The bodies are piling up. Sanford, freelance consultant, assassin, and doer of odd jobs, contracts his deadly skills through a Darknet brokerage service known to underworld insiders as Bugsy's List.

Sanford's assignments pit him against cops, other assassins, and the syndicate. The only likely winners in this bloody charade are two young Darknet entrepreneurs actively exploiting a wave of crime warfare as it spreads like wildfire across the City of Brotherly Love.

A mysterious Darknet presence has begun to slaughter the homeless and display its handiwork from the dark web. Viewers around the world can vote with Bitcoin cryptocurrency to determine the fate of each subject.

Rodney Bentworth, legendary eastern seaboard hacker, works with the city’s Cybercrimes and Homicide units to crack the case.

When the killer sets his sights on unsuspecting college students, Rodney and the department step up their efforts to find him and bring the killings to a stop.

If they fail, more innocent people die and the darknet becomes a decadent public arena for kidnappings, murders, and the killer’s anonymous, bloodthirsty followers.

Drug dealers are finding their way into the leading edge technologies that have come to dominate urban Philadelphia in the 21st century. Young people are dying from lethal drugs being peddled across the Darknet and delivered by unmanned drones.

Stanley Bentworth teams with his old partners, Sanford and Rodney, to crack the case of a teenage girl who fell victim to these lawless predators. Stanley faces his own mortality as the Darknet underworld unleashes first a human assassin to remove him from the picture, then a squadron of armed drones programmed to shoot him off the street.

He and his pals have to put an end to this technical invasion. If they don’t, the streets of this and other big cities will become a warring zone, with machines killing people and people on the losing side.

Chance Weston and John Hall arrive in Beaver Gulch, almost a ghost town, in the fall of 1875, both looking for work. What they find is trouble. A powerful rancher and his hired guns have run off many of the prominent citizens. The newcomers accept jobs as sheriff and preacher.

The Mason sisters, April and May, are as different inside as they are alike in appearance, and the sheriff fancies the demure April while the preacher is drawn to anything in a skirt. And when he cozies up to the rancher’s young wife, all hell breaks loose.

From the jailhouse and the pulpit, they face bullies, gunslingers, lynch mobs, and a corrupt town council. Their friendly rivalry escalates into a deadly face-off with guns and gallows as probable outcomes. Both men could wind up dead, leaving Beaver Gulch a lawless, godless town.

Rural southern America in the 1950s, a great time for a boy to grow up. Joey, eleven years old, begins the summer of ’51 with a new best friend, Tommy, the new kid next door.

Tommy is thirteen, with a down-to-earth country attitude, and wise to the ways of the world with much for Joey to learn.

Boys that age could roam, explore, and experiment with their environments without supervision and with the only curfew being, get home in time for supper.

Wander along with Tommy and Joey who, left to their own devices, get into one scrape after another, pushing the limits, exasperating their parents, and confounding the neighborhood.

At 87, Marvin’s eyesight is failing, but even he can’t miss the bruises on his fellow residents at the Orchard Hills Nursing Home. Someone is savagely abusing and sometimes killing the defenseless elderly people.

The staff dismisses Marvin’s concerns, so he begins snooping on his own.

Realizing he is ill-equipped to engage such a dangerous enemy alone, Marvin enlists the aid of Mike and Carrie, his two closest friends and fellow Orchard Hills residents. Together they set out to expose the abuser and end the abuse. Armed only with their cunning and a collection of unlikely homespun weapons, they stalk suspects, collect documents, make clandestine videos and set booby traps to impede the enemy’s advance.

If they fail, the abuse and even killing of old people, soon to include Marvin and his friends, continues unabated.

The computer-governed Singularity to the north and the female-dominated Amazonia to the south are about to clash in a war in which neither side knows of the other. The Singularity’s mainframe launches an invasion to confiscate electricity-generating resources, and Amazonia is unprepared.

Slaves of both civilizations, androids and clones, are caught in the middle. Rebellion arises when Verdun, an enslaved laborer, and JCNSA-27, a condemned android, form an alliance. The outcome can only be freedom or annihilation.

