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It's 1979 and Jimmy Carter's administration is seeing 21% interest rates. In the city of Sacramento, California, Gary Greb labors as a union carpenter but with a wife and two toddlers to support-and, as new construction is all but non-existent, he tries real estate sales; putting his knowledge of construction techniques and land-use to bolster his earnings, He quickly finds that one group-the excessively wealthy-are totally unfazed by the recessionary times and when he finds an engineer, with ties to people with unlimited funds, who will buy any piece of land at any reasonable price-for cash-he begins a career that will ultimately land him in prison, as well as turn him from the working class into a part of the wealthy landowners-a class he has come to disdain, distrust and dislike. If you never lived through these times in the 1970's and 80's, take heed and scrutinize today's headlines and economy and remember history has a way of repeating itself-and God only knows when the cycle will begin to spin again.
The author of Miami Rock sets a blistering fast pace, and this mystery/thriller will keep you on the edge of your seat, reading from the first page to the last, as you wonder what next calamity may befall one of the denizens of this sub-tropical area of our country, which many refer to as a paradise for its beautiful climate, sandy beaches, and famed tourist attractions. Its Latin beat provides the backdrop for another side of this city, however, and one also well-known to the public, for paradise can become a purgatory where crime is rampant and drugs are on every street corner in too many neighborhoods. The main characters, a rough-hewn group of construction workers, on a job site in Ft. Lauderdale, sojourn into Miami for a night out and encounter much more than they had bargained for as rogue cops, drug dealers, shapely vixens, and a briefcase full of money all collide in a thriller that you won t be able to put down.
This is the fourth collection of the best international short stories as submitted to the One Million Stories Creative Writing Project at millionstories.net through 2012. It takes a great deal of courage to take a story and put it out there in the world, to try and make a connection. That has happened for all twenty-three of the authors featured here. Some are old hands, others have never had a story published anywhere before. That they chose us is our good fortune, that you now hold this book in your hands, is your good fortune! You will discover stories of childhood both cursed and blessed, but all fascinating. There are tales from the end of life's journey too, some prosaic, others quite mad, but throughout, the general flavour is positive, uplifting. Keep a hold of this book. There are names in here you will read again, perhaps on the spine of a book in your local store, maybe on a blog, who knows?
Welcome to the third instalment, book three on the journey to a million stories, but of course it is about more than just the numbers. It is about the creative spirit that has given us the drive to write, the energy to express what we think, feel or desire. This year has been a year of innovation and new ideas at millionstories.net. The 52 Shorts Challenge invited writers to respond to weekly writing prompts. As an experiment it helped some authors achieve some incredible results, with fantastic leaps of the imagination combined with terrific industry. It was devised as a way to coach writers into a regular writing habit over the course of a year. Some of these stories are right here in this collection. Within these pages you will discover commentary on the London riots, the monsoon, living with HIV, celebrity, the perils of invisibility, environmental vandalism, ghosts, monsters and a nice cup of tea.
In Peace on Earth we see into both sides of a vicious, blood-curdling battle in the trenches of WWI, when poison gas, hand-to-hand combat and starvation still played a big role in wars between countries. In a true event, something that history verifies happened, we get a glimpse of what could have happened on that day on the Western Front, between two armies, and the human beings who discovered there humanity on that Christmas Day, in the year of Our Lord, 1914. In Muhammad's Revenge we see how the world can be, has been and will be again, changed in dramatically, historic fashion until it no longer is a world. And, in the Duke, we see into the life of a totally disreputable, thoroughly unlikeable character but whose traits we all recognize because that are not only those of someone we have known but traits that we ourselves have suppressed most our lives. In fact, the further we read, the more we realize that we, ourselves have some, maybe too many, of those same traits ourselves.
"Cowboys and Indians" is a look back into history and it explores the entire continent of America which was originally inhabited by Native Americans, none of whom had, or have ever, any familial ties to Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who was said to have discovered America. The theme throughout is the undeniable fact that the earth upon which we all live is being systematically strangled, drilled, poisoned, beaten and bartered to death. The undeniable truth shows us that the European immigrants had a philosophical difference with the Native Americans that they encountered living on the shores that they invaded and vanquished and always with the same thought in mind: to steal the land...
Follow a group of young men as they go through Marine Corps boot camp in 1962, at Parris Island, South Carolina, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October of that year, 1962, and then on to their duty stations and, for some, Vietnam. If you want to know what the Marine Corps was really like in the 1960's and those that served during this tumultuous time in history this is the book for you!
" Sandcastles in the Sun" is the first story in this series of four novellas featuring Julius '.J.D. ' Dickens and his partner Isaiah 'I-Hop' Hopkins. Dickens gets when his assistant, a 21-year-old first year law student, whose father, a police captain, is a close friend of J.D.'s, assures him that it's a simple "open and shut case" paid for with department money. Now, Dickens has "personal" reasons to take any case paid for with department money but soon finds that it's anything but and open and shut case. "The Spearhead Case," "A Heartbeat Away" and "Saving Primo" are more of the same spine-tingling stories that will quickly interconnect with the one preceding it and keep the reading reading until the last page is turned.
Muhammad's Revenge is a collection of short stories that literally forces the reader to bring the realities of life on this earth, along with such terrible things as war, into sharp focus and to concentrate on why things happen as they do-when they do-and what happens to the soul when this life on earth is over. In the title story, "Muhammad's Revenge," we see how the war experiences of a single human being can bring an apocalypse to the entire world. In "Peace on Earth" the realities of the horrors of World War I become starkly vivid and real but so does the humanity of mankind when the Germans and the English armies call a one-day truce, a historic event, that actually did happen. In "Big Sugar," as in all these stories, we see the personal as well as private lives of many of the characters, in their darkest moments and how one life's circumstances which end in a tragic death can alter history for all the others involved for the better.