Murder on the Sysadmin Express After accidentally solving two murders, Dale Whitehead hungers to stay in his apartment, hack virtual memory stacks, and forget the whole thing. Instead, his boss sends him to a technology/sci-fi convention in Detroit. He plans to endure his stint at the vendor table, stumble through his presentation, and escape anonymously. A dead body ruins everything. Dale finds himself battling liquid nitrogen ice cream, balky network addressing schemes, the Chaos Machine, and his own reputation, while the corpses pile up. "Wait to see if it happens again:" Great for troubleshooting IPv6 multicast over wireless. Not so much for murder.

High Speed Madness, with Love at the Wheel   Love. The most overloaded word in our language. Love of your mate, love of pets, of parents and children and friends, all different things. We spend our last breath sharing our love. For love, we break not just the law but ourselves. Love is pure devotion, and pure corrosion. Love propels these stories. Thrillers and fantasies, science fiction and historicals. Love chained by brain implants and little old ladies who should have been left undisturbed. Love strong enough to unravel the universe, with the knowledge to do it. Minuscule love wiggling its whiskers against your cheek. Trapped children freeing themselves through love of the incomprehensible. Love of art and family and another person, the kind of love that violates museums and gnaws Semtex. Selected from a decade of the author’s work, these eleven tales affirm the power of love—at knifepoint.   “Each story is Hieronymus Bosch writing a love letter to Charlie Brown’s little red-haired girl now grown and so weary she aches.” – ZZ Claybourne

Physics inconvenient? Change it. Then watch it try to kill you. Solve a murder in a universe without ground to stand on. Investigate inexplicable deaths a few million years after the Big Bang. Take too many breaths and never go home again. Let the antimatter trickle between your fingers, and visit five alien universes in this first Montague Portal omnibus. Contains: Forever Falls Hydrogen Sleets Drinking Heavy Water Sticky Supersaturation No More Lonesome Blue Rings

SECOND CONTACT Aidan Redding’s entire goal for her time in this universe: behave. For once. Discovering seafaring aliens trashes that plan. The aliens raise questions. Her co-workers raise more. The answers explain it all. And ruin everything. On a world where gravity changes every second, Redding finds herself involuntarily allied with a mathematician from Soviet Texas as she races to save not just herself but civilization. Forget aliens. Nothing threatens Earth’s golden age so much as ordinary human beings.  

“If Agatha Christie ran Unix Conventions”The BSD North conference draws some of the smartest people in the world. These few days will validate Dale Whitehead’s work—or expose him as a fraud. When a tragic death devastates the conference, only Dale suspects murder. Computer geeks care about code. But do they care enough… to kill?

A FAMILY AFFRAY With her father’s death, mercenary thief Beaks returns to the place she hates most—her childhood home, to both pay her respects and make certain he’s gone. She finds only lies. Determined to rip the truth out of the shadows, Beaks ricochets around the world, defying killers and government agents alike. With the man she loves and the secretive hacker Sister Silence, she targets a nightmare that turns suffering into profit and slaughter into joy. Family. It’s worse than murder.

Duplicate. Infiltrate. Exterminate.Liberate?The alien ate its way out of Antarctica, devouring and duplicating every living thing it found. Humanity turned continents to glass and oceans to poison in a desperate effort to stop it—and failed.Nobody expected that once the alien copied everyone, once it owned the world, it would set the copies free.Police detective Kevin Holtzmann fled with his family into the desert, and almost survived. Now a new Kevin must figure out the terrifying new world’s rules before the world eats him alive—again. His life teeters between yesterday’s nightmares and tomorrow’s unknown horrors.But humanity’s best and worst features survived. Life means hope, and terror, and joy, and fear. New life means new dangers. New threats. New crimes…Good thing he’s a new Kevin.

50% John McClane50% Robin Hood100% trouble Reeling from the death of her lover and partner, freelance “exfiltration specialist” Billie Carrie Salton breaks into a high-tech, high-security biotechnology firm to steal their sickle cell anemia cure and broadcast it to the world. In, out, announce. Easy. Except Salton’s life never works that smoothly. And a gig gone wrong only begins the disasters.

After extinction?Politics.Monsters.Murder.The alien Absolute eradicated Earth’s native life, replacing a fraction of it with alien duplicates. Kevin remembers the life of a police officer, but must find a new life in the bizarrely warped landscape of northern Michigan.But even astonishingly resilient alien flesh breaks down, with enough effort.Or enough electricity.Absolute eradicated humanity. But his copies brought the worst parts of humanity with them…