Their planet in total collapse, 500 of the best and brightest launch into space to find a new home, Earth being their chosen destination. Annie embarks on an advance expedition, but her craft is forced down outside a small Iowa town. With the help of three teenagers, she tries to gain acceptance for her people. Frightened citizens, hostile military forces, the media, and the President of the United States, treat the gentle colonists and their advanced technology as a threatening alien invasion. The survival of their race rides on Annie’s ability to charm the Earthlings and establish a new home.

All the characters in the Stanley Bentworth Mysteries series are gathered together in a three-book collection, the first three volumes of the series offered at less than the price of a single volume in the series.

On the Street Where You Die introduces Stan and his contingent of characters—Willa, Rodney, Amanda, Sanford—as they set about to shut down a blackmail operation and clear the client of a murder charge they believe and hope is a frame-up. You’ll meet Sammy too, the bartender at Oliver’s and Bunny, Stan’s on-again-off-again girlfriend.

In A Dead Ringer Stan gets shot at and missed only to learn that his double, driving a similar car has been murdered. Which one was the target? When the victim’s widow hires Stan to solve the crime, he and his pals find themselves embroiled in the intrigues of corporate hostile takeover, Internet pornography, his hidden and long-forgotten family tree, and buried treasure.

Clueless, the “Pantyhose Slasher” Cases finds Stan working again in the Homicide Unit of the local police department, leading a trio of wet-behind-the-ears homicide cops. Under Stan’s guidance, the fledgling team searches for a serial killer who preys on young women, leaving their bodies posed and desecrated in a manner designed to taunt the police and keep the public too scared to go out at night.

Somebody has taken a shot at Stanley Bentworth and the soft-boiled detective doesn’t know who wants him dead or why. Then, when a stranger who resembles Stanley is gunned down in broad daylight, Stanley wonders which of them was the intended victim.

His investigation charts an unlikely journey through the worlds of online pornography, a legendary cat burglar, buried treasure, and a legacy that he never knew was meant to be his own.

Dead young women are piling up in a small suburban city, their throats slashed, their bodies desecrated, and homicide detective Stanley Bentworth and his rookie staff are caught up in an intensive investigation.

When the Slasher steps up his schedule, the bosses pressure the team to find the killer and rescue the next victim. If they fail, the once peaceful town’s panicked citizens will lock themselves in at night, awaiting the next senseless killing, not knowing when, where, and who it will be.

When homicide detective Stanley Bentworth fires his weapon in the line of duty for the first time, he kills a youth from the projects. The tragic event pulls at his conscience, and he must deal with Internal Affairs, a city psychiatrist, and outraged citizens.

On administrative duty pending the investigation, Stan goes undercover to flush out dirty cops and an enigmatic drug kingpin, putting him up against the rat squad, dirty cops, outraged citizens, and gangbangers, any one of which could put an end to Stan’s career and maybe even his life.

With a month off from Homicide, soft-boiled detective Stanley Bentworth accepts an invitation from an old pal to consult as head of security for a high-tech corporation.

But when a company executive is discovered with a bullet in his brain, Stanley finds himself drawn into a homicide investigation with overtones of corporate espionage and domestic terrorism, all the while butting heads with his counterparts in the local police. Instead of a much-needed rest, he is up to his eyeballs in the cold, heartless, and even sinister world of corporate finance, giving new meaning to the phrase hostile takeover.

Soft-boiled P.I. Stanley Bentworth sets out to capture a bail-jumper, a botched adventure that puts Stan in the hospital and results in a warrant for his arrest on federal kidnapping charges.

On the lam under an alias, and unknowingly working as a bag man for a domestic terrorist support organization, Stan finds himself locked away in a remote safe house that he calls “Gitmo North.” He does battle with the Department of Homeland Security, corrupt narcotics detectives, his former wife’s jealous husband, and a mob assassin, all out to deliver lethal payback for the questionable deeds of his checkered past.

Just another routine month in the life of Stanley Bentworth, Private Investigator.

