Attacking the Dragon by A. Marc. Ross is set in China, the USA, and Equatorial Guinea. Some unknown organization is attacking the Belt and Road initiative led by the Chinese to uplift and possibly draw Third World countries into debt. This unidentified group has succeeded...

In The Beast Prince by Alix Nichols, readers are introduced to Elise, a quiet, outdoorsy glassblower in Chambéry, who walks into a dark hotel room with the intention of repaying a family debt, only to discover the person she thought would be there isn’t. Cue...

In Thomas S. Brown’s Echelon: The Cycle Stirs, Maria Kessler survives in the Lower East Spill by mapping patrol routes and drone cycles, until Dr. Elias Roth recruits her to Project Synthesis in Geneva, where her mind synchronizes with an artificial lattice called Echo-9. Through...

In Borderline Human: Persona by Oxsana Palatskaya, Lena Dyal works as an analyst inside Persona Tower, a corporate system that monitors cognition and behavior through an interface called Reflex. When her clearance is reduced after several unexplained legacy server accesses, she traces anomalies linked to...

In Dark Place by Christopher Kell, when Ros is taken in the night after her government rating as a compliant citizen suddenly collapses, her friends, Femke and Domhnal, follow through on a dangerous plan to discover where the dispossessed are sent. They deliberately trigger their...

In Sicko, Avril Grady tells the story of Jamie Katz, a queer man working as a scriptwriter for an adult film studio. Jamie’s life is complicated—he’s still intertwined with Paul, his twice-ex-husband who is also his boss and secret lover, and their repeated breakups and...

In Alexander Semenyuk’s Sea Diary of Johnny Unknown, Johnny, an orphaned factory worker hoping for a fresh start, boards a passenger ship filled with migrants, businessmen, and families on their way to a distant shore. On his very first night at sea, he hears the...

On the land of Ersa are four mages—Fionn, Orin, Elias, and Primus—who, apart from having been raised together, were bound by an oath to protect the peace of Dunya, their homeworld. However, it had been no secret to the mages that Primus, also the Prince...

Lightning by Michael Ray Ewing begins when Adam Barnett survives a lightning strike on a deserted desert road. He wakes with no memory of how he arrived there and with a powerful black dog at his side. As he returns to Defiance, Arizona, fragments of...

In Enemy at the Helm by Mark Dickson, coordinated maritime attacks strike major American ports and key global canals, beginning with the destruction of the cruise ship Leviathan off Miami. As the shipping channels are blocked and infrastructure collapses, investigators trace the operation to a...