Title:  Space is Hard Grab a Helmet

Author:  M. K. England

Hotshot pilot Nax Hall has a history of making poor life choices.  so it’s not exactly a surprise when he’s kicked out of the elite Ellis Station Academy in less than twenty-four hours.

But Nax’x one-way trip back to  Earth is cut short when a terrorist group attacks the Academy.  Nax and three others washouts escape–barely–but they’re also the sole witnesses to the biggest crime in the history of space colonization.  And the perfect scapegoats.

On the run and framed for atrocities they didn’t commit, Nax and his fellow failures execute a dangerous heist to spread the truth about what happened at the Academy.

They may not be “Academy material,” and they may not get along, but they’re the only ones left to step up and fight.

Title:  Sea of Greed

Author:  Clive Cussler

After the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico destroys three oil rigs trying two revive a dying field, Kurt Austin and the NUMA Special Projects team are tapped by the President of the United States to find out what’s gone wrong.  The trail leads them to a brilliant billionaire in the alternative energy field.  Her goal is the end of he Oil Age; her comp[any has spent billions developing the world’s most advanced fuel ell systems.  But is she an environmental hero…or a rogue genetic engineer?

The NUMA crew discovers that the oil fields are infected with a bacteria that is consuming the oil before it can be pumped out of the earth—a bacteria originally lost decades ago when two submarines vanished in the Mediterranean.

With hired killers on his trail, can Austin locate a submarine that’s remained hidden for more than fifty years?  And even if he can, can the biological terror that’s been unleashed be stopped?

Title:  The Ice Man

Author:  P. T. Deutermann

In 1942, off the port city of Nazaire in occupied France, a United States Navy S-class submarine assigned to the Royal Navy lurks just outside the borders of the minefield protecting a German U-boat base.  Lieutenant Commander Malachi Stormes, the boat’s skipper, patrols dangerously close to the minefield entrance and manages to trap and sink three outbound U-boats in one spectacular attack.  Britain decorates him, and the U.S. Navy promotes him and then gives him command of a brand-new class of submarine, a fleet boat called Firefish.  Based in Perth, Australia, having been driven out of the Philippines by the Japanese juggernaut, the Perth boats are the only American forces capable of hitting the Japanese in the western Pacific.

Stormes with his cold, steely-eyed focus on killing Japanese ships, is an enigma to his officers and crew, especially when it becomes clear that he is willing to take huge chances to achieve results.  Firefish sinks more ships than any Perth boat on her first war patrol, but Stormes’s  unconvential tactics frighten his crew.  Driven by a past steeped in the whiskey-haunted violence of the Kentucky coal fields, with psychological scars that torment his sleep and close him off from personal relationships, Stormes is nicknamed the Iceman.  His crew is proud of their boat’s accomplishments but wonder if their iron-willie skipper will bring them home alive.

With intense action and featuring authentic submarine tactics in the early years of the Pacific war, The Iceman continues P.T. Deutemann’s masterful, award-winning cycle of thrillers set during World War II.

Title:  Whiskey When We’re Dry

Author:  John Larison

In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead.  Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother, Noah, and bring him home.  On her quest, Jess a talented sharpshooter, lands in the employ of the territory’s violent, capricious Governor, wh9ose militia is hunting Noah–dead or alive.

Wrestling with her brother’s outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her to become a hero in her own right.

Told in Hess’s wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a stunning achievement, a propulsive quest for salvation and family, and a reckoning with the myths entwined with our history.

Title:  Navigator

Author:  Stephen Baxter

As Willian the Conqueror’s men attempt to stamp out the flames of rebellion, a prophecy is uttered.  A bedraggled woman in a ruined chapel speaks of civilizations in conflict, armed by the engines of God.

And that prophecy proves to be true as the fearsome war between Christianity and Islam leaves its mark across the land.  In Spain, where Moore and Christian live side by side, a rogue priest dreams of the final defeat of Islam, for he has found a rent in the tapestry of time, a point where agents from the future once tampered with the past and changed history—using diabolical weapons of destruction.

For centuries, the conflict ebbs and flows, moving from one part of the known world to the next.  Men of vision, weary of the strife, are drawn to the West, to whatever may lie across the endless sea.  And in 1492, one such explorer seeks the funding for his voyage while a mysterious Weaver plots to unravel the strands of time and stop him.

Title: Chicago

Author: David Mamet

From his perch at the Chicago Tribune, Mike Hodge–scarred veteran of the Great War–had gotten to know the underbelly of the metropolis like few others. Politicians, Gangsters, prostitutes, bootleggers, opium addicts, jazz musicians, and con artists–he’d observed them all. So perhaps he should have known better when he fell for Annie Walsh, whose family was on preferred terms with those who preferred the back alley.

The again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh should have known better that to trifle with Mike Hodge.

A big-shouldered, big-trouble thriller set in a mobbed-up 1920’s Windy City, Chicago is the first novel in more than two decades from David Mamet, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The untouchables and Wag the Dog and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross. Across the canvas of a city peopled by the corrupt, the cynical, and the deceived, Mamet crafts a wicked and tough saga of retribution and double-cross. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era (among them Al Capone), he explores–as no other writer can–questions of honor, deceit, devotion, and revenge.

Set in his hometown, Chicago is the book that David Mamet has been building up to for his whole career. From its opening fusillade to its astonishing conclusion, Chicago is the rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind gusting off lake Michigan.