Audiobook Test Drive

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INTRODUCING SHERLOCK HOLMES' FEMALE RIVALS!

This unique collection for connoisseurs of detection done female style brings back six of the greatest fictional women sleuths of the era of gaslights and horseless carriages. Fans of Kinsey Milhone and other contemporary women detectives, as well as of Agatha Christie and Honey West, will love this collection featuring the foremothers of today's fictional female crime-fighters.

Long out of print and unobtainable, these celebrated women 'tecs ― Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange, Arthur B. Reeve's Constance Dunlap, C. L. Pirkis' Loveday Brooke, Valentine's Daphne Wrayne, and Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace's Ruth Kelstern ― were once nearly as famous as the fictional sleuth of Baker Street himself. Their fame waned in the long decades of the 1930s through the '80s, when female sleuths took a backseat to Sam Spade, Nero Wolfe, and the like. But, they are back to baffle and thrill contemporary readers in The Legendary Women Detectives edited by Jean Marie Stine.

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A FANCIFUL AND HUMOROUS RETURN TO OZ

The Giant Chinchilla of Oz is an exciting, funny, thought-provoking and clever mixture of L. Frank Baum, Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth), and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Eleven-year old Jason Brandt meets Harvey the Squid (a retired cab driver) and Button-Bright (who can't remember his real name), and acquires a pet Expanding Giant Chinchilla (for use in emergencies). Together this foursome must overcome The Two Weevils (Less and Greater, of course), The Spin Doctor, the weird inhabitants of Stationery City, and other dangers to bring a warning to the Emerald City before it's too late.

Filled with jokes and sly commentary on everything from our Internet-obsessed society to the world of fashion design, The Giant Chinchilla of Oz has something for listeners of all ages.

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A STRUGGLE AGAINST DARK POWERS AND THE NAMELESS ONE!

Winner of the World Fantasy, Edgar Allan Poe, Ellery Queen, Locus and British Fantasy Awards, Manly Wade Wellman is considered one of the greatest fantasy writers who ever lived and is one of the creators of the great Weird Tales tradition.

An eerie tale of the American Civil War, and the uncanny evil being who called himself Persil Mandifer, and his lovely daughter, Enid, a tale of dark powers and weird happenings. The year is 1862, the place the Deep South. Enid Mandifer has been sent hypnotized by her stepfather, Persil Mandifer, to be a sacrifice to the Nameless One, a demonic presence who haunts an ancient house under the shadow of a natural pillar called Fearful Rock. Kane Lanark, a Lieutenant in the Union cavalry, who has been ordered to scout for Quantrill's infamous raiders, discovers Enid in a half-dazed condition on the trail to Fearful Rock. Kane is puzzled and repelled when he learns of her stepfather's strange worship.

Sergeant Jager, a religious fanatic known as "Bible" Jager to the other soldiers in their troop, and Kane's assistant, finds a horned image in the cellar of the house at Fearful Rock and destroys it, earning Persil Mandifer's undying hatred and his curse. After the Civil war, cosmic forces reunite all four at the foot of Fearful Rock, where the dead rise and events reach an eerie, shattering climax.

In the sequel, Coven, set several years later, Cole Wickett, a former Southern officer, who has lost everything in the war and become a tramp, drifts toward a small community he has heard of now called Welcome Rock, where a minister named Jager preaches to all who seek refuge. There Wickett and Jager battle a coven of evil witches pledged to the devil, and find themselves opposed to dark beings wielding unimaginable powers. Forces only the spells from a strange book called "Long Lost Friend" can possibly defeat. If Wickett and Jager can survive long enough to use it.

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GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE FICTION FROM THE PAST

Six often overlooked award-caliber sci-fi short novels and novelettes.

All the stories in this unique anthology were voted to be among the top stories of their year. We believe each would be a top story of any year.

Rog Phillips’ other stories are eclipsed by his psychological thriller, the brilliant Rat in the Skull, which received a well-deserved Hugo Award nomination.

In H. L. Gold’s “Inside Man”, he dreams up brand-new wrinkles on ESP no one else, including you, has ever thought of. The special quality of this work was endorsed by his colleagues when it was nominated for the Nebula Award for best short story.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction praises Leigh Brackett’s “The Stellar Legion” for its color, narrative speed, the brooding forthrightness of its protagonists, and the economy and vigor of her style, so it is hardly surprising that it earned a Retro Hugo Award nomination.

Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain” also earned a Retro Hugo nomination.

Evelyn Martin’s Reluctant Eve, winner of the Jules Verne Prize for most outstanding achievement in the science-fiction field for 1956, was the first science-fiction romance and is still an enthralling story today.

Don Wilcox's “The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years” (1940) was the first generation starship story and the first to incorporate the breakthrough notion of Earth developing faster-than-light ships that beat the generation ship to its destination - a worthy recipient of a Retro Hugo nomination.

Wherever you are on the spectrum of science-fiction knowledge or fandom, you’ll find hours of enthralling listening (and re-listening): forgotten favorites for long-time science-fiction fans and an introductory grand tour for those new to the genre.

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With Bionic Lover, acclaimed erotic science fiction author M. Christian spins a mesmerizing tale of bittersweet desire, lesbian romance, and all-too human frailty set in a near future San Francisco where cybernetics aren’t just commonplace but the stuff of erotic dreams.

It is a powerful and erotic lesbian romance exploring love, lust…and loss.

Pell was lost, alone, and lonely―until Arc appeared. Fiery, enigmatic, and with a mesmerizing cybernetic eye, Arc was everything Pell needed, wanted, and most of all, desired.

