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DX Varos Publishing

EXQUISITE FICTION

CATALOG

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Tommy knew the right thing to do was turn them in to the cops. But that wasn't the adventurous thing to do!

What happened to the three men who escaped from Alcatraz prison in June 1962? Did they meet the same watery fate as dozens who preceded them into the cold San Francisco Bay? There is credible evidence two of them - brothers John and Clarence Anglin - not only survived but lived for years in South America. Inseparable is a fictional account of how a 13-year-old boy named Tommy helped them to freedom.

Tommy O’Conner was an only child whose mother, a widow of the Korean Conflict, had been left to make it on her own. She passed her independent, sometimes lonely spirit, to her son. But Tommy was also, in many ways, no different than other boys his age who dreamed of adventure. Then, one June day in 1962, his daydreams were interrupted by the real thing when he came face to face with John and Clarence Anglin - two of the Alcatraz escapees - and made the decision which would change all their lives.

Before her brain started behaving strangely, Kat Porter’s biggest worries were her upcoming tenure review and her partner’s desire to start a family.

Then she began unlocking abilities that bewildered her doctor and attracted a shadowy research firm intent on studying her at any cost.

Aided by a group of mystics awaiting a prophet, Kat must now master her new powers before Neuro-Logic Industries and its government associates gain control of her brain, with or without the rest of her. Forced to flee her comfortable life in Seattle, Kat goes on a journey of discovery that takes her to the peaks of the Canadian Rockies and transforms her understanding of the world. What happens next might just birth an evolution in human consciousness.

1

It is the duty of the Vanguard to protect the world from unseen demonic forces.

But what if the organization falls to corruption? Their reformation is up to Cato, a disgraced former member who discovers many of the elite using their powerful positions and martial skills for ill-gotten gains rather than fulfilling their true purpose: aiding mankind in a secret war against their eternal foe.

Aldous is a Vanguard who fell from grace after being stricken with vampirism by a mysterious figure known as the White Lady. His increasingly vile appetites are tolerated because his knowledge as an alchemist is vital in the Vanguard’s battle against the demons. When those desires lead to the abduction of the woman Cato loves, Cato wages a one-man war against Aldous and his werewolf henchman.

It started with a Tiffany lamp in 1995.

Amy Dresden is used to turning men down gracefully. But when Pearce Martini sees her at an estate sale, he knows she is destined for him and doesn’t plan to go away. Not knowing what else to do, she turns to next door gun dealer and ex-LAPD cop Helen Wu for advice on self-defense.

Amy never expected she’d own a gun—or wind up in the arms of another woman.

It’s 7 December 1941. Do you know where your foes are?
Rear-Admiral Erwin “Tex” Rommel, aviation pioneer, fighter ace, and tactical genius in the use of air power, thinks he has an answer for that one. Washington has handed him plenty of rope to test his ideas regarding carrier tactics. Can he use it to lasso the Japanese threat, or will he just hang himself and the U.S. Navy with it?

It’s 7 December 1941. Do you know where your friends are?
Commander Anson McDonald has spent his entire career at sea, in destroyers, and has recently earned the command of one. He has never done staff work—but Rommel shanghaies him off the ship he loves, to fill a key staff position. For the first time in years, he is unsure of himself. Can he handle his new job, or will he foul up, bringing his career, his commanding officer, and his fleet to ruin and defeat?

It’s 7 December 1941. Do you know where your brains are?
Rommel preaches the gospel of readiness, drilling his men to a crack level. But the Navy is green; hardly anyone has ever seen action. Nearly everyone is mired in peacetime habits, suspicious of anything new. Untried inventions permeate the Navy. Few know how to effectively use those science-fictional gadgets, radar and sonar. The latest torpedoes are so secret they’ve never been tested. And no one, not even Erwin Rommel, knows what will happen when carriers clash for the first time on the high seas.

It’s 7 December 1941 . . . .

They took something from Dorian McGuire, something precious, and he wants it back.

He also wants his father to leave him be in Armstrong City on Luna, but old Gustave has other plans for his younger son.

Soon Dorian can count on only three things: his precious something, a lovely green-haired space captain, and what he has always relied on—his McGuire’s Luck.

The War is over!

In this finale to the Harvey & McCrary Adventures, we learn the brothers never saw each again after their adventure at Fort Sumter. Now, years later, McCrary’s daughter finally finds her uncle where he is living in hiding in the Caribbean. Together they share the stories of their families’ triumphs and tragedies through the rest of the war and during Reconstruction.

Sandie goes wherever the wind blows.
From orphan to delinquent to make-up artist, Sandie Donovan is the queen of the makeover, whether it's actresses playing Off Broadway or her own identity. But she can run from her past for only so long before she has to “woman up” and take control of her own life.

