Showing results by narrator "Richard Walker" in All Categories

The Lord Protector of Portland has continued to press his rule into every corner of the Willamette. Both Juniper and Havel know that war is coming, but their allies in the Free-state of Corvallis are less convinced. Sir Nigel continues his escape from mad King Charles with the aid of his new found Tasmanian allies, having to out race the legendary sailing ship the Cutty Sark and battle pirates off the coast of Africa.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. But Jason Trapp is losing his taste for it. For six months, his personal crusade has taken him around the world, mopping up the last of the Bloody Monday conspirators. There's only one left, and after the crooked financier Emmanuel Alstyne meets his maker, Trapp's debt will be paid in full. He vows he's done with the business of death.

The battle-weary Companions count their blessings when they find refuge at a tranquil ville, founded on the principles of harmony and enlightenment. However, they soon discover this supposed utopia is anything but. Violence waits in the silence, hidden beneath the pagodas and prayer halls. As sinister machinations unfurl like lotus petals, the Companions reckon with the true price of inner peace in a world gone mad.

Back in London, Gideon and his colleagues: journalist Aloysius Bent, airship pilot Rowena Fanshawe, and Maria, the mechanical girl to whom Gideon has lost his heart, are dragged into a case that is confounding the Metropolitan Police. For the city is on the edge of mass rioting due to the continuing reign of terror by the serial killer known only as Jack the Ripper, who is rampaging though London's less salubrious quarters. 

After the virus swept over the world, humanity has dealt with the zombies left in its wake as best it could, containing the teeming horde inside of newly walled cities, holding them there until armies can be organized to eradicate the plague from the face of the earth once and for all. In the meantime, in cities all over the world, ex-soldiers like Darian Kilgore and his company of reclamation engineers have licenses to legally go inside the walls and retrieve anything from within for the survivors who are willing and able to pay their price.  

Can you reverse climate change and promote social justice while generating a profit? Richard Walker shows you how it's both possible and valuable to "do it right". Walker runs a £3bn business that is affecting real change in the most unlikely but critical sector: the supermarket. From restricting single-use plastic to eradicating palm oil from products, his quest is to find purpose with profit for his business.

"Work Sets You Free" by David Barnett is an original short story featuring the protagonist of the forthcoming novel Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl. Gideon is a young fisherman in Yorkshire, England, in an alternate 1890, who embarks on a journey to find Captain Lucian Trigger, the famed Hero of the Empire, to deal with a mystery plaguing his home village. 

Lady Juniper recounts the capture of one of the Lord Protector’s most precious treasurers, the Princess Mathilda Arminger. While Sir Nigel reveals that the Lord Protector has procured a deadly new weapon. Will Signe Havel ever forgive her husband for fathering Juniper Mackenzie’s son Rudi? Will Sir Nigel find a home in the Willamette Valley? And what will happen when the Norman Arminger attempts to reclaim the princess and wreck his revenge on the Mackenzies and the Bearkillers?

The year is 2089.... America and much of the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare.... Ted Rockson and his small band of soldiers fight to rid the land of a Soviet occupational force bent on world domination. But Rockson not only has the enemy to contend with, for out of the ashes of the nuclear devastation of World War III, the Earth has become one large death zone. Mutated animals, destructive storms, and barbaric humans now roam the land. Death seems to be everywhere. Hope seems fleeting. But Rockson will not give up.

The world blew out in 2001. Vast areas of what was the United States lie beneath an unbrella of noxious dust and radioactive debris, a mantle of destruction drawn over a land of doom. Much of the East Coast has been oliterated; the Southwest is a land of fire; cities of smoldering ash have give birth to horrifically mutated life forms. Such is the Deathlands, legacy of global annihiliation.

The South Pacific is a rad-blasted paradise, inhabited by giant mutated crustaceans and savage cannibals. The local baron rules the Marshall Islands with a despotic iron fist and a secret formula for making Deathland’s gold: gunpowder. But his true invincibility lies in his possession of stockpiles of pre-dark rapid fire missiles and a fleet of functional PT boats. Ryan Cawdor and his companions have faced off against the baron and survived. But this time there’s only one way out of these death seas — through the sec-men infested waters of the baron’s kingdom.

In this twistingly beautiful and epically thrilling conclusion to the fantasy trilogy The Legacy of the Mercenary King, Michael, the infamous Kingkiller, and Serena, the Hollow Queen, race against the odds to have the future they’ve worked so hard to protect…or risk bringing about the end of the world.

In this twistingly beautiful and epically thrilling conclusion to the fantasy trilogy The Legacy of the Mercenary King, Michael, the infamous Kingkiller, and Serena, the Hollow Queen, race against the odds to have the future they’ve worked so hard to protect…or risk bringing about the end of the world.

Devastation from the nukewar shattered civilization and left a planet both primitive and ripe for rebirth - or retaking. While the balance of power has fallen to avaricious, amoral barons, a handful of humanity still holds hope of a future worth fighting for or dying to defend. If a better life inside the hellground exists, Ryan Cawdor and his friends will find it.

Apropos is the unlikely noble whose life began in the lowest of ways: as the result of a gang assault by a group of drunken knights on a helpless tavern wench. Last time out, Apropos attempted to seize control of his own fate, and ended up with, appropriately, nothing. Time has passed since he fled the kingdom of Runcible, and Apropos leads a quiet existence as a tavern owner. All that changes abruptly, however, when the sorceress Sharee re-enters his life with the forces of the warlike Lord Bellicose hard on her heels. They want something they're convinced she has stolen.

Ryan Cawdor is gunned down and left for dead by the new Provisional US Army, commanded by a brilliant general with a propensity for casual mass murder and a vision to rebuild America. Waging war from his pre-Dark, fusion-powered armored locomotive, he's poised to unlock the secrets of the Gateways — as the rest of Ryan's group stand powerless. All except one. Hope may be lost for Krysty Wroth. But revenge is enough.

A cold sense of dèjá vu becomes reality as the group emerges from a gateway they'd survived before — a grim graveyard of lost friends and nightmares. The consuming need to escape the dangerous melancholy of the place forces Ryan and company onto the frozen tundra, where an even greater menace awaits. The forbidding land harbors a dying tribe — cursed members of the ancient Inuit, who seize the arrival of Ryan and his band as their last hope to appease angry gods...by offering them up as human sacrifice. 

Generations after global annihilation, Kansas is a mutated landscape of dense, deciduous forest. Gone are the amber waves of grain, another hideous result of nuclear devastation that changed the face of the Earth forever. Now it's survival of the freakish. Following rumors that might lead them to the long-lost Trader, Ryan Cawdor and his band of warrior survivalists find themselves the unwilling house guests of the wealthiest barons in all of Deathlands. 

The deadly White Wizards of Fairhaven, wielding the forces of chaos, threaten the ancient matriarchy of Sarronnyn, the last bastion of order in Candar. When Sarronnyn falls despite the assistance of the Black Order mages, Justen, a young Black Engineer, must escape the city and master forbidden technology that harness chaos itself. Even so, it may not be enough to halt conquest of the White Wizards.

Eerie remnants of pre-Dark times linger a century after the nuclear blowout. But a traveling road show gives new meaning to the word chilling. Ryan and his warrior group have witnessed this carny's handiwork in the ruins and victims of unsuspecting villes. Even facing tremendous odds does nothing to deter the companions from challenging this wandering death merchant and an army of circus freaks. And no one is aware that a steel-eyed monster from the past is preparing a private act that would give Ryan star billing....