Free Agent

Remo is set to teach a few lessons in hospitality at Florida's top tourist attraction, but his mind is made up. He is a free agent. No more CURE, no more trying to solve America's problems.

But the nation goes into a state of shock when a Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike is nailed trying to shoot the President, and Remo can't ignore a sense of deja vu. Soon, a meddling television anchorwoman and strange transformations at the White House leave him feeling that he has landed in a role in a bizarre Hollywood Thriller

With the direct line to the President still dead, and Chiun trying to give away the secret of CURE, Remo and Smith are hard-pressed to protect the Man who threatened to shut down CURE for good...

When Captain Audion holds America hostage by jamming all television transmission and star news anchor Cheeta Ching is kidnapped, Remo must save the country by defeating Captain Audion and rescuing Cheeta.

A wave of global terrorism spreads as a result of one madman's tyrannical powers. Even while the governments of three major world powers are on his trail, CURE, the United States' top secret agency, knows of only one way to solve the problem - The Destroyer. There's little doubt that Master Chiun's protégé Remo Williams is capable of waging any war, but when the mysterious radical assassin is out to kill, everyone runs for cover - except the fearless and most powerful.

Death was in the air

All over America the airline travelers were dying, seduced by lovely young women and strangled by silken scarves in savage hands. The security of the nation hung over an open grave - and Remo Williams, the Destroyer, and his oriental master and mentor Chiun, were ordered to slay the slayers and save the free world.

Little did Remo and Chiun suspect that their enemy was an ancient goddess who had a fifteen-hundred-year-old score to settle with Chiun. She commanded an army of youthful devotees and had the power to turn even Remo into her helpless slave. Now the Destroyer was being used for evil rather than good in an ultimate struggle between light and darkness that even Chiun feared he might not win...

It's Easter in Reading — a bad time for eggs — and no one can remember the last sunny day. Ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III, minor baronet, ex-convict, and former millionaire philanthropist, is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. All the evidence points to his ex-wife, who has conveniently shot herself.

But Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary remain unconvinced, a sentiment not shared with their superiors at the Reading Police Department, who are still smarting over their failure to convict the Three Pigs of murdering Mr. Wolff. Before long Jack and Mary find themselves grappling with a sinister plot involving cross-border money laundering, bullion smuggling, problems with beanstalks, titans seeking asylum, and the cut and thrust world of international chiropody.

And on top of all that, the JellyMan is coming to town...

The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown, despite being a bit of an international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City & The City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but from book to book he's tried on different genres, and here he's fully hard-boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detective's voice that's wonderfully appropriate for this story of seen and unseen. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu's own dissolving sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder.

Red Alert

When a diabolical superfoe acquires a superlaser that uses hypercolor to control emotion, he throws the world into a kaleidoscope of deadly mood swings. CURE goes on red alert.

And if things aren't black enough, a rival nation has seen the mind-blowing potential of beaming mood-altering color from satellites...and rendering entire nations defenseless.

Color them crazy, but Remo and Chiun know they've got to thwart this bizarre color scheme. More than ever before they must rely on their sensory skills honed to a razor sharpness - because the Destroyer is going to catch the enemy blindfolded.

When Inspector Peter Glebsky arrives at a remote ski chalet, he intends to ski, drink brandy, and loaf around in blissful solitude. But the chalet’s other vacationers—a famous hypnotist, a physicist with a penchant for gymnastic feats, and a large handful of others—are a nuisance, and so is the avalanche that soon cuts the inn off from civilization. And then there’s the dead body, which may not even be human…

In this genre-bending novel, the Strugatskys gleefully upend the plot of many a Hercule Poirot mystery, and the result is much funnier, and much stranger, than anything ever written by Agatha Christie.

Review

“If Russian sci-fi can be said to have a soul, it resides with the Brothers Strugatsky… Delightful, and a must-read for a new generation of sci-fi fans everywhere.”

—NPR

“This is the Strugatskys at their best, at once silly and dead serious… It’s a ripping good yarn, which translator Josh Billings has rendered with great energy and wit.”

—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Does for science-fiction/detective hybridization what *Hard to Be a God* has done for sci-fi/fantasy.”

—Flavorwire

At the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Alfred Bester--who as a comic book writer created the original Green Lantern

Oath and such supervillains as Solomon Grundy--wrote two of the seminal works of the genre and then pretty much retired from

the scene.  His first, The Demolished Man, won the inaugural Hugo Award in 1953.

These classic overtones helped to give added intellectual heft to what might have been merely one more entry in an essentially

pulp fiction medium.  Some of it is a little clunky now--the Freudian motivations ring especially hollow--but it's easy to see

why it would have been so important to the field of Science Fiction when it was written.  Borrowing from the classics, Bester

himself created a Classic.

Peter DelaSangre lives in seclusion with his father on an island off the coast of Florida. They have good reason for their isolation: Peter and his father are dragons. Capable of taking human form, they have built a successful business in Florida, run by humans they control but don't trust. Peter and his father feed on humans, but do so stealthily, so as not to draw attention to themselves. But when Peter brings a young woman named Maria to the island in secret and kills her to avoid having her discover that he is a dragon, he draws the suspicion of her brother, Jorge. Peter is distracted, however, by his father's death and the scent of a female dragon who possibly could become his mate. When he at last finds this female dragon, Elizabeth, he fights for her and wins her as his bride. Jorge's relentless search for his sister and the treachery of someone working at Peter's company dog the young couple, and Elizabeth is perplexed by Peter's unwillingness to merely do away with his human enemies. The tension builds as a mysterious further enemy becomes a real threat to the dragons. An exciting, inventive, unique novel with, in Peter, a surprisingly sympathetic protagonist.

It's always darkest before the end

Things weren't exactly looking bright for Remo and Chiun. Not to mention for the entire world. From an evil inferno the ancient almighty god of destruction had risen to possess the Destroyer's body and soul. Meanwhile Remo's Oriental master, Chiun had been betrayed by the U.S. President himself, and was now a weapon of the U.S.S.R. Smith, their unflappable superior in C.U.R.E., planned to take the easy way out-commit suicide. But for Remo and Chiun, the solution wasn't going to be quite so simple and not nearly as painless..

A Thousand Year Nightmare

A vacationing Harold Smith finds himself in the middle of a war zone when World War II planes bomb London and Nazi-attired skinheads goosestep through the streets.

To complete the weird  déjà vu, the guy responsible is a raging Nazi, part of a secret brotherhood with a high-tech agenda for recapturing the dream of a certain evil visionary.

But this rogue Nazi devised a new blueprint for world domination that sets him on a path of violence in pursuit of the glorious dream.

Just in time. Now Remo has a little something to keep his mind off all the troubles in the world: saving it.

HOW DOES A BEAT COP BECOME AMERICA'S SECRET WEAPON AGAINST EVIL?

It isn't easy. Especially after being nearly fried in the electric chair, plunged into a secret crime-fighting organization called CURE, then handed over to a Korean killing machine called Chiun, the reigning master of Sinanju.

But every prophecy -- even one that foretells Remo Williams's future with the ancient house of assassins -- has a downside, and for Chiun, it's an explosive family secret so devastating, it could spell doom for the House of Sinanju. Someone's got a plan for vengeance that's a real doozy and is selling their services to the mob-racking up the body count with capo and congressmen alike.

Ready or not, Remo's got his first assignment. With Chiun along to make sure he doesn't screw up, Remo's about to stop an enemy from putting Congress out of session. Permanently.