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Earrings of Ixtumea.

Fourteen-year-old Lupe Hernandez wishes she was blond, white, and popular. She dismisses the legend her Mexican grandmother tells about a treasured family heirloom—a pair of ruby earrings—as a silly fairytale, despite recurring nightmares of human sacrifice whenever she wears them. But when the earrings thrust her into the parallel world of Ixtumea, she must confront the very thing she shuns the most—her cultural heritage.

Lupe’s journey takes her through a dense Mayan jungle to the damp underground kingdom of Malvado, where a rebel leader plots to keep her from fulfilling her destiny. She is guided by a hot warrior protector named Teancum, who tells her about a prophecy of a long-awaited young prophetess—which happens to be Lupe. She trains with the Spider Goddess, who teaches her the sacred knots that bind both worlds together. And she meets her long-lost mother, Concha—who is now a dangerous enemy.

Life as Lupe knows it will never be the same!

PURCHASE

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8 DAYS BY BARRI L. BUMGARNER

8DAYS is the riveting story of the not-so-distant future when four brilliant young scientists begin the process of cleansing humanity by systematically releasing Chemical X-86 on cities in the U.S. and around the world. Their mission? To destroy the world, leaving only the fittest to survive. The survivors who have been drawn to Joplin, Missouri, have not only the desire and instinct, but also the visions of the eight-year-old Jessie to guide them.

ON TO MARS 2 BY J. RICHARD JACOBS

SEEDS OF MEMORY BY J. RICHARD JACOBS

SPACE...once believed to be a vast and vacant void, has been found, in fact, to be filled with all sorts of things—things that roam freely and at random. Our little spaceship Earth is no longer as secure as we once thought it to be. There are clouds of dust and gas so hot that their mere passing would scour our little system of planets with a breath of death and destruction complete. Clouds so massive that just their passing could throw all our little planets from of their peaceful orbits into the deep cold of a sunless darkness and fling our star out and on its way to being one of the eternal roamers of our galaxy, or even throw it into an intergalactic journey to who-knows-where? Black holes; blazars; blasts of deadly radiation from nearby super-novae; stars; burned out hulks of stars; super-dense neutron stars; rocks (small or incredibly large), and a host of other things—none of them welcome visitors.

IN THIS INCREDIBLE, SWEEPING SAGA across thousands of years and hundreds of light years we come face to face with our fears and deep prejudices. It is here, in SEEDS OF MEMORY, that we get an idea of what it means to be "HUMAN" and what "HUMAN" really means. It is here, in SEEDS OF MEMORY, that we are confronted with the need to know colliding head-on with reality. Are we, HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS, truly the only form that humans can take, and is our history the only history? Might there not be others, or others created out of the very stuff of life who are, after all, our brothers and sisters—kith and kin?

In this story we find that the lines that divide have indistinct, fuzzy edges, and that we are the ones who make those divisions. Here we discover humanity at its magnificent best, its seething worst, and everything imaginable between, while we make an uncertain attempt to reunite two peoples separated by time and space...and other things...

One of those unwelcome visitors has arrived and we are pitifully unprepared. This is a speculative look into a far-flung future disaster that could actually happen (and well might, someday) and how the human species reacts to it. It could even be said that it is a look at a future history—a history we might not be able to survive.

SILVER ANGEL BY BARBARA M. HODGES

THE BLUE FLAME BY BARBARA M. HODGES

THE EMERALD DAGGER BY BARBARA M. HODGES

SHADOW WORLDS BY DARRELL BAIN & BARBARA M. HODGES

WAR BUG BY BIFF MITCHELL

For those of you with dread fear of giant killer ants ... there is no giant ant in The War Bug. The War Bug is actually a smart-assed computer virus that is more pig and dog than ant.

William Koonce in BookBanter Book Club

Well written and fast paced. Plot somewhat set in a “Matrix” world. Very entertaining.

AMAZON.COM BARNES & NOBLE POWELLS.COM

XENOGENESIS BY J. RICHARD JACOBS

XENOGENESIS is a tale of change; inexorable and inevitable. Human beings are always craving change but when it comes it is frightening . . . Sometimes to the point that we would prefer death.

Pat Dalworthy is a tracker, ex-pilot cadet in space corps and a dabbler in physics. As a Tracker, a hunter of people who would rather not be found, he is the best there is in inner system and, to hear him tell it, outer system, too. One of the problems with being the best is that you sometimes get much, much more than you bargained for.

Dalworthy is in for the ride of a lifetime and more than a life-time of a ride when he is contracted by Sean McGavin, one of the wealthiest men in the solar system, to track down one of his granddaughters. She has disappeared into the lower city and she has taken something McGavin wants returned. Dalworthy is to hunt her down and come back with both the woman and the goods. He is not to stop until it is done. It is not going to be easy and he is expendable.

What she has in her possession could easily spell the end of all life on earth, maybe the whole solar system if the slightest error is made, but what she carries in her will bring an indelible change to the human species and there is nothing anyone, not even Dalworthy, can do about it. So, which is it going to be, the end of all life or a change known as . . . XENOGENESIS?

"Xenogenesis is one of those rare books that manages to catch even the most jaded of sci-fi readers off-guard. Somewhere between the description of cities in stratified levels of wealth and the injection of nano-machines, we realize we are somewhere between the world we inhabit and the world we only dream about, which makes the entire book something beyond a simple novel of escape. This combination of biotechnology and space travel with a hefty dose of hard-boiled detective fiction in the character of Patrick Dalworthy allows Jacobs to create a work that is both fantastic and close to home, one that tackles the subject of what it truly means to be human in a rapidly advancing world and answer it with aplomb."

~Jamie A. Hughes

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