The next time Pell saw Arc the eye wasn’t the only thing artificial about her new lover. And the time after that, and the time after that: each time the passionate and mysterious Arc drifted into her life, Pell saw more and more of her being replaced by refined and precise machinery…and with each departure of her natural body for the artificial, Pell grew more and more terrified.

One day, she knew, there’d be nothing left of her lover but the cold, the engineered…the bionic.

Pell knew what she had to do…but the end, when it came, was worse than she ever could have imagined.

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A CLASSIC LOUIS L’AMOUR TAMING OF THE WEST TALE

Rock Bannon was a killer and a hero. All the settlers understood was that he was a killer, and where they came from killing was wrong and justice left to the police. So, Rock's warnings of peril fell on deaf ears and the settlers forged onward, lured toward certain destruction by a glowing promise of a cheap rangeland paradise that didn't exist. Then Mort Harper, the worst killer in the territory, took Rock Bannon's fiancée, and Rock came to get her.

"Figured you'd haul for this place if you knew the country at all," Bannon said. "So I cut across country."

"There's no other trail," Harper said.

Bannon replied, "I make my own trails. I don't try to follow and steal the work of other men."

Harper laughed and his hand swept down and up ... the two guns boomed together.

Showdown Trail was first published in Giant Western magazine in winter 1948 under Louis L'Amour's Jim Mayo pseudonym. Years later, when L'Amour was first starting out as a paperback novelist, it was rewritten as The Tall Stranger. One of the earliest L'Amour westerns to be adapted for the movies, the film version starred Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, and Michael Ansara.

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Riders of the Tumbling K is an overlooked novel-length work that Louis L’Amour wrote as a series of three novelettes over a five-year period from 1947 to 1951. It was first published in ebook format in 2014 and has since enjoyed consistent popularity. An audiobook edition is now available to L’Amour fans who prefer listening to rather than reading his enigmatic stories about the taming of the West. With his ear for cowboy jargon, and his feel for the wide-open spaces, L’Amour has created a wholly fictional but entirely real setting for his stories, and created characters that seem as real as if they’d truly lived. More so than many stories in other genres, though not originally intended to be read aloud, they benefit from it greatly. It’s almost like listening to an old timer who lived through those adventures recounting them around a campfire, or in a rocking chair on a shady front porch. Randal Shafer has the perfect voice to make these stories and characters ring true. His slight rural twang effortlessly transports the listener to yesteryear and the hard scrabble living conditions that existed for the inhabitants of that region.

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A HARROWING JOURNEY ALONG THE DARK TRAIL

Schoolteacher Konrad Diamond falls afoul of cattle baron Ernst Haeckel. Rather than invite more trouble, Diamond and his sister Lila light out for new pastures. But the vindictive Haeckel puts a price on Diamond’s head, and the bounty hunters are coming for him. The teacher and his sister fall in with Gusty Gillespie, a battle-scarred bruiser, and then fate throws the trio into the path of Jacob Millard, who is on a rescue mission for a young girl kidnapped from his town. Konrad, Lila, and Gusty try to persuade him it is a suicidal enterprise. But what the hell! They say blood is thicker than water. The group of four wade through a crimson tide as they ride the dark trail and do battle with bounty hunters, Cheyenne warriors, crooked lawmen, and outlaws. No one can foretell which of them will survive, if any.

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YOU NEVER HEARD OF HER ― BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE!

Her name is Frances Deegan. She wrote 21 stories and 35 articles under her own name for the science fiction pulps between 1944 and 1952, when few other women were selling to them at all. Yet you won't find her listed in any book about science fiction. Not The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction, Pamela Sergeant's Women of Wonder, Roger C. Schlobin's comprehensive listing of women science fiction authors, Urania's Daughters, Alexei and Cory Panshin's The World Beyond the Hill, or David Hartwell's Dark Descent. In fact, in the years since her death, Frances Deegan has become the forgotten woman of the golden age of pulp science fiction, and none of her stories have ever been reprinted.

The only place you will find Frances Deegan's name is buried among the plethora of male authors in the table-of-contents listings for old sf magazines. Yet at a time when only a handful of women were writing or reading science fiction, Frances Deegan was one of the field's most popular authors, if the letter columns of the period are to be believed. And that popularity was deserved, as this first-ever collection of her stories shows. And what stories they are! Set against backgrounds that are often rustic ("The Radiant Rock"), peopled with characters who are decidedly not urban ("The Wizard of Blue Gap"), and frequently humorous, with comic touches in even the most straightforward scientific puzzle story ("The Third Bolt"), they blazed new trails for science fiction when first written and still stand out as vigorous, idiosyncratic work even today, a half century after they were written.

It is hoped that this collection will introduce the work of this forgotten woman to new generations and help, in some measure, to rescue the name and reputation of Frances Deegan from obscurity.

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MEET GLORIA MORRIS, BAD ASS P.I. EXTRAORDINAIRE

Gloria Morris is a respected private detective with an explosive sense of honor who cherishes frisky ladies, reads Poe and Twain, believes in justice, and kicks a lot of ass. Her investigation into the disappearance of a popular and notorious seductress, whose pervasive presence affects the lives of two compelling women, takes her to San Francisco’s sexual underground and the discovery of treasonous political intrigue. She is assisted by the missing woman’s roommate and lover, Clarissa, and together they engage in a cat and mouse scenario with a powerful femme fatale, who is Gloria’s chief suspect. It turns out that searching for the missing beauty is only one of the problems they encounter. During the course of her investigation, Gloria meets an astonishing lady and begins a life-changing romance. But will this new relationship benefit her work … or deliver her to danger?