The only thing buried deeper than her sister's body is the truth.

To protect Maureen Buckley from her family's plot to have her placed under a guardianship, attorney Allen Mann will have to first understand what could have driven her to conceal the mummified body of her twin sister under her family's sprawling Texas ranch. While none question Maureen's brilliance, her fear of leaving home and deference to the mysterious entities she refers to as the "Guardians" raise serious doubts about her sanity. Allen will have to dig deep into the gnarled roots of a wealthy family's twisted history, including the disappearance of two boys decades earlier, to unravel Maureen's motives and determine if she really is the delusional killer that will be portrayed in court.

So who’s dumping all the dead cats in Fawn’s territory?

Fawn Malero has gone out of her way to live a normal life. It was a little hard to do what with her father being a powerful magician and head magistrate over all supernatural activity in the greater Seattle area. But she tried, even to the point of neglecting her part of the city assigned to her to watch over.

Then the dead cats started showing up, and so did Logan, a werewolf with whom she had had an uneasy childhood. Next thing she knew, she was hiding a vampire in her basement as well as a young warlock on the run. Did I mention the roommate who was a ghost?

Before she knew it, Fawn had a whole posse to help her solve the mystery. So much for her so-called “normal human” life.

Here I sit at a police station being accused of murder!

Will wonders never cease? How could I have decapitated Gerry Delaney when he was a big, barrel-chested man and I’m a slim woman, barely registering five-feet six? That’s something the cop interrogating me can’t or won’t answer. Besides, why would I kill Gerry? I was trying to get him to buy tequila mixers for his dive bar. He hadn’t made up his mind yet and killing him wasn’t going to help.

I’m Hetty Carson, private investigator. Business was slow, so I started selling tequila mixers on the side in downtown L.A. Who knew it could lead to murder? I mean, Gerry’s murder was a tragedy, for sure, but I figured it didn’t have anything to do with me. Until someone figured it did, and now I have to investigate why if I want to stay alive.

• Who coined the term “sci-fi”?
• What widely-read 1930s non-SF novel inspired a series of stories about flying, space-traveling cities?
• Was there really a Communist front organization that produced nearly two dozen of the best science fiction authors, editors, and publishers, almost none of whom were Communists?

Perhaps the “Cliff’s Notes” of classic science fiction, writer Sourdough Jackson’s essays keep alive the books, authors, editors, publishers, magazines, and movies that made science fiction the successful subject and industry it is today.

Jackson’s love and deep knowledge of SF is obvious in That Old Science Fiction, originally published as a monthly column in DASFAx, the newsletter of the Denver Area Science Fiction Association.

That love is brought to you here, complete with a forward by Robert Vardeman, author of The Cenotaph Road and dozens of other science fiction novels.

What do you do after you’ve burned your hometown to the ground? That’s the question best friends Danny and Sieg have to answer when their homecoming float goes horribly awry. Instead of going to prison, the two end up renovating a broken-down mountain resort Danny’s uncle won in a poker game.

There they discover love, the evilest cat in the world, ghosts, and an Oxford-educated Sasquatch. Now, they and their new friends have to save the Sasquatch from a pair of intrepid tabloid reporters, a fake medium, and a developer who wants to level the resort to build condos.

The fire is beginning to look like the easy part.

Perseverance!

That is how Martha, a single mother in the West Virginia of 1918, survives and ultimately thrives, doing whatever she has to for her daughter, Frances.
It is also how Frances, a pregnant newlywed at the outbreak of World War II, gets through those dark days and their aftermath.

This tale of two remarkable women covers a fifty year period from World War I well into the 60s, full of pain, joy, friends gained and lost ... oh, and the creation of Kevlar.

Tiffany didn’t mean to kill her boyfriend and the skank he was cheating on her with, but the wolf just took over.

Which is how Tiffany found out she was a werewolf and there was a world of supernatural creatures the humans only heard about in myths and folklore. Now, Tiffany needed to find her place in her new pack—did she even want a place there?—and a way to balance her wolf life with her human career. Oh, and then was the sheer animal magnetism of Fin ...

Who is Lydia Warren? That’s what she’d like to know.
An amnesiac, she vaguely remembers arriving in Santorini with this one-armed man she instinctive trusts but cannot recall his name. She guides us through the fog that is her mind, and her odyssey towards understanding that is even further complicated by memories of a life not her own from before she was born.

So you think you know about Evita? No, you don't.

Ask Mona, her confidant, or Pierre, her bodyguard. They have the inside track.

Argentina fell in love with Eva Peron during her lifetime. The world followed suit later with the help of a Broadway musical about her Life, Evita. But there is much we don't know about the first lady of Argentina. For example, where are her jewels? They seem to have disappeared. Mona can tell you where they are — in a vault in the Swiss Alps.

