This detailed examination and documentation of the premise and origin of the four shows offers an objective evaluation of every episode--and demonstrates that when Irwin Allen's television episodes were good, they were great, and when they were bad, they were still terrific fun.

Patricia Ann Browning didn't see the deer standing in the middle of the road until it was too late, not that it would have mattered. For retired NYPD Detective, James Maguire, the pieces of his life were finally starting to fall into place. He was running his own lucrative private security firm catering to Fortune 500 companies and had just met Melody Anderson, a highly successful business woman from Long Island's posh enclave of Southampton. Everything, it seemed, was looking up. That was until the morning newscast reported that his former high school flame was missing from a one car accident on a rural country road in upstate New York. Arriving back in his old hometown Maguire must come to terms, not only with his past, but the fact that no one seems interested in pursuing the investigation into Patricia Browning's disappearance, including the missing woman's husband, the local sheriff. As Maguire struggles to put the clues together in time, he is drawn deeper into a game where people are as expendable as pieces in a chess game and the only goal is to take down the king. A crown Maguire unwittingly wears.

Merlyn's Mind completes the original trilogy of segmented story-dreams by the sixth century Merlyn, the Scotsman. The Present, real time story-dream brothers, Robert the poet and Richard the writer, continue their theoretical discussions in real time from May 2007 into late February 2008. The Past, with Grandma's Stories begin with Lady Allowyn and Sir Geoffrey in the sixteenth century and works her way into the twentieth century where Grandma Earth ends her genealogical narratives with the nineteen year olds Robert and Richard Graystone and their future wives, Connie and Cindy Bleacher, at the dining room table celebrating the late FDR's January birthday with their respective parents and grandparents, first in 1960, then again in 1961. Thus, old Grandma completes word-filled human snapshots, fruitfully linking the Graystone and Bleacher generations from 12,000 years ago in the first book to the present, 2008, in the third book. Merlyn's suggestive Future, titled 'Pouch Text, ' concludes with all the major characters alive but one. The family group ( a mixture of human beings and their physically and mentally human-like marsupial counterparts from HomePlanets across the Milky Way galaxy) focus on raising seven year old Diplomat, a hybrid of both species and cultures, on Earth.