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1462: an alien who feasts on the suffering of sentient beings dines off the agonies of Vlad the Impaler’s twenty-thousand victims near Targoviste, Romania.

1688: a woman is framed for witchcraft and hanged by the neck in Boston.

1965: a toy store that never seems to run out of special toys is suspected of being the location of a temporal portal, the same one used by the agony-feeding alien.

2022: a grandfather, showing his young grandchildren what remains of the Boston of his youth, is shown that portal by his granddaughters.

And they’re off! Off through the gate that grants wishes, off to deal with time travel, off to break and enter, off to endure the pain of seeing afresh loved ones long since departed in their own time. They’re off to deal with hardened, murderous criminals and with equally murderous aliens.

And all of that is set around the time of Christmas joy, in old, fine hotels, with presents, fresh loves, Handel’s Messiah, a department store’s enchanted village, old delicacies, modern weapons, lasers . . . and a very special calico cat.

“Augmented Reality” game Transdimensional Hunter seems too real for comfort as the world of the game merges with reality. Now, teenage game prodigy Lynn Raven will have to conquer the game or be destroyed by it.

Reality Bites—and it has Big Teeth

Becoming a global celebrity overnight would make most people happy.

Not Lynn Raven.

As a teenage gaming prodigy, she’s enjoyed years of anonymity behind the virtual mask of Larry Coughlin, war-hardened vet and virtual gaming mercenary. But now Lynn has stepped out of the shadows to compete in the cutting-edge augmented reality game TransDimensional Hunter that has taken the world by storm.

And she’s winning.

But with success has come swarms of paparazzi drones, jealous teammates, and a backstabbing rival team that will use any trick in the book to ruin her.

Then there’s the game itself. At times, the “augmented” reality seems too real for Lynn’s comfort, and strange accidents keep happening. Something is going on; she just has to figure out what.

Lynn would much rather fight monsters than do paparazzi interviews, but somehow she’ll have to master both—and pass her senior year to boot. She managed to step into the real, but will the storm of reality now defeat her for good?

A RACE IN AFRICA TO BUILD THE FIRST SPACE ELEVATOR

New money, old tribes, and international megacorps race to build the first space elevator. With a little Dabare magic, it just might work!

The Sadous, an oil-rich West African family, are handed a plum contract as repayment for a decades-old favor that could tie them into an industry of the future—if the family doesn’t tear itself apart first.

Two engineer daughters of the Sadou family, Pascaline and Maurie, upon whom the burden of success rests, have troubles of their own. One wants nothing more than to leave and make her own name as an engineering prodigy, while the other is troubled by fever dreams and snakes.

Ethan Schmidt-Li is an ambitious megacorp executive with eyes on a big promotion—only to get more than he bargained for when put in charge of the company’s make-or-break project.

Endeley Adamou is the powerful nephew of a Bakweri chieftain walking the fine line between modernization and tribal tradition.

These are some of the people that Tchami “Chummy” Fabrice has brought together to an ambitious end: constructing in Africa the world’s first space elevator and ensuring the space industry that it catapults will enrich the continent and all involved. They have the carbon nanofiber, prime land around Kilimanjaro, and a captured rock in orbit for the tether.

The hard part will be getting all these different people working together long enough to see it built.

A NEW NOVEL IN ERIC FLINT’S LANDMARK RING OF FIRE SERIES CONTINUING THE EASTERN EUROPE STORYLINE EXPLORED BY FLINT IN 1637: THE POLISH MAELSTROM.

Up-timer Morris Roth and his Grand Army of the Sunrise stand at a crossroads. Military success against the Polish-Lithuanian magnates has all but guaranteed a continued push east into Ruthenian lands. There, Roth hopes to further his Anaconda Project so that tens of thousands of Jews are not slaughtered in what’s to become known as the Chmielnicki Pogrom of 1648. 

An envoy from Transylvania arrives with a promising offer from its prince, who wishes to form an alliance with Bohemia, but the land shrouded in the fog of the Carpathian Mountains—and known only to most up-timers as the playground of Count Dracula—is a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Such an alliance would surely draw the ire of Sultan Murad IV. 

The United States of Europe agrees to assist the Bohemian forces, and sends in the Silesian Guard, under the command of Brigadier Jeff Higgins. They also send in Gretchen Richter to organize and lead the political struggle. 

Transylvania is thrown into political, social, and religious turmoil as battle lines are drawn. Whatever happens and whoever wins the fight, one thing is certain: the history of Eastern Europe will change radically. In fact, it already has.