Showing results by narrator "Darren Eliker" in All Categories

September 11, 1973: Eleven-year-old Alejandro Penda watches from his apartment window as Santiago, Chile falls to a military coup, destroying his family and his childhood. Arriving alone in America, he’s taken in by the Larks: a prominent family in the town of Guelisten. Though burdened by unresolved grief for his disappeared parents, he becomes fiercely loyal to the Larks, eventually marrying one of their daughters, Valerie.

Tech executive Sam Hughes came to Silicon Valley to “make the world a better place”. He’s just not sure he’s doing that anymore. And when an onstage meltdown sends him into a professional tailspin, he suddenly sees the culture of the Bay Area’s tech bubble in a new light. Just as Sam’s wondering if his start-up career and marriage might both be over at 40-something, an inadvertent discovery pulls him back into his former company, where he begins to unravel the insidious schemes of the founder and venture investors.

As the Germans blitz Poland in 1939, a young fighter pilot finds his way to France and ultimately England where he distinguishes himself in the Battle of Britain. He meets a woman and falls in love and so does she over time. He crashes in the English Channel and ultimately is captured.

Nazi-occupied Aquitaine, 1943: A beautiful young woman is found murdered in the shadow of the Bergerac Prefecture. Auguste Ran, assistant chief of police, suspects Brunner, a German security police major, of the crime. The more Auguste investigates, the more obsessed he becomes with bringing down the seemingly untouchable Brunner. Auguste begins to realize he has been conveniently ignoring the Nazi atrocities going on around him and understands too late the human cost of his own participation in the internment of the local Jewish population.

Ian Withers rewrote the book on what it means to be a Private Investigator. He traversed the world recovering abducted children, gathered intelligence for left and right-wing regimes, and was jailed over a British prime minister's bad bet. Across 60 years, he chased down fraudsters, bugged leaders of international coups, and cracked open assassination plots. He tracked the IRA’s Hyde Park bomber with a bluffed phone call, located Jeremy Thorpe’s illicit lover, and put his life on the line to return snatched tug-of-love kids to desperate parents.

In the near future, a new space race is in full swing to be the first to colonize Mars. In preparations, an engineering team is building out the interplanetary communications network when a mysterious object emerges from the depths of interstellar space. As the nations of Earth scramble to investigate this strange comet, they must overcome plots from within and the machinations of a malignant AI in order to be the first to meet the menace, or the promise, that the intruder foretells.

The world is rocked by the sudden death of the president of the United States. Almost as shocking, details soon emerge implicating a member of the White House Ushers Office. The evidence seems overwhelming, and the case is soon declared as open and shut. If only the rest of the world knew how much more was going on behind the scenes. Hear how Chief Usher Bartholomew Winston, a 50-year veteran of the White House, puts together an investigation team that works to uncover the truth, even if that means diving headfirst into some very dangerous, intricate political waters to find it.

Nazi-occupied Aquitaine, 1943: François Dufy, alcoholic and alone, is dragged into the war effort when he rescues a young Jewish girl from the Nazi Security Police. She breathes life into his world and gives him a reason to go on. Dufy begins a path of revenge on the occupying Germans. A sniper in the Great War, he uses his skills to devastating effect, always posing as the town drunk. Then the British drop supplies and a beautiful SOE agent whom Dufy falls in love with. But as the invaders hunt down the partisans in the deep, crisp woodland, nothing works out as Dufy had hoped.

Sefira Carrington is no stranger to tragedy. The death of her father as well as the curious mental decline and subsequent imprisonment of her mother, have left her truly and utterly alone. Despite her misfortune, she has managed to carve out a decent life for herself. She’s found a good family, friends, and at sixteen, she’s finally realizing a semblance of normalcy. That is, until she moves to Southern California. Strange things begin to happen. Things that become increasingly difficult for her to ignore.

On the eve of World War II, the most intelligent nuclear physicist in the world discovers a new sub-atomic particle, but before his secret could get out, he mysteriously disappears. The repercussions of the young physicist's actions leave waves that, 80 years later, reach the rocky shores of Ocean Point, Maine. 

Joe Nolan and his Thought Thief friends managed to escape Brightside in the original novel, but now, they find themselves with a giant price on their heads and the entire country looking for them. Joe is badly injured and up against incredible odds, but he is willing to do whatever it takes to helps his friends and father.

As a society that struggles to reconcile the uncovering of past wrongs with simple human frailty, punishment, and personal redemption, the stories in Without Expiration challenge us to consider the humanity of characters who are flawed and heartbroken and who do and suffer terrible things. Works from Without Expiration have been published in some of America’s best short fiction journals.