A madman with a taste for savvy, professional women is on the prowl in Denver. The killer knows his victims intimately, but has never seen them before. Kevin Packard, a rising young ad executive, is thrust into this web of terror when his ex-girlfriend is found brutally murdered and he is the prime suspect. Determined to find the killer and clear himself, Kevin turns to the only thing he knows—advertising. He taps into CompleteBase, a powerful database of personal information, to build a list of the killer's future targets from a marketing perspective. When the next victim is on Kevin's list, he and the police detectives on the case join forces in a race to track down the killer before he strikes again. But is CompleteBase leading Kevin closer to the killer or leading the killer closer to him?
In TARGET MARKET, the thin line between targeting consumers and profiling serial killers blurs into an exciting thriller that shatters the myth of personal privacy in America.
"With his twists and turns in poems like "Spaghetti Sauce" and "The Tenth Commandment" Brian Rosenberger is the modern-day Saki of the poetry world. In "9 to 5" he dumps on the workplace ("the suicide crawl of the second hand"). In "State of Decay" (…a tattoo that seemed a good idea at the time") he mourns the waste of his intellect. In the powerful "You Don't Hear the One that Hits You" a lost love is compared to Russian roulette. Rosenberger can be hilarious, as in "By Pork Possessed", or deep, as in the title poem, but he's always right in your face. Whether you like it, or not."
Cindy Rosmus:
editor Yellow Mama, author of collections: Angel of Manslaughter, Gutter Balls, Calpurnia's Window, and No Place Like Home.
"...spiked with poisoned puns and acid alliteration... Rosenberger's blamk verse wriggles with imagery as witty as it is disreputable."
Among the rotting ruins and open sores of a diseased Earth, Jude – sole survivor of a solitary group of hungry travellers and scavengers – is destined for a vital task ... but those who knew what that task is are all dead.
Bewildered and questing, Jude makes an epic Odyssey across a dying and decaying landscape of corrupt countryside and crumbling cities, thinly peopled by savage killers and unworldly dreamers, in a desperate bid to discover what he is meant to do.
Along the winding way, he gathers new companions: a wretched waif, rescued from slavery and cannibalism, a mysterious woman of beauty and secrets, and an equally mysterious, though anything but beautiful, old man of unfathomable prophesies and ferocious violence. At times, Jude feels his tired old wagon horse is his only true ally as the once-clear dividing line between friend and foe becomes blurred.
In this futuristic re-telling of ancient Grail legends, Jude becomes knight errant in a joust to the death between fear and duty.
Will he become the saviour of humanity or its doomed scapegoat at the end of days ... when his quest finally brings him to The Tor?
With characters that become as familiar as personal friends and enemies, a story that is both vaguely remembered and vividly fresh, and pages that seem to turn in the wind, Liza Granville inspires her reader to ask, for new reasons, the age-old question ... is our very presence on the only planet we know intimately the problem or the solution? Are we Mother Nature's children or her killer?
Stewie A. Smithee lives in a small town ... but he thinks big.
Behind the counter of the local grocery store, he plans to break into the movie business by writing, directing, producing and filming his masterpiece Sci Fi flick, Cannibal Lesbian Zombies from Outer Space - versus - Doctor Clockwork and his Furious Plastic Surgeons of Doom. And the only thing small about that epic project is its budget.
The whole town - many promised starring roles - rallies round: Apart from the local police chief and his brother the judge, who'll stop at nothing to sabotage the shooting of the outrageous, sexy movie on their prim and peaceful patch.
And there are other major headaches for Stewie ... a cast of unruly friends, a morally-challenged cousin as his PA, and a luscious fiancée with a script of her own and a tough deadline: "Your film's in the can before our wedding day - or you're out of the picture!"
There's a whacky wisdom, an endearing innocence and a thrillingly encouraging message of optimism in Bosley Gravel's hilarious tale of dead-end, small-towners breaking all the rules and battling all the odds to earn their place in the big picture. In times of global gloom and doom, The Movie reminds us just how much can be achieved with a dream - and the sheer guts to chase it. Gravel's drum-tight prose make the pages turn at the rate of a smile-a-minute.
The Movie is the most indecent thing to ever disgrace the city of Podunk. It features lewd acts by paid sex workers and glorifies the occult. It encourages lascivious and lustful behavior between half naked, sexually confused women and the living dead. Even five minutes of this will turn moral folk's stomachs.
Paranoid recluse Adam Bittermouth's Roebuck University makes a fortune. But as a seat of learning it gets bottom marks when money-grubbing bean counters replace professors and students become craftily manipulated cash cows.
From his opulent high-tech hermitage in a tower 500 feet above the campus, Bittermouth monitors every eccentric move of staff and students via hidden cameras ... and dreams of the day when his money-spinning institution will be free of both.
Meanwhile, far below, political corruption, monstrous egos, existential terror, corporate bullying and murder head the curriculum, along with romantic angst, constipation problems, sanity issues and bad plumbing.
In an hilarious riot of a tale that echoes an imploding real world, author Steve Attridge introduces scary security guards Baz and Dave; sex-mad failed poet Damion Dimmuck; Dr Duff with his paranoid terror of sick people; Mercedes Blonk, seducer of young men and radical theorist; and psychopathic dwarf, General Spinelli, a bloodstained South American dictator who enrols (at a price) to read (but misunderstand) classic literature.
Unlikely champions of human values are a befuddled academic whose only friends are literary characters, a weedy fantasist student addicted to list-making, and his secret love, the Rubenesque, silent and unsmiling girl with poetry in her soul and a huge cache of illicit chocolate bars under her bed.
At stake are all future generations in the western world ... will they be educated or programmed?
Sonny, a drunken convenience store clerk living uneasily in a relationship with twin sisters, woke up naked and blue. Not sad, but actually blue from head to toe.
A warped warning from a former CIA colleague? A message from a deranged hit man that he and those he loves are marked for death? Or is his blueness a more invidious omen?
Sonny's search for answers will lead him to a perverse reconciliation with his former bloody role in geopolitics - and his destiny - on the bloody trail to Chiapas.
Along the way he will befriend a people struggling to survive, reconsider the nature of terrorism and the drug trade, and decipher an ancient Mayan vision of the end of time.
He will also meet another former CIA operative who doubles as a jaguar shaman, a Mayan holy man whose prophesies include Sonny, and a mysterious boy whose role in his people's future is both mythic and deadly.
Sonny's flashbacks to his gore-stained government work in Mesoamerica, including the act for which he was 'excommunicated', constitute proof of power's inhumanity, but his darkest revelation is that violence and greed are the true mechanisms of history.
Michael McIrvin's high-octane, intelligent novel is an immaculately researched, powerful indictment of brutal counterintelligence, including torture and murder, an exploration of how ends are achieved by a nation-state. This book is frighteningly timely.
