Bøger af Ken Pelham

What if "they" are us? Gaze skyward and admire the stars. Is anyone out there? Questions have been asked about alien intentions. What would first contact with extraterrestrials mean for the people of Earth? Should we greet them with hostility and fear or with a hope that together we could build a bond that stretches across the cosmos? Earth's story is littered with fantastic tales of alien contact with Earth, both past and future. Some of these tales bring light and hope, while others make us shiver with horror. But what happens when the foreign visitors look remarkably like us? From the far future to the not so distant past, these ten incredible stories blend science fiction with mystery and suspense, fantasy and wonder, history and romance. Ten stories that invite you to discover what would happen if our first encounter with extraterrestrials is with humans returning to Earth. Return To Earth is the second project of the Alvarium Experiment, a consortium of accomplished and award-winning authors. Join the authors of the Alvarium Experiment as they answer the question: How will the world react when instead of extraterrestrials, it's humans who Return to Earth?

Why do some novels keep you on the edge of your seat, flipping pages as fast as you can read them, while others you trudge through? What is it about the page-turner? In a word, suspense. The author entices you, hooks you, and lands you. But how? It's not by accident. Learn the tips, tricks, and techniques of building suspense in fiction. In this concise guide, you'll learn what makes suspense tick, why we like it, and how to instill it into your writing. Ken Pelham, a member of the International Thriller Writers and author of the award-winning thrillers BRIGANDS KEY and PLACE OF FEAR, spells out all things, big and little, that make prose irresistible and propulsive and keep readers up late into the night.

"A perfect storm of menace...breathtaking! The underwater scenes are marvelous, and the portrait of the monstrous hurricane as it batters the key and surges over it is mightily gripping." --the Florida Weekly... Death Sweeps in off the Gulf of Mexico... An ageless, impossible corpse at the bottom of the sea. A lethal plague. A ruthless murderer. A monster hurricane. Archaeologist Carson Grant came to Brigands Key to escape the limelight and repair his shattered reputation, and finds himself instead staring down the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. When Carson Grant discovers the body of a man at the bottom of the sea, suspicion of murder falls squarely upon him. Citizens mysteriously begin to fall ill and die, others disappear, and others are murdered, while an ambitious governor and an unbending president engage in a battle of wills over the fate of Brigands Key. With a hurricane bearing down on the quarantined island, Grant enlists infectious diseases researcher Kyoko Nakamura and teen misfit Charley Fawcett in a desperate race against time to break the spiral of death and unravel the mystery of a decades-old corpse and a staggeringly valuable prize shrouded in secrets of the past. Pitted against them is a killer who will stop at nothing to claim that prize. Winner of the Royal Palm Literary Award, Brigands Key is an edge-of-your-seat roller coaster ride through murder, vengeance, and secrets best left undisturbed.

Deep in the rainforest of Guatemala, a missing scientist, long given up for dead, languishes in a lightless prison cell. Fueled by a powerful, unknown narcotic, his senses are on fire; he can feel them expanding far beyond human bounds, even as the drug tears at his sanity. Upon learning that his friend is alive, Carson Grant mounts a frenzied rescue before the appointed time of execution. While a cutthroat band of looters, seeking easy riches, closes in for the kill, Grant stumbles onto the remnant of a mysterious hybrid civilization intent on destroying anyone that threatens to expose it. Trapped and desperate, Grant entrusts his team's survival into the hands of a young Maya cop and his beautiful, haunted sister. Winner of the 2012 Royal Palm Literary Award, PLACE OF FEAR propels you inexorably toward a collision between Norse myth and Maya history, wherein only ultimate sacrifice brings survival. PLACE OF FEAR is the stunning prequel hinted at in BRIGANDS KEY, the thriller described by The Florida Weekly as "a perfect storm of menace!" Fans of Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, James Rollins, and Steve Berry will find in PLACE OF FEAR a page-turning adventure and absorbing mystery that'll keep them reading long into the night.

"A fascinating account into a fascinating subject!" -Steve Berry From BEOWULF to THE TIME MACHINE to HARRY POTTER, an entertaining and provocative look at fiction genres, how they shift and grow, and how they change us and our world, often in profound and unexpected ways. Storytelling has bonded humanity with shared lore and lessons since prehistory. How did our favorite tales of mystery and imagination come to be? Were the authors hatched in airtight vacuums? For the most part, no. All good writers are good borrowers first. Gillian Flynn borrowed from Daphne du Maurier. Albert Camus borrowed from James M. Cain. Stephen King borrowed from Sheridan Le Fanu. Wars, disasters, plagues, and technological breakthroughs have shaped stories, and in turn, many genre stories, both good and bad, have shaped human societies.How did a volcanic blast affect all popular culture to follow? How did a mystery writer invent modern police detection? How did an Edgar Allan Poe story of treasure hunting help win two world wars decades after his death? How did a novel about peace kickstart the atomic bomb? The connections are endless. GUMSHOES, FANGS, ROCKETS, & SPIES digs deep to tease out these connections, and to celebrate the world of writers and writing.

Escape to the Borderlands of Imagination... Smugglers. Murderers. Graverobbers. Treasure hunters. Time travelers. Invisible men. Witches. Sixteen stories bridging the borderlands of mystery, thriller, horror, and science fiction, lands where time travelers are thrown into tragedy and one of the world's greatest works of art...where a brutal husband discovers his wife's mysterious skills... where a Depression-era theater troupe summons forth the witches of Macbeth to once again seduce the ambitious with power...where a young woman fights for her husband's life in his trial for heresy, just as her people race toward destiny and the mythical homeland of Earth...where a shipwreck on the Florida coast yields both riches and terror from across the sea.

Florida Writers Association Winner, 2015 PUBLISHED BOOK OF THE YEAR. How do you put aside your writer's point of view goggles and express what a fictional character sees, hears, thinks, and experiences? How do you keep viewpoint consistent? How do you keep your reader from getting bumped out of the storytelling spell you cast, and saying, "Wait...what?" One of the most difficult writing skills to grasp is that of writing from the viewpoint of fictional characters. A must-have for writers of both fiction and nonfiction, Out of Sight, Out of Mind teaches through example how to spot-and more importantly, how to fix--both obvious and not-so-obvious errors in viewpoint.