Like Eva herself, Mona comes from a broken family and has to make her own way. Perhaps that's why the two women feel close. Evita is at the pinnacle of success but already in the grip of a fatal illness. We see her life through the eyes of Mona and Pierre, two people she trusts -- and who betray her in the end. Or can theft and murder be justified?

Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated!

However, in this timeline, cooler heads have prevailed and a world war is averted. The threads of history which began unweaving with the premature death of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, in Victoria II are now sewing themselves into a new and different European tapestry.

Much of the extended royal family which rules Europe looks a little different. The British King, the German Empress, and the Tsarina of Russia are all siblings. These close familial ties have guided Europe into a peaceful 20th century. But there are threats from outside this close-knit circle which could be the undoing of all as the children of Queen Victoria II fight to keep their crowns.

Book 3 of the Pan Chronicles

So far Pippa Gardiner has lost her mother in a fire, fallen in love with a Pan from another reality, the Fairy world, discovered her father was a former Pan, developed a close friendship with a satyr, and discovered she has a half-brother who just happens to the Prince of the Fairies. And that’s all been within the last year.

Now that her brother seems determined to release the apocalyptic creature known as Ruinae, Pippa has to brace herself for even more shocking revelations as she tries to save both of her worlds from the Ruinae’s followers. Most notably, the Squalus, a malevolent being who uses the oceans to wreak havoc.

Percival is an inconsequential lad stuck in the most disgusting, humiliating, and dangerous job on the planet Landis who flees to find a future at sea.

Aboard the Fisher King, a run down, undercrewed, interstellar cargo ship, he learns important lessons such as being in the vacuum of space without a spacesuit makes his tongue itch, how to fend off a pirate attack with a mining tool, and make new best friends who poison him and cut his throat (but not without apologizing profusely).

But his old life won’t him go. After being drug home for a murder he didn’t commit—creating a technical state of war between the Fisher King and the governments of Landis—he finds strengths he didn’t know he had. But is the personal cost just too much to save himself and his friends?

Father Thomas Morelli thought he knew the story behind Lucifer’s fall from Heaven. However, upon making the acquaintance of renowned book authenticator Lorenza Pellegrini and being invited to stay in the opulent Venice villa belonging to her “master,” Thomas discovers he has only heard part of the story.

In Boston, psychoanalyst, best-selling author, and outspoken atheist David Wright has been tasked to handle the funeral arrangements for his dear friend Albert Kennedy. What could have driven this controversial exorcist to take his own life? The answer, it seems, is contained in a tome that isn’t supposed to exist.

Joining forces, Lorenza, David, and Thomas must race against time to prevent an ancient battle from reigniting.

“WE’RE GOING TO GIVE OUR VIEWERS MORE!”

With these words, the TV news ‘train’ officially ‘ran off the rails’. New reporter Bill Stacy arrives at KEGT in August of ’87, the same month the FCC rescinds the Fairness Doctrine. No longer forced to report news in an “honest, equitable” manner, Bill (whose name is as fake as the news he covers) finds himself in the middle of the biggest story to ever hit ‘Texomaland’—a serial arsonist is terrorizing the community.

The big question: Can the investigative journalist find the ‘Torch’ before his ratings-hungry boss gets him killed?

What’s a 20-something Union war widow to do in 1867?
Start up her own detective agency with a former Reb P.O.W. of course!

Quinn Sinclair, who uses the name Mrs. Paschal professionally, and her wryly observant partner Garnick get two cases on the same day - one to help a man prove he didn't kill his wife, another to help a lawyer find reasonable doubt that his client killed her ex-lover's new bride. As the detectives dig deeper, they unearth facts that tie the cases together in disturbing ways.

This tantalizing tale of 19th Century Chicago comes complete with corrupt politicians, yellow-press reporters, gambling parlors, and colorful bawdyhouse madams. At every turn in the investigation, Quinn discovers more suspects and more secret motives for murder.

Not least among her worries, someone seems intent on murdering her!

People mostly treat the royal families as merely a lot of fluff with no real power. They could not be more wrong!

In our timeline, Queen Victoria had 9 children and 42 grandchildren who were the rulers of much of Europe and the major players in World War I. But what if she had only one child, her eldest, Princess Vicky? This first book of three shows how one seemingly small tragedy, the assassination of Prince Albert in 1842, begins to unwind the threads of history and re-braid them into a very different world.

Imagine a world changed by eight little inches. That is the world of this book, changed forever when a bullet that missed in our timeline finds its mark in Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband in another. Now with an only daughter, the queen must groom her heiress to become Victoria II.