P.I. Stanley Bentworth spends his days staking out cheating spouses and chasing down bail jumpers and his evenings drinking Jack and pursuing women with a pulse.

When he helps a lovely young prostitute discourage an obsessive stalker, he finds himself immersed in a complicated murder case. That’s not unusual, except that this time Stan is not only trying to solve the crime, he is the number one suspect.

Stan can take a passive back seat on a bar stool and risk serious prison time. Or he can plunge in to save himself and get busted for impeding the official investigation. Either way he loses.

Trouble follows P.I. Stanley Bentworth like a baby duck. When a brutal murder at sea interrupts his romantic getaway with Grace, his new girlfriend, the ship’s captain recruits Stan to investigate. Stan and Grace soon find themselves the targets of a desperate killer who intends to thwart the investigation whatever it takes. If Stan fails to expose and overcome the villain, he could lose Grace forever and find himself treading water and feeding the sharks somewhere in the expanse of the Bermuda Triangle.

P.I. Stanley Bentworth is on the lam and in trouble again, this time accused of the murders of two mob enforcers. Not only is there a contract on him, the local cops want him too. This time he’s the prime suspect with means, motive, and opportunity.

Means? Both goons are killed by bullets from Stan’s guns.

Motive? One of them beats his young assistant to a pulp; the other one buries Stan alive.

Opportunity? He’s carrying and he has no alibi.

Stan is hard pressed to keep himself out of the slammer and off the slab. His only hope is to solve the murders himself, something he is equipped to do, but something that won’t be so easy given that Stan is on the lam.

Once again Stanley Bentworth, soft-boiled PI, finds himself infatuated with a beautiful client, one who hires him to find her missing aunt, a resident at a local nursing home. What should be a simple case of an elderly lady wandering off becomes what Stan and his associates learn is a horror story, a diabolical scheme involving Medicare fraud and mass-murdered old folks, frozen and stored away and ultimately cremated, all for profit.

The 1950s. A bright young boy is raised in a state welfare system and struggles with an internal rage that marks him as a sociopath. A team of CIA field agents work covert ops in Soviet-occupied East Berlin. Their specialty: assassinations.

The lives and destinies of these people converge when the boy grows up to become a CIA-trained agent, mentored by the old spies and freelancing as a rogue for the military-industrial complex.

As he prepares for his first assignment as a kill-for-hire mercenary, he copes with identity changes, a CIA sanction, blown covers, women who complicate his work, and personal doubts about a mission that places him in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

A collection of short stories about unusual people and events. Two curious boys break into the shack where a pair of old recluses dwell in mystery. A new weapon can stop an enemy in his tracks without inflicting bodily harm. A ride home from the gig is more important than the music. A computer geek meets the girl of his dreams. Townspeople accuse a retired entertainer of murdering a small boy. An arcade machine grants wishes in unexpected and unacceptable ways. A boy seeks revenge for the loss of his father. Another boy controls the world when he alters the passage of time. A beautiful lady prevails in the smoky, noisy world that until now had belonged only to men. A soul passes into a place that doesn’t exist.

These are the themes of the ten short stories presented in this collection. They have little in common except that they involve extraordinary people and extraordinary deeds.

A collection of heretofore unpublished short stories from my archives, some going back three decades, most dealing with computer technology of that era.

The stories range from a cozy mystery involving department store Santa Clauses to a dark group therapy session dealing with post traumatic stress disorders from the Vietnam war.

A self help tutorial with which a programmer uses the book and an accompanying compiler suite to learn the C++ programming language. It isn’t easy and it isn’t for dummies. It takes time and dedication. If anyone could do it, there would be no demand for C++ programmers.

You should already understand the fundamentals of computer programming. Then, with the accompanying downloadable Quincy C++ development environment, run the example programs in an integrated tutorial and learn with incremental lessons that build upon one another.

Welcome to Programming is a tutorial with which the reader teaches himself or herself to write computer programs on a PC. The book discusses all aspects of computer programming, provides downloadable example programs, and uses the QBasic interpreter (which you can download) to demonstrate these principles.

