Hometown Hero Returns by Colleen Montgomery (staff reporter) DraftU.S. Air Force captain Kenneth Vance is back in Colorado Springs onmedical leave, and currently working for his old friend QuinnMontgomery's vandalism-plagued construction company. Sources say bothfamilies are being targeted for their roles in taking down that SouthAmerican drug cartel a year ago. Ken has been seen around town withJulianna Red Feather, who has been busy training caninesearch-and-rescue teams. Each is at a turning point in their careers—and lives—and spending all this time together might lead to good news for theVance family for the first time in months!

For 16-year-old Jan Kamienski, life as he knows it ends when Germany invades Poland on September 1, 1939. After a great deal of hardship, he joins the Polish Resistance and eventually, in 1941, is sent to Dresden, Germany, to take up Underground activities there. Armed with false papers, he works at various jobs, maintains a clandestine stopover for Allied couriers, produces Polish-language news bulletins for Poles housed in forced-labour camps, and does everything he can within the heartland of the Third Reich to sabotage the Nazis’ war effort. Among Kamienksi’s many horrific experiences is his survival during the terrible firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. After the war, the author becomes a translator in East Germany for the Russian occupiers, studies at the art academy in Dresden, and eventually finds work as an artist. In 1948, after marrying a German woman, he escapes the Soviet zone, is brutally interrogated in a Polish

Aboard the Hyperion, Richard Bolitho sets sail with an untrained crew for blockade duty off France. Unfortunately, his superior, Commodore Mathias Pelham-Martin, is an incompetent egotist whose petty hostilities jeopardize the operation of an entire fleet.

"An unnamed American city feeling the effects of a war waged far away and suffering from bad weather is the backdrop for this startling work of fiction. The protagonists are aimless young men going from one blue collar job to the next, or in a few cases, aspiring to middle management. Their everyday struggles--with women, with the morning commute, with a series of cruel bosses--are somehow transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully uncanny. That is the unsettling, funny, and ultimately heartfelt originality of Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's short fiction, to be at home in a world not quite our own but with many, many lessons to offer us"--

"Nick Ryan knows his craft, and his topic. His World War 3 stories are tightly-written, fast-moving, with great characters." - LARRY BOND Co-author of Tom Clancy's 'Red Storm Rising' and New York Times bestselling author of 'Red Phoenix' . When the Russian Army invading northern Poland threatens to quickly overwhelm Warsaw, a lone Company of American Abrams tanks and a unit of Irish infantry are sent forward to the small village of Stare Lubiejewo and given an impossible mission; hold back the advancing Russian Army at all costs. Overwhelmed by enemy tanks and APC's, the American tankers and the Irish infantry heroically fight off one determined assault after another until it seems they must surely be over-run. But the American and Irish fighting in the bomb-ravaged village have one last desperate plan up their sleeve. If it works, it might just buy the time the Allies need to reinforce and save the threatened Polish capital... . From the book... The two tanks broke free of the rubble that sheltered them and dashed gamely out into the fields, firing from point-blank range at the enemy troop carriers. A handful of advancing Russian infantry were crushed under their surging steel tracks. Others were scythed down by the Abrams machine guns. Three BMP-3s exploded in quick succession before the first of the enemy APCs slewed round on its spinning steel tracks and began to edge backwards. With the Abrams so close to their own troop carriers, the T-90s on the ridge fell silent, fearful of hitting friendly targets. One of the BMP-3s fired its main gun at an Abrams as it rampaged towards the hedgerow. The round struck the American tank's turret and deflected away harmlessly. Two more APCs fired at the same tank but the Abrams emerged, its sloped steel armor scorched and dented, but intact. The Russian infantry in the fields around the village lost all cohesion; they became just a cluster of desperate men who realized salvation depended on them retreating to the shelter of their troop carriers before the vehicles reversed and fled the field. The soldiers edged backwards, still firing to cover their withdrawal, and glanced nervously over their shoulders, fearful they would be abandoned...