Douglas Smith

An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing, little-known story of an American effort to save the newly formed Soviet Union from disaster. After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine-and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst...

Vaya is an immortal Valkyrie and favorite daughter of Odin All Father, sworn to carry dead heroes from the battlefields of Earth to live forever in Valhalla. One day, she intervenes on the battlefield to save the life of a soldier who has captured her heart, and is forced by Odin to choose between immortality and the man she loves. Vaya chooses love, not knowing that the hardest choice still lies ahead of her.

Charlie the Pearl-con man, gambler, and ever absent father-is about to catch the dream that he's chased his entire life-the secret of good luck. But it's a secret that could cost Charlie the only thing in the world that he loves more than a winning streak-his daughter.

The House promised Jack wealth, fame, and revenge...if it didn't kill him first. Dr. Lucius Rainer, head of research at GenTech, is dead. But to Jack, it seems that his old mentor still lives on through his house. Certainly, Rainer's strange island retreat exudes the personality of its late owner: isolated and eccentric, brooding and uninviting. But when GenTech learns that the house holds a working model of Rainer's final project, Jack discovers...

Maroch, ex-CIA, reluctantly agrees to coach a beautiful young woman "remote viewer" in a scheme to locate lost paintings. But the woman, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife, has her own secrets. Together, they set off a chain of events that may alter the past and destroy both their lives.

Mary and her teenage son, Jase, survive by their own wits in a post-plague Earth. On the run from a vicious gang, they are saved by Bishop, a man with mysterious powers who just may be the Dead Man, the legendary hero of the Fall of Earth. But Bishop's dark past catches up with them all, forcing Bishop to choose between his love for Mary and Jase, or revenge against the men who killed his family.

The year is 1999. The world awaits a new millennium with a mixture of anticipation and dread. The fear stems from the much-hyped Y2K computer problem, the so-called millennium bug, which could cause uncorrected programs to fail all over the world. PCWare is the world's largest software company. John Dunne is team leader for the company's newest operating system, the first with a virtual reality user interface, complete with virtual human agents. But...

The second half of life invites us to experience new growth such that we live an even more fulfilling life. But often the invitation isn't all that attractive, with changes in our families, our health, our relationships and our increasing grasp that the journey does have an ending. Many of us refuse the invitation to evolve, hanging on to old ways that may not serve us well in the second half. In Doug Smith's best-selling first book, Happiness: The...

The man known only as Stranger lived and died in a town with no name. Each day he lived. And each night he died...

Think of human emotion as a geography, with peaks of pleasure and valleys of pain. Imagine a drug that flips the valleys and makes them peaks, too. You react now to an event based not on the pleasure or pain that it brings, but solely on the intensity of the emotion created. Pain brings pleasure, grief gives joy, horror renders ecstasy. Now give this drug to a soldier. Tell them to kill. Not in the historically acceptable murder of war, but in a systematic...