Are you ready to become a pantser? Fiction writers everywhere are divided into camps of “plotters” and “pantsers,” and many plotters want to change camps.

Aspiring writers who are at the start of their careers similarly want to learn how to write from the “seat of their pants,” but there aren’t many guides available to lead them along, because pantsing, being a right-brain exercise, is hard to explain.

Writers can tell us how they “pants” in case by case portrayals, but we often have difficulty explaining how we got there, leaving bewildered new writers thinking that special gifts beyond their reach are required.

Zen and the Pantser’s Muse leads the novice writer through the pleasant route to pantsing via meditation and writing exercises. You might not be a full-fledged pantser when you finish this book, but you’ll be prepared to discover your way there.

Travel with Al from his childhood when he discovered ventriloquists on television in its own infancy, through his development as a child performer and his rediscovery of the engrossing art when he retired after forty years as a computer programmer, writer and musician.

Follow Al's workshop skills, as he builds and repairs ventriloquist dummies and renovates the time-worn works of the old masters.

And stay with him in a lifelong search for the one dummy that will define his role as a performer in such an unusual and distinct performance art.

Learn Ventriloquism from the ground up as taught by a master: Technique, comedy, performance, equipment, promotion, and show business.

Al Stevens has written this wonderful new textbook on ventriloquism that any student - young or old, beginner or seasoned pro - will find of tremendous value. It covers not only the basics, albeit described in new ways and with delightful new twists, but it also contains advanced techniques and concepts for the serious student. In addition, it reveals deep insight into subjects rarely touched upon in other books on ventriloquism. From the Foreword by Tom Ladshaw

The companion book to Al Stevens’s popular "Ventriloquism: Art, Craft, Profession," this book contains a comprehensive collection of scripts that Al wrote over the years for his ventriloquist act and that he has performed in night clubs, private parties, and corporate shows. Many of Al’s most popular routines are here including Doodley Squat, Viagra for Dummies, Uncle Sweeter’s Ol’ Woman, Dexter at School, Aunt Sally the Librarian, Uncle Sweeter Goes to the Doctor, and Juan Comes to the USA. The material ranges from G-rated to a small sampling of R. Open the book and prepare to add spice, humor and big laughs to your next show.

There’s nothing funny about diabetes. But from the mind of Al Stevens, long-time columnist for Dr. Dobb’s Journal, stand-up comedian, and author of “Politically Incorrect Scripts for Comedy Ventriloquists,” the lighter side of the disease can make you laugh while it scares the crap out of you with its potential for ruining and shortening your life.

From his first diagnosis, which he blames on a topless bar, to memory losses and hallucinations, to getting thrown out of a pharmacy, Stevens tells with good nature and humor the story of his thirty-plus years coping with diabetes.

Whether you’re a diabetic, related to one, or have one as a friend—which most people do—you will gain new insight into the disease that Stevens calls “public enemy number three.” You might even pick up some pointers on how to cope, what to do, and, by example, what not to do.

teach yourself... Jazz Piano Comping guides you as you learn basic accompaniment chording.

This book is for entry-level and experienced pianists who want to move into the realm of jazz and standards accompaniment and big band playing.

With the knowledge you learn in this book and a disciplined regimen of practice, you will be equipped with skills and tools that not only allow you to sit in at informal jam sessions but to expand your experience into the more advanced realms of piano accompaniments.

"teach yourself... Rhythm Jazz Guitar" guides you as you learn the basics of playing jazz chords.

This book is for entry-level and experienced guitarists who want to move into the realm of jazz accompaniment. You learn a basic repertoire of chord sequences that employ colorful, or hip, voicings. The sequences use chord fingerings that are easy to play, with each chord in comfortable proximity to the previous and next ones.

You learn to translate those cryptic chord names you see on sheet music and big band charts into easily-fingered chords that involve no extreme hand stretches, sound good, and fit into the harmonic context of the tune you’re playing. With the knowledge you learn in this book and a disciplined regimen of practice, you will be equipped with skills and tools that not only allow you to sit in at informal jam sessions but to expand your knowledge into the more advanced realms of jazz guitar playing.